Jonathan Richards writes: > What I value about FlightGear is that it attempts to *simulate* the > real world > and aviation in it. The landscapes and the airports are realistic, the > weather is (can be made) realistic, the celestial objects are realistic, the > flight dynamics themselves are realistic, and there is superb work done on > making the objects (scenery and planes) look good. > I agree, though, that what is missing is other inhabitants of the simulated > planet :) The biggest mismatch with reality is the absence of other air > traffic, or even ground movement, and I know that people have started to > address these. In the real world, though (modulo conflict zones) there is no > air combat. I'd welcome other flyers in the FlightGear VR, but should the > primary goal for a first interaction with them be to 'blow them outa the > sky'? The spirit of simulation would rather suggest building in flight > planning, ground- and air-traffic control, and generally relieving the > loneliness. If I thought I could do it (and I might...) I'd begin to see if > we can have FlightGear generate situation-relevant ATC radio messages by > doing text-to-speech translation with Festival. Even if it only warns me > about other traffic that I fail to see (so no change there :¬) > I don't want you to get the idea that I have some moral objection to simulated > violence, I've bought, played and enjoyed many combat sims, and I've rambled > enough, so I'll just throw out some questions... where does the real-world > information come from to =simulate= classified weapon and weapon platform > performance? How will combat damage be modelled? Will the sim assess the > location of e.g. cannon shell impacts and adjust the flight model, or put > equipment out of commission? > Multiplayer? Great idea, and I'd support it. Combat? Not yet... and please > not in the core distribution (see Erik's earlier message).
I've just started reading through the multiplayer thread. Good to see some action on this front and it sounds like you guys know a lot more about it, and have a lot more experience with the issues than I do, so I'll generally just sit back and leave this to the experts. However, let me point out that some people have a big problem with even pretending to shoot people. Personally, I have no problems with shoot 'em up games as long as you don't play them so much you start dreaming about it. :-) We should recognize however that many people feel *very* strongly about this ... strong enough to leave this project if they sense we are trending towards a pure combat sim. I would propose that the server be structured so that a purely civilian/non-combat version could be run. I don't want it to be possible for some idiot to come and blow me out of the sky when I'm practicing ILS approaches in my C172 at my local airport. When thinking about the design of such things, it would be good to consider what kind of separation we can keep between the military/combat features and the rest of the core simulation. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
