> I'm afraid that your grading is no more than a beauty contest. It does > matter "if the gauges are all in the right place or if the cockpit is > complete down to the last detail". Under your grading a cockpit could be > a complete figment of the imagination, but by looking pretty or having a > wow factor it will get a high score. I would suggest that as such it has > little value for a Flight Sim such as ours which values accuracy > above all else.
> Bit of fun for the forum though. I wish we could dispense with such disparaging comments. To get it out of the way - yes, a cockpit could theoretically be completely fictional and get a high rating. So there are cases in which the rating could be or actually is misleading - so what? But to call it a 'beauty contest' doesn't reflect what actually happens, because the basic assumption to trust developers that they try to place gauges and levers right isn't that bad. It is simply not the case that everyone tries to make up fictional assignments of instruments in cockpits to get a 'Wow!' factor, and once you allow for that basic trust in model developers, I find a decent correlation between realism of systems, FDM and 'beauty'. That may not be what you are interested in, you may be interested in accurate positioning of instruments above else, which is fair, but it doesn't equal 'little value' and it doesn't mean everyone else is like you. As for an accuracy rating of instrument positions, see what I wrote in the forum: "You'd be looking at maybe 30 minutes work per aircraft to get cockpit photographs, search for the position of each lever and gauge and compare and then make sure there is actually no version of the aircraft beside the one you have photographs for in which the gauges and levers are not placed differently. That's 200 hours of work - if you do it as a full time job with 8 hours per day, it's a whopping 5 weeks. Natural question - who spends that time?" So, to get that out of the way as well - you can always make a point for the perfect rating which is much fairer and reflects your particular interests much better, then we find we can never invest the time to actually do it systematically, and then we all go home. I concede that point, you can make the case for having no rating at all because a completely fair one which can't be misused is too time consuming. Cheers to that! * Thorsten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Increase Visibility of Your 3D Game App & Earn a Chance To Win $500! Tap into the largest installed PC base & get more eyes on your game by optimizing for Intel(R) Graphics Technology. Get started today with the Intel(R) Software Partner Program. Five $500 cash prizes are up for grabs. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intelisp-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
