Forgotten Simmers

[Guest Darkness]

Forgotten Simmers

 

A new generation is coming

 

Years and years of virtual flying are gone. I remember it was 1986 when I virtually flew for the very first time, aboard an F-15 in an old eight bits computer with an ancient simulator. No mouse, a four colour screen, no joys, no pedals, no Trackir, no online... Just some lines at the monitor, and a big dotted line in the middle, with blue at the top and some kind of brown at the bottom. Just taking off or whatever it was, and dreaming I was there, in the middle of nowhere. Nowadays people flying simulators, in top computers, with very complex renders and photographic images, cannot see in many ways how our minds could create all the things that were lost at the screen.

 

Far beyond the steps we made.

 

I was at the military service at that time, and I had my computer in front of a new and brilliant System 36 IBM Computer. I remember one day one general coming to the office to see the new computer, and after seeing the marvellous IBM, he put his eyes on the eight bits computer and said "and what the hell is this"? And yes, I had to tell him "my general, this is my own personal computer, I´m studying computer programming and I need it, I have a permission from the coronel". He then turned and said to me "¿oh really?" That´s good to hear, I have a daughter who is twelve years old and I want her to study this stuff, you can come with me to El Corte Ingles one day to help me purchase one of those". I said "of course I´ll be there my general when you say". You can bet I didn´t see that general anymore- It was quite an experience, I thought I was going to go to hell.

 

Many, many time has gone since then. I cannot say I´m old, but when I see people flying virtually, who were born many years after that, I have a sense of being like an old Fokker DR-1 among some F-22s. Ok I´m not going to start to crying, I can handle it, but it is important because of the little thoughts I´m going to talk right now, if you are brave enough to go on reading.

 

A new generation should arise.

 

I´m not here to make you know my life, but to think about old those glory days, and the time I had since then. I´m not and old man nor an old pilot, but time is running every second every day, and I think to myself who´s going to take this, you could say, "simming world" after us, from the "old" virtual pilots from the 80´s. The question is not what kind of simulation we´ll have in ten or twenty years, but if there will be no simulation at all.

 

Please don´t think I´m being catastrophic, and don´t think I´m saying that without us there won´t be any simulation. I perfectly know there is a new generation arising, well prepared, and good enough to go wherever they want, much better than me, but the question is ¿are they going to have what we had? Is that all? And what means "all"? Some flying, some forums, some webs, maybe some articles... Are we going to be flying in our houses for the next one hundred centuries, isolated in our forums from the rest of the world?

 

What about creating a new simulation world? A place where people can get connected all the day to online servers to make national and international events and competitions? What about carrying the simulation world to a new era where you can hear that there is more than Quake and Nintendo DS on TV? What about the thousand people who want to fly and don´t even know we exist? What about an international virtual flying forum to talk about events, competitions, development, etc? What about being known by the entire world? What about taking seriously this hobby for the very first time?

 

Do you think I´m mad? Yes maybe, but think for a second. If you see outside, you´ll find international virtual soccer competitions, virtual Fighting competitions, racing competitions, combat competitions, all they with sponsors, with the crowd following the leaders, with TVs talking about it... This is a new era in electronic entertainment. This is the virtual sports of the XXI century. This is the future. So, where are we?

 

When I hear and read some "old" people like me, saying, after years of flying virtually, that all those ideas stink, I have the impression we have failed, that we could have the opportunity some years ago, and that we have lost our future. Resign is what I see when I hear and read that all those ideas are "dust in the wind", and when I see there is no reaction to any new idea that comes from anywhere anytime.

 

Maybe it´s time for a new generation to come and take new ideas, but they´ll have a very hard work in front of them. To break this eternal loop where we have said to ourselves that all that could be done is done, is not a very easy work. So new people with new strenght is what we need to take this hobby to a new era.

 

The weight of the past.

 

The past has been a very very hard weight for simulation. Today, we can still hear the echoes of those amazing events that were made five, ten or twelve years ago, and those virtual fights at the beginning of the online era. Yes, those were good times. But they´re gone. And they´re gone forever. I don´t say we cannot talk of it. Yes, we can, of course we can. I don´t say we cannot write about it, make videos about ir, or make meetings about it at the Palace Hotel. I just say we should also talk about the future, a more brilliant future than anything we had in the past. I just say, let´s talk about what to do to make progresses to become a group of people around a marvellous and impressive hobby.

 

But reactions when talking about the future are demagogic, it seems that any future you could imagine is freezed at the present and must live without trying to be anything better that was related to the past. For some people, the future is just as good as was the best past, and any other idea of changing that into a new world of possibilites is sunk inmediatly by the fact that "all those old times" were so brilliant that anything else is possible.

 

Well, I know many people won´t think about this, and even they won´t matter about this. That´s good. But there is some kind of chain that seems to connect the past with the future.

 

It is time to drop many obsolete things. It is time to start again. So a new generation must take the command, people without too many stories to tell about the past because they were child at those times. That´s the generation that can change the future, that´s the generation that can break the chain.

 

Debriefing.

 

I´ve talked with many people about this. Many reactions were positive, but, in the end, when we finish talking, it seemed that the past arose again to maintain the statu quo, to avoid releasing the weight we are carrying. I can imagine a better future for simulation, and I want to make sure that I make all the steps to create a new world of possibilites for simulation. And I know it´s a hard trip and that there will be many people that won´t believe in it. But I think new people are coming, and I think those people can get the control of the future. We must believe in a better future for the virtual flying, if we don´t, we´ll just sit at the chair with the joy flying a neverending dogfight.

 

Maybe we´ll never be so many as other people with other hobbies, but it is clear for me that we can´t be released to an secondary place in the world of the virtual entertainment. We are virtual pilots, we spend thousand hours learning to fly all those big birds that so many people want to know. It is time for us to leave the dust of the field and take off. Let´s take off.

[Nitsuga]

I remember those flights where I felt the pilot of an Avro Lancaster, trying to shoot down monochrome planes and rightly a dam... flying in Dambusters.

 

Or with the F-15, where the only thing you could see was a tiny window toward the front, blue sky, the sun a hard round white, green land...

 

What those happy days! The latest technology for home! If I had imagined what was to come...

Edited July 25, 2008 by Nitsuga

[Guest Darkness]

That´s right Nitsuga, now teenagers can´t imagine those old glory days, for them something below a Quad Core seems to be a T.Rex

[Galahad78]

Well, I've been brave enough to go through the entire article, where is my prize?

 

The thing is that I've been also following the "argument" about this same topic in the CP 2008 Debriefing thread; I've read some complains (hey, no criticism here ), but very little hard facts. I mean, no concretion of concepts. When you say this:

 

What about creating a new simulation world? A place where people can get connected all the day to online servers to make national and international events and competitions?

 

I immediately think of IVAO or VATSIM, for instance. Is this not enough in your dream of a new simulation world? I'm not a man of great vision, thus I cannot imagine things that surely you have envisoned in your dreams. Please, Darkness, share those dreams with us Perhaps some of us could be part of that new generation you say

[Guest Darkness]

That´s right, I know of IVAO and VATSIM. Let me tell you something: when Falcon 4 was being developed, programmers said a part of the sim would be prepared to be online all the time, 24X7, so a war would be generating continously. You could just take your seat in you fighter, then start one of the missions that the generator would be creating continously. Well that was some kind of idea of what I want to say with "What about creating a new simulation world? A place where people can get connected all the day to online servers to make national and international events and competitions?"

 

That´s not IVAO, but you can think of it like a military section of IVAO or VATSIM. Today for every virtual military pilot you can find ten or twenty civilian pilots. That´s ok, that´s the reason IVAO and VATSIM are so big.

 

Please, Darkness, share those dreams with us Perhaps some of us could be part of that new generation you say

 

I want to dream with new virtual worlds, where people can get connected and fly, like IVAO, that was a very good example, in a military way. But young people are the future of this world, not me of course. I want to see how it starts, I want to give some ideas, but this is going to be created in ten, fifteen years by young people, and I won´t live forever (I expect :P ). Just remember the E-69 once per year when you are flying in those virtual worlds, what about "for the 69th!!" that could be a good example of our work today trying to make the first steps to this new virtual worlds

[Pepe.]

¡ Mamones ! A ver si aprendeis a comunicaros en Español, que ya sois mayorcitos.

[Guest Darkness]

Don´t understand that barbarian language sorry :P

[Galahad78]

Paella, sangria and mucho guapa are the only spanish words I know

 

Coming back to the topic, perhaps we haven't had good tools in the past to get a "military IVAO". Think that even now, 10 years after been released, it is quite difficult to have a 24x7 running campaign in Falcon (ask our colleagues of Falcon Wing ). Yes, it is the best dinamic campaign ever programmed (although I liked EF2000's and Comanche vs. Hokum's also ), but it lacks something; perhaps it is the inherent difficulty of military operations: in IVAO, you choose a plane, an aiport, you fly to another airport and hopefuly perform a good landing. Period. In top of that, a campaign in Falcon (or other simulators) needs strategy, needs resource management, etc. and I think that's difficult to agree or implement between different virtual squadrons around the world. But perhaps I'm going too quickly let's talk about tools.

 

I know that IVAO AND VATSIM are "external" organizations, with their own softwares. Perhaps their "advantage" is that there are only 2 main standards in civil flight simulation: FS and X-Plane. Military simulation have been more atomized, even though nowadays there are 3 or 4 main simulators: IL2, Lomac and Falcon. But there are quite differences between them to integrate them in a net as IVAO does with FS and X-Plane I cannot see any simple solution to this.

 

But there is always hope after the storm (and you'll never walk alone ). And that hope has name: Blackshark. I'm really looking forward to it. I think that it is the first time that I really see feasible the "integrated battlefield" concept. If I recall correctly, it was SSI's Flanker 2.0 the first which was advertised as the first simulator of an era: flight, naval and terrestrial simulations for a realistic battlefield. Lead Pursuit tried the same trick with Allied Force, which was nicknamed as Battlefield Operations. Needless to say, none of them did more than publish a flight simulator.

 

Blackshark could change that, with its modular programming (I think, I'm no expert), integrating such different platforms as attack choppers and high performance air superiority fighters in the same battlefield. Moreover, I find it can be "quite" "simple" to develop different modules to meet different needs of each kind of simulator: sea physics for an AEGIS cruiser's simulation (for radar module surely could be "easily" tweaked to copy the exact behaviour of the AEGIS), armor stuff for a tank simulator...A dinamic campaign is not a simple task, but with these threads, I'm sure it can be (and will be) done

 

I'm not an optimistic man (expect the best but plan for the worst, you know ), but I think that simulator's future is a good one, right now

Edited August 8, 2008 by Galahad78