Real Life vs. Gameplay

[covega]

Forgive me if I previously gave the impression that I was looking for a real-life simulator here.

I long ago gave up preaching for real-life in either WarBirds or Aces High.  Neither sim seriously resembles real life and I have been chastised many times for even suggesting a closer match with real-life.  

If anyone was serious about building real-life into a sim, they would have:
 1.  Nighttime.  I never realised that WWII was fought entirely during daylight hours until I got into flight sims.  <g>  The howling and whining from fighter guys could be heard all the way to Mars when WB had nighttime for a short period.  Bomb explosions at night used to be awesome looking.  Oh well.
 2.  Low ceilings and visibilities.  Of course we all know the weather in Europe is nearly perfect all year around, so why have any instrument approaches or radio beacons?  
 3.  Random mechanical malfunctions.  Airplanes experienced engine failures on takeoff, once in awhile, during WWII.  (..at least that is what my WWII pilot friends tell me, but what do they know?)   <g>
 4.  Winds aloft and surface winds.  An occasional stiff crosswind would be a great wake-up call for some of us in Aces High, particularly with some of the conventional geared machines.  There was some experimentaton with winds in WarBirds, two or three years ago, but the program evidently was shelved.  

Note: None of my comments should be construed as complaints.  Both WB and AH are marvelous sims and the guys who design them (HiTech, Pyro, etc.) are geniuses in my book.  Three cheers for the staff at AH!  Salute!

/s/
vega
Dickweed Heavy Bomber Group

[ra]

My 2 cents:

<<1. Nighttime.>>  I'm all for this, but how much fighter v fighter occurred at night in WWII?  Most of our flying is in single engine fighters.  Even with AH's great graphics we already have poor visual queues compared to the real world (that's why we need icons), this problem would be even worse at night.  Probably not insurmountable, but worse.  Night fighting would be a fun change of pace but I think most players would only try it from time to time.  I don't blame HTC if they leave it on the 'maybe someday' list for now.

<<<2. Low ceilings and visibilities.>>>  HTC already has created some of the best clouds in any sim.  The problem with creating actual weather probably has more to do with frame rates than anything else.  Just my guess.  It would be great to have weather to contend with, though.

<<<3. Random mechanical malfunctions>>>  That would be nice, though hard to model accurrately.  It wouldn't be right for all types of aircraft to have the same likelihood of malfunction because some types were more reliable than others.  Figuring out how unreliable each component of each type of aircraft should be would make for some veeeery long threads on this board --  'My grandpa flew 33 combat missions in P-38L's and never had his airspeed indicator fail ONCE!!'.

<<<4. Winds aloft and surface winds.>>>  I would really like this, I hope HTC takes a look at it.  Having some random wind effects would certainly solve the problem of buffs nailing acks from 30K.  It would also make landings a bit more interesting.  Maybe we could have a function key would would display wind speed and direction for any friendly field withing 2 miles, so we would know which runway to use.

[This message has been edited by ra (edited 04-01-2000).]

[This message has been edited by ra (edited 04-01-2000).]

[funked]

Random failures - This is simulated via discos.