Popular Posts

Saturday, August 7, 2010

FSX; A Program With Amazing Potential

Dudley Henriques has long been our ‘resident test pilot’, working for Microsoft to help them make their aircraft models more realistic, and helping the flightsim communities learn how things are done ‘in the real world’, specializing on the classic jet fighters of the now previous age. Man, does that make us feel old! But old is good in this instance, because it means experience.
Dudley had tremendous problems in the past with getting FSX to run, and he even quit FS for some time because of it, but he’s back and has things working now. So we’re happy to see he is getting enthusiastic again and wants to share his wisdom with us. Read his story below !!

I’m not here to sell FSX to you as a training tool. My purpose here is to relay to you that what I’m seeing now being done within FSX by developers who have upgraded the program into what I believe is a simulator worthy of serious positive comment as the program affects YOU, the end user.

Remember I mentioned several factors I believe will define the future for desk top flight simulation? These factors are an actual trend toward realism, accuracy, and fidelity. I equate all these factors to a single all important design model. That design model can be summed up in a single concept, and that concept is a designed in UNPREDICTABILITY within the flight experience!

You can build a “game” around predictability, where the outcome of a performed action or the outcome of an unperformed action has been preordained by the code placed there for you by a programmer, but for anything approaching the realism, accuracy, and fidelity found in the actual flight experience, you MUST have a factor of predictable outcome ONLY if correct procedure and/or action is followed. For ANY flight simulator to even approach the real world flying experience the designer of that simulator has to eliminate the predictable outcome factor and find a way to make predictability of outcome based on the performance of the aircraft, and that performance directly linked to the performance and action or even inaction of the sim pilot flying that aircraft.

No comments:

Post a Comment