In many prop aircraft, the throttle, mixture and prop pitch knobs are again given different shapes (round, star and "undulating" respectively). The tow / winch release lever is a yellow ball. On the glider I have most hours in, the lever on the left that is blue, with a moulded grip is the speed brake. For that reason, aircraft have physically differently shaped handles for the important knobs so that they are unlikely to be confused. Part of that is knowing, exactly, without looking, where everything is. I spent a lot of time gliding while writing up my doctoral thesis (mostly as it's hard to panic about not working when you're too busy not dying) and found it very helpful for other situations in everyday life. A large part of flight training is pattern recognition, muscle memory, and fine motor skills. You look at the instruments, but you don't stare at them. For example, if flying VFR a lot of the time is spent looking out the window and actively checking that there is "nothing there". Something that is quite hard to convey is how you actually _do_ get into an "OODA loop" in an aircraft ( ) – observe, "orient", decide and act. The FAA talk about "flow patterns" for correct activities in certain phases of flight training to recover from some non-normal situations is quite literally learning a specific muscle memory, as well as decision making (albeit quite simple decision making). My griping comes from a place of love as someone who has been using xplane for over 10 years. That said, I totally agree with the others that this is an outstanding product and a bargain at its price. You can fix some of it with key mappings, but it's clear that this experience is not the priority. Over the years it has gotten less and less enjoyable to fly xplane with that kind of a setup because of the emphasis on making it look cool over making it behave realistically (I don't consider having to click a graphic of a physical switch on the screen with my mouse more realistic than hitting a key on my keyboard). But most of us don't and can't have that kind of thing, at most a joystick and often just a keyboard and mouse. The full sim setup people have built with yokes, pedals, and other controls are absolutely astonishing and it's so cool that xplane supports that. I've always enjoyed xplane but one thing I find annoying is that it seems like sometimes they emphasize visuals and cool effects (like 3d cockpits) at the expense of making the planes fun and practical to fly from a normal computer setup. I have a keyboard, mouse, and cheap joystick, I'm not going to get a realistic flight experience out of these, period, and spending 80% of the development effort on getting the airplanes to feel like their real counterparts isn't important to me. I don't care as much about having the airplanes handle like real airplanes. I really like the idea of a flight simulator that tries to enable realistic things to happen, like stalling or being able to loft missiles, etc. It was none of my concern though, it wasn't part of my mission, at least not until I got into the air. The game was simulating an actual, unplanned, attack 30 miles away and nearby air defense was responding. The dynamic campaign was so cool, one time I was taxiing, preparing to take off for some routine mission when a bunch of Patriot SAM missiles nearby start firing off into the horizon. I was really hoping it was going to have a dynamic campaign like Falcon 4, an old MicroProse game, where players took part in a vast AI driven war campaign. Thanks for mentioning Tiny Combat Arena, that looks really cool. > In real life, there'd be feedback on the flight stick or yoke due to all the air hitting the control surfaceĪlso, not all aircraft are direct linkage anymore, and most (all) commercial airline aircraft (your Boeing 737, 787, 777, Airbus A320, etc) will either have simulated feedback or no feedback. To help mitigate this, most sims offer a scalable conversion factor for controller input, but it's never perfect. Moving the stick a few mm's could result in an uncontrolled roll in-sim. It's even worse for things like joysticks that have a very low available deflection already. This means the sim-pilot doesn't have a connection with what is happening in the real-world vs what is happening in-sim, making minute changes a lot more challenging. Take a flight yoke for example - you might have say 120 degrees of rotation available physically on the device, but the actual aircraft has 180 degrees. It's been a problem with flight sims since day one.Įach "controller" be it your mouse, a joystick, flight yoke, game controller, etc, all have a different amount of available deflection on the physical device, and that has to be translated into deflection in-game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |