Best General Aviation Sim?

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by Chairboy
blah blah blah it uses a table blah blah blah

[Pei]

While I have never done any programming of flight sims I have worked on large scale physics simulations. Since the computing resources capable of running these simlutions were limted (we had to share time with other users) we had needed to limit the total load on the system. In order to do this standard prctice is to work out what parts of the calculations need to be done live and what parts can be calculated before hand. For the stuff we could do before hand we ran a "physics render": essential we ran the calculations with all the relevant data ranges and stored the data in lookup tables. This data was then used by the simulation in real time (or in actual fact scaled-up time). As long as you are are dilligent  and make sure that the physics render produces results of the accuracy and granularity required then there is no reason why the results should not be as accurate doing the whole set of calculations live. In fact you may be able to make it more accurate because you can do the render more accurately as you don't need to worry about resources as much: i.e. you can devote more horsepower to the calculations.
Until we have quantum computers that can simulate the real world down to the actual molecules and atomic forces "look-up" tables are likely to be more efficient in making simulations.

[john9001]

HT had something very interesting to say about look up tables vs real time calulating, do a search.

[Chairboy]

For something like Aces High, lookup tables are great!  Users are not creating their own planes, so it's logical to do all the calculations on the back end.

It's apples & oranges, the real time calculating is cool in X-Plane because you can accurately model the flight characteristics of almost every plane built just by entering the numbers (air foils, wing sizes, chords, pitches, drag coefficients, etc).  There's no 'tweaking' required.

[Vulcan]

If you do a search on X-Plane and Hitech you find some very interesting comments, many of which indicate tweaking IS required acheive accurate modelling.

But like you said, Apples and Oranges, and from the informed comments I read it sounds like tables are good for historical models (like AH) and X-Plane is good for experimenting with designs and is as accurate as you could get with a PC for new untested unbenchmarked designs.

[Virage]

Thnx for the responses,

MSFS2004 or X-plane, hmm.

Which does VFR Cross country the best?

[Mark Luper]

MSFlightsim 2004

[Chairboy]

MSFS.