Pretty much echoes my sentements here gents.

Vicious I partially agree with you that the hard core gamers didn't kill the market. We didn't kill it but our demanding nature didn't help in some instances. Let me explain and this isn't a slam on anyone, well maybe on some of our more arrogent members but not on the general numbers here.

By nature these games are expensive. Even games like Railroad Tycoon are not cheap to make. Coding takes time. What makes it so expensive for us is the need to code reality. Guys that make Quake III or Doom III have a distinct advantage over the developers of EAW or LOMAC. They don't have to worry about someone complaining about the unrealistic rate of fire of the Mk1 Plasma cannon or the porked damage model of zombie 1zulu. Guys like Oleg Maddox, on the other hand, get handed loads of crap because supposedly the turn radius of his Spit V is 4.3 meters off based upon the notes some guy found on the internet. Coding reality is pretty hard and a lot of guys have given up on it.

I also think we eat our own here. We have a small group of people in our genre that feel that if it isn't full realism then it is crap and that people who fly without stalls, spins, red/blackouts/ with icons, etc. are weenies. I once got crap from a review I wrote because some of my screenies had icon's in them. Literally someone blasted me for pointing out a feature in a game. These people tend to drive away new gamers interested in playing these things.

When we all started the big games were (depending on when you joined) Red Baron, Aces over Europe/Pacific, F-22 or USNF. Compare any of those to today's sims and they could be called arcadish. Many of us lose track of the fact that these games can get very hard to get into by the newbies unless they are 'dumbed down'. Many don't even know that there are easier modes.

I am guilty of this myself. My reviews rarely talk about the ease that a new person can get into simulations with a particular piece of software. I harp on the hardness of something and it probably turns off a new person interested in playing. Most folks want to play a game, not spend four hours trying to get off the ground. For most of us taking off in a P-47 in full realism is fairly easy. We have HOTAS setups and have flown enough sims with P-47s that we know the torque effects and expect to compensate. Someone who has never flown a P-47 in a simulation probably planted himself 18 times in IL2:FB and gave up. Now if he played it a while he would get the hang of it, maybe pick up an X45 setup and a new hardcore simmer is born.

Just some observations. We tend to eat our own here.

I agree - have lost count of the number of times a new plane has been released and people have criticised some aspect of it (or, even worese the person modelling it) rather than work out that they are gettng something that is a positive addition to whichever sim for free. I never criticize add ons other to suggest improvements and only when asked. I can think of a fair few modders who have given up helping out because all they got for their hard work is a slagging off.

Glad I'm not the only one feeling this way.

As to the hard core flight sim community killing flight sims, I have a feeling that they might have contributed to their demise by making unrealistic demands for the wrong things. This has pushed developers into developing products that won't sell, or which are so complicated and time consuming to produce that publishers won't touch them.

The insistence on stupendously detailed 3D models of everything makes it technically impossible to have the sort of rich environment Zander refers to above. I remember before B17 II came out, reading an interview where the developers said they didn't want large numbers of low detailed aircraft models, and instead were building every aircraft in maximum detail. The result was a sim that ran like a tortoise on the PCs of the day and consequently sold disappointingly, but it also totally ruined immersion (a shame since B17 scored well in many other areas) - every mission involved at most 12 B17s, with maybe up to 6 fighters attacking, a pitiful little cluster of planes, instead of the formations of hundreds of the real war. Why is it more "realistic" to have rotating gun turrets on every one of 12 planes than to have historically accurate numbers of planes even if their turrets don't rotate? The only reason for having all these detailed models is so that every aircraft looks good when studied in paused external view. I would ban external views from flight sims - the only function they serve is to allow people to complain that the models don't have enough polygons. If I want to look at a pretty picture of a plane, I'll look at a photograph of the real thing. Flight sims should be about flying and fighting, not about admiring pictures. But because flight simmers often demand eye candy (and a very specific, one plane at a time sort of eye candy) above all else, developers spend all their time and effort concentrating on the wrong things.

As for hardness - I think hardness in a game is a good thing, but it should be hard to play well, not hard to play at all. A target rich environment packed with friendly and enemy aircraft diving in and out of the clouds should be exciting and frantic enough for any type of gamer, and is also very realistic. Instead we get a handful of beautifully modelled planes engaging in duels - for which it is very difficult to write adequate AI. Of course serious simmers want their full realism modes, and that's where a high degree of scalability comes in. Every option should be swtich off and on able. Though I suppose that adds to coding complexity too.

Interstng point VS - one thing people often forget is that the sims back in the days of yore had easy and realistic settings - release a game with that option and of enough interest to the general public and people will want to play it (the average gamer does not want to spend 3 hours woirking through checklists but wants to get up there and shoot things down!). The realistic flight model could either be incorporated as a later patch or be there for us serious simmers. This would also get more people interested in the more detailed sims (after all I doubt many people here just launched straight into Falcon 4 on max realism!)

All hail the great god of Polycounts

Let me bounce a few numbers around to give some weight to the very pertinent points raised by VS.

IL2 / FB .... polycounts for the high detail model are around 2500. The same number, or a fraction mode, goes into the cockpit.

SFP1 .... 6-7000 polys for the high detail

CFS3 .....Some of the add-on's have 20,000 + !!!! You see useless spheres with perfect roundness used to make blisters...all sorts of rubbish.

Ironically, they have less impact on the speed of a game than you might think! What killed FR's for me on CFS3 was the scenery low down. Wouldn't have minded if it was pretty....

Anyway, for me, it is quantity of planes that give immersion. Play a dogfight in Rowans old Battle of Britain, and the skies are full of dogfighting. You can ignore the low-poly planes because if you spend time looking at the pretties, the fight is very short...and you be dead

Modern graphic cards have got so good at pushing the polygons around that modern sims can throw a lot more polygons around that they used to. Where things go wrong is when the new power is used.

I think 2500 polys is a good figurefor a plane...IL2 aircraft look pretty enough for even the 'external view' merchants. Where sims need to increase their expenditure of polygons is in terrain dressing! Swoop down over the battlefields of flanders and what should you see. Trenches. Men. Shell holes. Gun batteries, shattered villages, and above all... MOVEMENT!

And in the air...well, clouds that block the AI's line of sight would be nice...and ones that know how to fly their planes properly! Nothing worse than an AI that thinks it can turn fight a zero in a B17

Totally second that Tailgunner - I find there is nothing worse than landing at a supposed airfield to find a couple of buildings - no people, no lorries or cars or people just going about their business....nothing!

Am sure that usually happens at all the airfields I have ever seen!

Tom Cofield - I couldn't agree more !

I won't name names, but there was one of the top posters in one of the top flight sims who very often touted the "real way" to fly a sim saying he would help people and the sim, explaining to them how to avoid being wheenies. I know of two hardcore sim pilots that did not fly (and buy?) that sim because the athmosphere in all forums for that sim was so bad.

The same person who unselfishly helped 6000 hour pilots (not me!) understabd the only way to fly a sim now mods another sim. So he now has a interest in the well being of the sim and suddenly he now longer helps the sim by helping people to see the light. I was not surprised! *******!

Only very few of us use flight sims to save lives. We use flight sims for entertainment (or, if you want, edutainment). As long as he hurts noone, someone that has bought a sim can do with it what he wants.

That includes using it as 3D model viewer BTW .

BTW - the 3d models are often not the reason you can only have few planes. Someone made a test in CFS 3, using 6 polygone boxes as planes and was not able to run many without massive slowdowns.

Back on topic, I think there are several bad effects of some people posting on forums, all todo with demotivation:
Saying "You are not a real man if you turn things down" - demotivates especially new pilots but also old ones that want to have fun.

In some forums, a lot of people say "this is crap" about very good flight sims. There are many 1000 aspects of a sim - you will never be able to excell in all, so people always have something to whine. I think it makes them feel better, either by thinking "even them are stupid, I can't be bad" or "I would have done better" or simply by feeling a lot of power by being able to destroy big groups. In the MSFS scene, some big groups folded when only a few dedicated people invested some hours into efficiently demotivating / angering / putting fear into the main modders, that had spent thousands or even ten thousands of hours into the hobby.

In an industry in which people do not work for money, since they would get more elsewhere, this affects paid professionals as well as modders. Like Xeidos2 said, developers see forums as hostile places. Unfortunately, a few bad apples are enough. And in some forums (not speaking SimHQ) there are more bad apples than good ones.

Yep, I remember B17-II. In fact it's the game responsible for (re)getting me into flight sims. I'd loved the original B17 and bought II as soon as it hit the shops, although by then as it was delayed I'd bought CFS2. Unfortunately I felt it lacked some of the finesse of the original, and it didn't take long to realise that a lot of what was happening wasn't real. For example you mention 12 B17's - well only 4 of them could ever actually do anything, the others just pottered along and didn't even drop bombs or fire guns. Of course the AI fighters would ignore them in every possible way...er...except for collisions which happened regularly. In the end I gave up on B17-II and went with CFS2, which with some mods was a cracking game in its time and to my mind the only really successful prop game between EAW and IL2.

As to poly counts, well I personally think that ball-park 2,500 is pretty low, especially for the larger planes which often look very crude in IL2. On the other hand I don't think 20K is necessary for externals either, although if properly LODed and it doesn't affect FPS I doubt it really matters that much. CFS3 for example can handle huge numbers of planes in the air and not bat an eyelid. Internals are another matter though, lots of cockpits really look bad with low poly counts and there's very few that look totally convincing (and most of those are in FS2004). Edit: in CFS3 two things cause stutter - sounds and scenery. The first one is easily solved by editing one of the xml files so that the problem files are preloaded, the other one, well...you can make it a lot smoother, but to me it looks a bit (OK, very) blech from low down. I guess time will tell if it can be made to look passable and smooth at the same time.

The problem is that while I think it's fine for an add-on developer to push game engines and hardware to the limits, I'd rather commercial developers would pay at least some attention to campaigns and immersion. They managed it years ago so why not now?

The point about polycounts, though, was how much you notice them when actually flying. I know when I attack a B17 in IL2FB that I don't have much time to sight-see! If you have a poly budget of 25,000 to spend, would you rather have 1 25K plane, or 10 2.5K planes?

Though, as Osram pointed out, poly count isn't the sole cause of slowdown! Making planes fly in 3D space is a CPU intensive thing! The more real you want it, the more CPU cycles you need to devote to making that happen. How many people have had to upgrade to fly the latest flightsims?

Sadly, the things that make a good sim Great are not the ones that will make glamourous screenshots or excite. We see screenshots and drool... we can't drool so much over the promise of a highly immersive campaign or the high-fidelity flight modelling...cynics that we are, we just assume that to be marketting hype and wait for some reviews!

That developers find forums such hostile places is probably the saddest thing to come out of this whole story. Between us, in a few threads, we have outlined pretty much what we want from flightsims, looked at ways to achieve it, and sympathised with a group of guys who tried and failed. All very adult, mature, and thoughtful stuff. If only MORE forums were like this MORE of the time...well, who knows! As long as the flame-fests such as the UBI forums dominate, it's no wonder the Dev's don't want to get invovled!

In the end...we all lose out.

AI and FM are the real killers, particularly combined. TO move 3D objects, even very detailed 3D objects, in 3D space is not that tough - FPS's do it all the time. To make the behave physically realistically particularly with bullets that need to behave physically realistically and planes that need to take damage and then fly physically realistically for their damage - now that's quite tough on a CPU. And then to make an AI that can fly and fight intelligently taking into account the accurate behaviour of his plane - now that's very tough on a CPU!