One day... Simulator + War Sim

[badmojo420]

Good idea, but it will never catch on... thats far too much work for FUN....

The same could be said about a lot of stuff in PR. Who wants to spend a couple hours driving supply crates to people who need them? Or sitting in a tent staring at a map with dots on it? Or laying on a rooftop waiting to fire a missile at an aircraft that might never come. Or "shoveling" sandbags, etc. Lots of people still enjoy all those activities.

A game like I describe wouldn't be cool just for the task you are currently doing, rather it would really immerse you into a team/army where people are counting on you, and if you screw up your simple task, that could cost lives somewhere down the line. It goes back to what the OP said about killing CPU opponents not being as fun as killing human players. I admittedly wouldn't play much artillery simulator on its own, but if it was part of a larger human conflict and my shells were falling on real human players, it would mean something more.

[jerkzilla]

Arma2 has the right idea, just horrible flying physics, and a somewhat unrealistically high hardware requirement to ever make it popular and abysmally shitty AI on single-player and lack-of-focus in multiplayer all leads to a failed idea... a good idea, but a failed idea.

Arma 2 lacked a lot of technical detail you kind of expected after it was marketed as a sim and all. Honestly, this features significantly more realistic tank combat. Arma2 doesn't even have location based damage for vehicles like subsystem failure. Their CQC mechanics suck as well.

[Bluedrake42]

Arma is the only one that tried to do it, and its my opinion that they failed. Its not a bad game, its very modable its just not very playable. and im not talking about xp and stats and strafe jumping... Im talking about shooting your targets lol.

BF2 is a spammy game, and doesnt cater to expantion. COD's levels are too small becasue they are static objects stuck together. theres nothing in the negative zone outside of what you see, the map while looking realistic is just one big Collision.

However, this game may have potential. it could turn out being as spammy as everything else. but who knows. its called Heroes and generals and its made by the guys who made hitman. and the hitman games were quite realistic, but also quite arcadey. the game works by having an mmo style battlefield where soldeirs spawn in and partisipate in WW2, and another leaf of the game is where high ranking players operate as the general and order troops to go places and do things. which other than BF2 on a small scale hasnt been done before. (afaik)
Heroes & Generals Windows, Web game - Mod DB

Other than that i dont know what to tell you...realism gamers while being a minority group are mostly comprised of older guys who like fight sims army and sniper games. but we simply arnt being catered to in the ways we desire.

But you should bare in mind, nobody else is either. even gears of war, halo, bad company, and a bunch of other console fps arnt getting it right for their fans, with the exception of resistance 3 i guess.

Oh yeah I saw that on moddb, I think it has potential for sure, but like you we'll just have to see... and also I don't think realism gamers are only older guys 0.o I'm 21 and I've been playing mainly tactical/realism games since I was 17, and I think 75% of the people I play with are around that age range. (not to put down the older guys, you all are just as good if not better team mates than anyone else =P)

The same could be said about a lot of stuff in PR. Who wants to spend a couple hours driving supply crates to people who need them? Or sitting in a tent staring at a map with dots on it? Or laying on a rooftop waiting to fire a missile at an aircraft that might never come. Or "shoveling" sandbags, etc. Lots of people still enjoy all those activities.

A game like I describe wouldn't be cool just for the task you are currently doing, rather it would really immerse you into a team/army where people are counting on you, and if you screw up your simple task, that could cost lives somewhere down the line. It goes back to what the OP said about killing CPU opponents not being as fun as killing human players. I admittedly wouldn't play much artillery simulator on its own, but if it was part of a larger human conflict and my shells were falling on real human players, it would mean something more.

I think what he's saying is that that's not really an optimal solution for what we want, and I have to say I agree, I don't think it's necessary to have multiple engines running alongside one another, I think one really well optimized engine would be fine. To be honest what you're describing sounds like it could be obtained with a single engine, I don't think the whole 2 engine thing makes as much sense (cause ultimately you'd just make them a single one)... but I'm not coder so you'd have to ask one of them haha.

[badmojo420]

Perhaps saying multiple engines gives the wrong idea. I imagine the game being developed under the same engine, but each sub-game would tailor the engine to its own needs. So, while the infantry would fill their memory with high resolution textures and models, the pilots would load up lots of low resolution textures and low poly models, so they can handle the increased view distance and bigger maps.

Imagine another version of PR, optimized for jets, that had increased view distance, disabled out of bounds, and any other tweaks that would improve jet usage but wouldn't be suitable for infantry. And when you ran this other version, you could only spawn at an airport outside the normal PR map. Jets would still contribute to the game in the same way, but it would be a more realistic experience for both the pilots and infantry.

This obviously wouldn't work too well for PR, but a full fledged game like PR2 might be able to use this type of setup.

[Bluedrake42]

ah but you see there-in lies the problem ;D, having different view distances for infantry/jets would be terrible! Ground units need to engage jets as well as vice versa (how frustrating would it be to never see the A10 coming until it was too late) I think we can all agree that all players need to have the same view distances, otherwise it isn't fair. Maybe a well optimized "dual-engine" that balanced things out like that could work, but to be honest what's harder: optimizing a single engine for all the different units, or building multiple "engines" and then having to iron out all the bugs and imbalances to game play that comes with it =/

regardless though I entirely get what you're saying and I totally think that one day it could maybe work out, but I'm just playing devil's advocate =P

[badmojo420]

(how frustrating would it be to never see the A10 coming until it was too late)

That's what happens in PR. The A10 appears out of the fog to rain down pain.

When I say give the jets more view distance than infantry, I mean if the infantry load the terrain in a 5km circle around them, the jets would load 50km around. It's not going to give the jets an advantage, it just gives them more immersion to not see a big wall of fog 5km ahead.

[Trout]

A complete war simulator should have the following things:

-a massive single game world where everyone plays on one server cluster together (therefore most likely a subscription based service)

-a combination of human and AI roles (you need AI to do the more boring tasks that people wont do; sentry duty; long supply runs, long defensive patrols ect.)

-many different types of battles taking place 24/7 (to satisfy both serious and casual gamers)

-a way to generate infantry combat where spawn points are not too far from the battle, and where people are restricted to a certain map area for the duration of the battle. This is necessary if you are going to have a GIANT map hundreds of times larger than an ARMA map (which is already pretty huge)

These concepts were in World War 2 online but they were very poorly executed and hence, there were not enough people playing to simulate anything like real war.

Even if all of this is not possible, what FPS game need most of all is a a break from handcrafted maps where you only get 6 - 12 or so with every game. Maps as we know them = poor replayability. THere is no sense that you are fighting your way across a theatre or that a battle could take place anywere. Its just a handful of sandboxes.
I've probably fought in Muttra a thousand times and the solution is NOT for the devs to make more maps, but rather to create a full scale theatre sized map and then have battles in small sections of it.

Trout

[ninjamarcus]

A engine that would suit every aspect of a game would be the Outerra Engine.

Unlimited viewdistance for pilots but very detailed ground and objects from a fps view.

Would be a perfect engine to simulate all that you write about!

[KiloJules]

Outerra Engine...never heard of it.
Too bad, cause this is too good!




Oh my god!!!

[ninjamarcus]

It's freaking epic!

[40mmrain]

you know, instead of waiting around for 20 minutes on the pad jacking off, or building a fob in a misc corner of the map at the start of each game when waiting for heavy air assets, it would be a lot more fun, and immersive to sit in the cockpit of your craft flipping the switches to start the engine, test it for problems, etc.

[PFunk]

you know, instead of waiting around for 20 minutes on the pad jacking off, or building a fob in a misc corner of the map at the start of each game when waiting for heavy air assets, it would be a lot more fun, and immersive to sit in the cockpit of your craft flipping the switches to start the engine, test it for problems, etc.

Distracted by radio chatter, press wrong sequence, blow out engine, wait 20 mins for respawn and 20 mins to start up again. Made fun of mercilessly for the rest of the round.

I can see it happening.

[Bluedrake42]

Distracted by radio chatter, press wrong sequence, blow out engine, wait 20 mins for respawn and 20 mins to start up again. Made fun of mercilessly for the rest of the round.

I can see it happening.

oh come on now you're just being negative

[PFunk]

oh come on now you're just being negative

Have you never seen anybody crash a jet on take off cause they didn't know how it worked? Sit still at the end of the runway and accelerate to 100%. They screw that up regularly enough.

I have faith in the chaos of war, and the chaos that is particularly sowed by those inept in managing their assets.

Come on, you know it would happen. Not saying I wouldn't enjoy it myself... maybe. But you know, it would.

[Redamare]

yes ... one day it would be fantastic to get PR to run like that ... but honestly its alot of work for the DEVS and theres a lot to go wrong ... plus you can get half the features a sim would get because of the BF2 limitations. flight dynamics are sort of run off a plain where if you go too slow the aircraft simply doesnt work anymore -_- .... which is 100% incorrect . . . there is alot of flight physiology that should be implicated before we get into HIGH detail on aircraft simulation for PR

and PS that's not proper departure procedure

[Hunt3r]

But until then, why not adapt a bunch of features from Combined Arms into one of PR's mods on any game engine to actually make it feel like we're sitting in an airplane not made in the Korean War era?

[OkitaMakoto]

Uhh, no. Ground forces communicate directly with close air support all the time. JTACs are around for a reason. Squads are equipped with Radios for a reason. You think that some Platoon commander or Squad leader would be sitting on the ground, fighting the enemy when gunships are circling, unable to communicate with them with his own radio?

The easiest video that comes to mind when you have an aircraft directly communicating with ground forces is the one released by wikileaks. Crazy-Horse 1-8 communicates directly with ground forces after his engagement and you can even hear the responses and chatter of ground forces from the Apache's own radio.

There are also numerous studies, reports and other documentation of American forces communicating and coordinating close air support directly from their own radios. Do you honestly think that danger-close air support would be communicated through a third party in the middle of a fight when it's perfectly acceptable, as well as possible, to call the aircraft on your own?

I was just about to reply to the same post you did, but then realized its date of posting and figured someone already did. Thanks for saving me the trouble

[Bluedrake42]

Have you never seen anybody crash a jet on take off cause they didn't know how it worked? Sit still at the end of the runway and accelerate to 100%. They screw that up regularly enough.

I have faith in the chaos of war, and the chaos that is particularly sowed by those inept in managing their assets.

Come on, you know it would happen. Not saying I wouldn't enjoy it myself... maybe. But you know, it would.

can you honestly tell me you've never played a flight sim just to fuck everything up haha, I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, I'm just saying people could still have fun =P I think for the casual servers people will have fun just blowing **** up and romping around (albeit sloppily) with military equipment, and for tactical servers, there will be communities experienced enough to have serious rounds.

[PricelineNegotiator]

can you honestly tell me you've never played a flight sim just to fuck everything up haha, I'm not saying it wouldn't happen, I'm just saying people could still have fun =P I think for the casual servers people will have fun just blowing **** up and romping around (albeit sloppily) with military equipment, and for tactical servers, there will be communities experienced enough to have serious rounds.

Yeah, playing flight sims I am 99/100 times serious. But when it comes to that one time, regardless of whether it is a flight sim and how realistic/time consuming it is, I want to crash a plane into the ground/do stunts/kills friendlies/anything to go out of the boundaries of normality. But still if a game were produced like this, it would be awesome. Is there anyone who is an IT or Network professional? I'd like to ask some questions about large scale video games.