Interesting new post at PixelPoke
Jason, chief pixel poker for Flight Sim, has posted an interesting bit about the bridge problem that occurred with FS2004. My tenure with Flight Sim ended with that release and I still remember the hue and cry that the community brought forth when they started looking for various bridges.
The post does bring to light some of the problems associated with attempting to model the entire world, it also (in my opinion) understates the enormity of the problem just a little. The assumption of a large part of the user community is that the Flight Simulator team is massive and has unlimited resources. This simply is not the case. Let’s take the example of scenery. How many people do you think it should take to validate the entire world? That’s Bridges, Roads, Shorelines, Land Class, Elevation, Auto-gen, and custom scenery. Oh, and let’s not forget 22,000 airports. Think about that for a few minutes and decide how many people you think you would need. Please remember that you only have a limited amount of time and that not all the data is actually there when you are ready to test it.
(Insert Jeopardy Music here)
Ready? Now please juxtapose that number with the real number of people dedicated to scenery for FS2004……2 (and the second one wasn’t there the whole time) I always thought they were a bit over worked. What about you?
Another well discussed topic in FS is the flight models. There are those that think that MS doesn’t really know how the flight model works. (Hi Ron.) This is of course not true. The fact is that the guy in charge of making the flight models (just one guy) is also the guy that made the engine that drives the flight models. He did the CFS modifications as well. As Mr. Gilbert once pointed out, building the system is a bit different than building stuff that plugs into the system. Also please try to understand that 100% fidelity to a flight model is not the goal, although it’s not a bad thing either, the goal is a reasonable approximation of any given aircraft, keeping in mind the breadth of the audience, and the time and resources allotted to the project.
Wow, this turned out longer than I expected. Jason must be contagious.
Oh, Thanks Jason! for pointing me to the Wing Fell Off blog.
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