I was practicing for a race in the AHXARL earlier and I was thinking of how nice it would be if I could race against another plane without having to find someone else online to work with. Wouldn't it be great if you could record yourself or somebody else's flight like you do with AHFilm, but you can fly
with them instead of just watching them? The only game I can name specifically off the top of my head that has this sort of feature is
Forza Motorsport. (Zipping up the "XBOX-GENERATION SKILLESS DWEEBZ R STEALIN' MAH GAME!!!" flamesuit.)
In
Forza there is a practice mode where at the completion of each lap a copy of your car during your best lap on that track spawns next to you and you can literally race yourself. This is a really useful tool in developing your skills and learning how to drive a particular car on a given track to its maximum potential. Instead of just driving hard and getting your lap time as low as possible, you can really examine where you can improve turn-by-turn. I believe you can even race against other peoples' ghosts. "Oh, I really need to make sure I brake early here because otherwise I'm sliding through the exit and setting myself up horribly for this straight." In the Air Racing League the way you handle each individual turn is doubly important. "Is the larger radius turn line here really the fastest in the long run with this E-clobbering 180 right after it?" It'd be nice if I could look at two different lines side-by-side.
Ghosts could also be a very valuable and convenient training tool for general flight, ACM, and gunnery. Imagine if the Trainers, instead of having to meet everyone they're teaching in-game, could for instance record themselves performing a landing. A new player could load this Ghost, and use it to guide him in on his first landings. And the Trainer could record his voice narrating the proceedings step-by-step. Then there could be a Ghost playing "Follow the Leader", where new pilots can start building muscle memory and the sense of the limitations of the aircraft. The same thing could be done for general combat maneuvers, and there could even be a check-box for enabling Ghost collisions, so you could practice gunnery on an A/C that's doing more than just flying in circles.
The possibilities for the use of Ghosts aren't endless but there are certainly many. What do you guys think? +1?
