What's current in fighter and sub sims?

[Kobal2]

[quote=“1920s Style “Death Ray”, post:20, topic:505905”]

The problem with things like trim in a flight sim is that it’s all well and good in a real aeroplane when you can feel what’s happening and you have big knobs to adjust the settings with, you can do it without thinking, but in a sim it takes up much more brain space than it should. It’s a bit like rudder, in real life, you don’t think about using the rudder, you just do it, in a sim you only have very limited visual cues to use and trying to coordinate the rudder with the aileron is much more work than it should be. Also if you were having to adjust trim for wind and altitude then that’s not realistic, wind and altitude should have no effect on trim, just engine power and indicated airspeed.
[/QUOTE]

All of this is true, but not only that, the simple fact is that when one is in a dogfight on a PC, merely keeping a modicum of spatial awareness (where’s my target, where’s my wingman/men, where the hell am I, am I going up or down right now ?) is a full time job. Even more so in a WW2 sim, where there’s little in the way of avionics… and where you have to throttle up and down whenever the engine starts to overheat. Having to retrim right in the middle of that is just too much, especially since as you said, before even thinking about the trim of the plane, you have to think about what your plane’s doing right now, which you instinctively know in real life.
As for wind and altitude, it could be me misremembering - as I said, I didn’t play the game much.

Another problem with flight sim trim is that it doesn’t work realistically. Trim is used to change the neutral position of the stick and rudder pedals, it does not give you any more control movement than you already had. Yet I’ve flown sims that, for example, won’t let you lift the nose for take-off if the elevator trim is in the wrong position, the reality is that if you are strong enough to be able to move the controls all the way then you will get full control surface deflection regardless of the trim setting.

It’s not like that in IL2 - in fact, it’s the opposite of that. The game will give you no clue whatsoever about what you’re doing wrong or what the hell’s happening, and the tutorials are skeletal.
That said, it’s not that trimming gives you more control, it’s just that on takeoff, the prop torque will make your plane bank on its own, so unless you try to takeoff with the stick in the exact sweet spot where you don’t bank in the direction the engine pushes you, but don’t overdo it and bank the other way, then trim’s your friend.

Finally, I’m having a hard time finding something to back this up, but the idea that a WWII single engine fighter is unflyable without setting the aileron trim correctly doesn’t sit right with me. For one, the time when engine torque is most obvious is when at a low airspeed with a high power setting (e.g., when taking off), and this is also the time when when the controls are the least effective which also means the trim is not effective AND the control forces are the lowest so there is no requirement for trim. This is quite different from trimming the rudder on take-off because, unlike the ailerons, the rudder is in the slipstream and so not only is the rudder trim effective but there are also high aerodynamic forces that require the use of trim.

As I said, it’s not exactly required, nor is it impossible to fly without trimming all the time - it’s just much, much easier to takeoff if you trim the plane before throttling up, and more comfortable to fly a properly trimmed plane than having to apply constant pressure one way or the other to compensate for torque, RPM etc…

[Zeriel]

@SenorBeef

Well, there’s this. (demo)

That pretty much looks like the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen. Just put the freaking instruments on the primary/only monitor for those of us without a huge monitor bank, thanks.

@Kobal2

It’s not like that in IL2 - in fact, it’s the opposite of that. The game will give you no clue whatsoever about what you’re doing wrong or what the hell’s happening, and the tutorials are skeletal.

You have officially summed up everything wrong with the flight simulator industry today.

As I said, it’s not exactly required, nor is it impossible to fly without trimming all the time - it’s just much, much easier to takeoff if you trim the plane before throttling up, and more comfortable to fly a properly trimmed plane than having to apply constant pressure one way or the other to compensate for torque, RPM etc…

The real problem here is the combo of “Insufficient documentation/poorly mapped controls/poorly labeled cockpit instrumentation”. Add in the competing factors of “hardcore flight sim realism buffs are as annoying as any other kind of hardcore anything” (this is what I blame for the lack of middle-ground flight sims like Jane’s used to be) and “look, all my REAL flight hours are either in a Cessna 172 or a Nimbus 3” make these games pretty much unplayable for me.

What I want is something like Jane’s anything–the trim stuff is mostly handled for you, the flight and radar dynamics are configurable (from “nintendo game radar” where you see everything to realistic detection envelopes, to configurable degrees of stall and spin tendency from “never” to “realistic”)

What we’ve been getting for the past several years is either Wing Commander-style (very arcadey) or IL-2/Battle of Britain 2-style (ultra-realistic, painful to learn due to shady tutorials, etc).

[Kobal2]

Agreed. And it’s why I loved and still love Falcon 4.0
A manual you could build houses with, coupled with highly parametrable realism settings, and so many mods and tweaks it’ll make your head spin. If something in that game can’t be changed to your liking, you’re probably staring at the box art :]

In all honesty though, much of the hardcore stuff in IL2 can also be turned off, turned down and tweaked, the difference being of course that IL-2 came with my pet peeve : a fucking .pdf manual, rather than the real thing. You can’t put bookmarks on a .pdf. You can’t pause the game to frantically rifle through the .pdf to figure out what this warning light means. You can’t read through the background material in the .pdf, or go through the basics one more time during the boring parts of the flight.
And the .pdf isn’t even that thorough. Much of what I learned about IL2 (and, hell, Silent Hunter as well) I gleaned through the forums and user FAQs and so forth. Back in my day, when kids knew to keep off mah lawn, every gorram thing was in the manual, and if it could choke a donkey that was a good thing. These days, even for .pdf ones it seems going above the mandatory 4 pages (including the epilepsy warning) is a fucking act of God.

[SenorBeef]

@Zeriel

That pretty much looks like the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen. Just put the freaking instruments on the primary/only monitor for those of us without a huge monitor bank, thanks.

How is that awkward? Want to look up? Look up. Want to look at your instruments? Look at your instruments. I don’t have one, but it’s on my want list.

It’s much more elegant and has much more control than a simple POV hat and zoom keys.

As far as putting the instruments on the monitor - you want half your screen real estate at all times taken up by an instrument panel? There’s an option to do this in MS flight simulator and it’s ugly and detracting. Useful occasionally when you really need to keep an eye on your instruments at all times, but inelegant. It completely ruins the feel of a virtual cockpit.

[Zeriel]

@SenorBeef

How is that awkward? Want to look up? Look up. Want to look at your instruments? Look at your instruments. I don’t have one, but it’s on my want list.

From the way he was moving his head, I was imagining the angles of view reacting very poorly with the ways in which I tend to get eyestrain.

It’s much more elegant and has much more control than a simple POV hat and zoom keys.

I think you could say this about anything short of printing out a mockup of the cockpit, writing “this is real” on it, and taping it below your monitor.

As far as putting the instruments on the monitor - you want half your screen real estate at all times taken up by an instrument panel? There’s an option to do this in MS flight simulator and it’s ugly and detracting. Useful occasionally when you really need to keep an eye on your instruments at all times, but inelegant. It completely ruins the feel of a virtual cockpit.

You could do it in Jane’s, but typically as a modern sim 90% of the relevant flight/weapons data is on the HUD anyway, and you could call up individual instrumentation displays as needed and then put them away. This would be my ideal, at least for modern sims.

Second place was actually IIRC a mech sim, which eschewed the “look with hat switch” thing for a simple mappable control that was “focus on instrument panel”–as long as you held that switch, you looked down directly at the instrument panel, when you released it you snapped back up to front and center head position.

[Tixenfleaz]

@Sailboat

I’ve been going to the websites for Aces High II and WarBirds, which are apparently the two competing giants of multiplayer fighter sims…the Coke and Pepsi, the PC and Mac, the FedEx and UPS. I’ve also Googled some for “WarBirds vs Aces High” looking for comparison opinions.

So far, it’s been hard to tell what info is current and what is years old. Looks like the technology is comparable; some claim WarBirds is a smaller community but socially better…?

I’m still undecided whether to try any multiplayer sim community, and further undecided between these two, so I’d welcome any comments or opinions.

You might want to take a look at WWII:Online. The graphics aren’t the greatest, but they are more than functional. The game encompasses air, land, and to a lesser extent, naval combat in the opening days of WWII. The aerial component has an important effect on the campaign, and isn’t just dogfighting for the sake of dogfighting. Bombers are present and good combat air support can change the face of a campaign. I’ve only begun flying recently, and although it’s frustrating, my rare kills are some of the most satisfying gaming moments I’ve experienced.

There are some caveats though. You’ll want a good joystick, throttle, and pedal setup. TrackIR is also very helpful. The main difficulty is that the vets outnumber the noobs, so you die ALOT. The upside is that the developers realize this, and scheduling a training session is pretty easy. One hour of training is worth ten hours of learn-it-yourself.

The best way to avoid the noob blues is to join a squadron and fly with vets. Flying solo can be done, but usually ends in disaster. Three noobs with a basic understanding of tactics and a teamspeak connection can wreak havoc far out of proportion to their actual level of experience.

[Skywatcher]

@Zeriel

Second place was actually IIRC a mech sim, which eschewed the “look with hat switch” thing for a simple mappable control that was “focus on instrument panel”–as long as you held that switch, you looked down directly at the instrument panel, when you released it you snapped back up to front and center head position.

Red Baron had something similar.

[DETXL]

@SenorBeef

How is that awkward? Want to look up? Look up. Want to look at your instruments? Look at your instruments. I don’t have one, but it’s on my want list.

Sell organs if you have to. The difference between playing with TrackIR and not playing with it is about equal to the difference between playing with and without a joystick. UPS broke mine in the same box as they broke everything else, the bastards, but as soon as I have time to put my computer together again that’s at the top of the list. The head movement becomes second nature in about five seconds.

More to the OP, flight sims as a whole are in pretty sorry shape right now. There’s Fighter Ops, which will never be completed; whatever the Battle of Britain successor to Il-2 is supposed to be coming out at some point, though given it’s predecessor’s curious decision to float between simulation and sadism (as you found out) I’m not sure how much hope I hold out. Seven-G is working on a fairly competent (judging from the demo at least) F/A-18 sim. If you have–or can find–an old Enemy Engaged Commanche vs. Hokum disk, a mod community has sprung up around that, using the game’s source code, and they’ve pretty much completely redone it.

Silent Hunter 3 and its follow-on are pretty good, especially with what the modding community’s been able to do with them. Dangerous Waters, which has also been mentioned, is also fun but firmly in the old-school “you should have a degree in engineering to even attempt this” vein; the manual is huge and the game, while rewarding, is less a simulation and more a puzzle involving many different hydrophones. It is fun, though. Or can be.

Edit: one thing to look at is Third Wire’s sims, like Wings Over Vietnam and Wings Over Israel. I think Third Wire has done a very good job of adapting the Jane’s mentality of blending realism when appropriate with simplification when appropriate. They abstract just enough away to let you focus on flying as opposed to memorising keystrokes and button-presses, which I guess is probably what real modern dogfighting is like but is also uninspiring, for me at least. Also, they let you fly the F-100 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.