Below you will find some ideas to the question: „What would I do if I had to design a flightsim?“.
Note: since there is „nothing new under the sun“, my ideas are variations of solutions i‘ve come across in other games to date.
Main Arena
I‘m not a great fan of icons, yet I understand why they are in use.
My idea would be to use a combination of icons, camoflage and insigna to identify between friend and foe.
Icons display range data only. Camoflage and insigna are country specific.
Example 1: Country „A“ has planes with red tail/nose markings, County B‘s markings are yellow etc. One could either use a non historical way to mark the planes, or actually stick with the wide variety of historical markings that would fit the roster. (I‘m thinking of historically red nosed P-51‘s, or yellow nosed Me109‘s - obviously this will only work if they had yellow nosed P-51‘s and red nosed Me109‘s at the time too...
Example 2: Camoflage is different from country to country (European theater camo vs Desert camo etc. note: this may be unbalancing if one countries camo sticks out more than anothers in a certain terrain).
Example 3: Countries represent actual nations e.g. Country A = USA, Country B = Germany etc. The USA in this example woud use regular camo/markings for its own aircraft, foreign countries aircraft would display camo/markings as applied by the americans in WWII (I‘m thinking of how the americans painted/marked the Spitfires they flew, or how they marked captured German/Japanese planes used for test flights). What I don‘t like about this Idea is the fact that people would identify too much with their country being „US“ or „LW“, thus imbalancing the Main Arena - hmm, on the other hand... a.) I could be wrong and b.) since when was the MA balanced?
Benefits
Icons no longer play a dominating role. SA now involves identifing friend/foe by camoflage/markings. Players have a better chance of using their camoflage to engage/disengage the enemy. A larger variety of camoflages for any given plane.
Duelling Arena
ok... whilst the above ideas are a variation from the slightsim „skyfighters“, the upcoming idea is just plain „stolen“ from that sim...
User editable plane skins
The romance behind dogfights in general, and duelling arenas in particular is fighting man against man - just like the knights back then on horseback. Now, just as they had unic and beautifully coloured garments and armour, I want to be able to design my own camoflage. Furthermore I want to download other peoples camo designs. Why? Because every man is an artist! I fondly recall the great camo designs by „Skyfighter“ veterans like Storm, Nash, Hedgehog to name a few.
Benefits
Player personalities are enhanced, not only be the art of how they fly, but also the art of how they look while doing that
It gives me something to do when it gets boring at work...
Speaking of work, the boss wants me to do the same *sigh*
Conclusion
I‘m not saying AH should have these features - these features would be the ones I‘d implement if I had the 20 years to programm a flightsim of my own
