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I have only one grief with (all) PC Flight Simulators: the feeling on landing. As a private pilot, I find that takeoff and flight is actually quite well simulat

by geff82 4y ago

I have only one grief with (all) PC Flight Simulators: the feeling on landing. As a private pilot, I find that takeoff and flight is actually quite well simulated, but not the landing. In a real small plane, the controls begin to feel wobbly, you feel the floating on the cushion of air, you feel the wind: all totally different in the simulation. I wonder how they could get it right.

smoldesu 4y ago
BeamNG has some interesting ideas for future simulators to take note of: https://youtu.be/ZBwGK2zuNOk https://youtu.be/ZBwGK2zuNOk It's a "worst case scenario" idea for driving simulation, where each piece can be deformed and tracked to implement various features. As a result, the driving feels more like a collection of pieces rather than one mesh with consistent acceleration. It's subtle during regular gameplay, but emerges excellently in high-stress scenarios like hard corners or crashes. Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. It feels like the tech is there, but the will to design a realtime physics-based flying simulator isn't.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. I think the real reason is that the compute power required for this is not quite there yet. I remember about 15 years ago, people were floating around the idea that in the future (once we get more compute power) videogames will not be using hard-coded animations for basic actions in games (like shooting in an FPS). Instead, people speculated that we will have enough compute power to just actually simulate the physics of those actions, and create the animations for those actions dynamically on the fly, with each one of them being unique. I believe there are some videogames that already do that (no example at the moment though, will add in a comment reply if I find a few good ones). The next barrier is obviously full physics simulation for everything present on screen. However, it feels like that would be magnitudes more compute-intense than making just some basic animations physics-similated (instead of hard-coded), definitely beyond what we can do now (possible AI-assisted magic aside, as I cannot say much about it; DLSS still blows my mind). I expect we will see increasingly more physics simulation mechanics trickling into videogames in the future, but not sure how much. After all, it has to serve the gameplay, and often it is just not a good match for the envisioned mechanics.
  - thereisnospork 4y ago
    The closest I've seen to that ideal is Noita - every pixel if its (2d) world has full chemical/physics simulation. Overall its quite reminiscent, and certainly inspired by the 'falling sand' flash game from the 90's. Of course it doesn't quite qualify as a realistic simulation but still quite impressive.
  - MrGilbert 4y ago
    After watching the recent episode[1] of "AI & Games" on why Machine Learning hasn’t seen widespread use in the Gaming industrie yet, I wonder if ML could indeed fill the gap between what we have now and a accurate physics simulation. Definitely something to keep an eye on. [1] https://youtu.be/hwk37ID4qdE https://youtu.be/hwk37ID4qdE
bitL 4y ago
For some reason when using VR I feel like MSFS 2020 landing is realistic that I get the ground effect keeping me afloat longer; wind sometimes pushes me to a side as well. I used to fly sailplanes which were extremely sensitive to these things and that feeling is there again in VR.

by geff82 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago

BeamNG has some interesting ideas for future simulators to take note of: https://youtu.be/ZBwGK2zuNOk https://youtu.be/ZBwGK2zuNOk It's a "worst case scenario" idea for driving simulation, where each piece can be deformed and tracked to implement various features. As a result, the driving feels more like a collection of pieces rather than one mesh with consistent acceleration. It's subtle during regular gameplay, but emerges excellently in high-stress scenarios like hard corners or crashes. Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. It feels like the tech is there, but the will to design a realtime physics-based flying simulator isn't.

filoleg 4y ago
> Hopefully the next frontier in simulation titles is distilling these simulation ideas into mechanics that are both fun and accurate. I think the real reason is that the compute power required for this is not quite there yet. I remember about 15 years ago, people were floating around the idea that in the future (once we get more compute power) videogames will not be using hard-coded animations for basic actions in games (like shooting in an FPS). Instead, people speculated that we will have enough compute power to just actually simulate the physics of those actions, and create the animations for those actions dynamically on the fly, with each one of them being unique. I believe there are some videogames that already do that (no example at the moment though, will add in a comment reply if I find a few good ones). The next barrier is obviously full physics simulation for everything present on screen. However, it feels like that would be magnitudes more compute-intense than making just some basic animations physics-similated (instead of hard-coded), definitely beyond what we can do now (possible AI-assisted magic aside, as I cannot say much about it; DLSS still blows my mind). I expect we will see increasingly more physics simulation mechanics trickling into videogames in the future, but not sure how much. After all, it has to serve the gameplay, and often it is just not a good match for the envisioned mechanics.
- thereisnospork 4y ago
  The closest I've seen to that ideal is Noita - every pixel if its (2d) world has full chemical/physics simulation. Overall its quite reminiscent, and certainly inspired by the 'falling sand' flash game from the 90's. Of course it doesn't quite qualify as a realistic simulation but still quite impressive.
- MrGilbert 4y ago
  After watching the recent episode[1] of "AI & Games" on why Machine Learning hasn’t seen widespread use in the Gaming industrie yet, I wonder if ML could indeed fill the gap between what we have now and a accurate physics simulation. Definitely something to keep an eye on. [1] https://youtu.be/hwk37ID4qdE https://youtu.be/hwk37ID4qdE

bitL 4y ago

For some reason when using VR I feel like MSFS 2020 landing is realistic that I get the ground effect keeping me afloat longer; wind sometimes pushes me to a side as well. I used to fly sailplanes which were extremely sensitive to these things and that feeling is there again in VR.