Free Falcon

[CaptHawkeye]

Found out about this mod recently. For those who don't know Free Falcon is mod for Falcon 4.0/AF. While i'm playing the hell out of it lately I will admit that as usual, it's a mixed bag. It has many of the complications of both a community built mod and a hardcore sim. Instability, occasional slow downs, lazy or unfinished content (the MiG cockpits are all fucking gross), and my biggest gripe with sims, shitty control layout with unnecessary details and NO GOD DAMN WAY to reference the keyboard list in play.

Seriously the controls in this sim are among some of the worst i've seen even by sim standards. Flaps are controlled with the inconvenient double command of the Ctrl and F10-12 keys. Because you know, they're not a frequently used system that i'll be needing quick, easy control of from one moment to the next.

Oh but the fucking MASTER ARM switch, is the m key. A whole key for a function that I shouldn't even have to concern myself with. (Tie it to the fucking weapon selection. This micromanaging over control bullshit is what absolutely slays me in sim design.)

That being said i'm playing it lately almost exclusively because it has a huge list of playable aircraft (though only a few are in any condition to be used) including the F-4, F-14, Tornado, and F/A-18. It's also free, of course, so it's not like their is any reason not to play it. Unless of course you're a normal person who runs a computer on Vista or Windows 7. Neither of which the mod is compatible with and the dev team has flat out admitted they will not be attempting to fix this.

So hey if this is still the state the sim genre is in it's no wonder no one gives a shit about these days.

[Sarevok]

Do you need the original Falcon 4 datafiles to play this ?

[Dendrobius]

The Falcon series really has had its day...the engine limitations and everything else has caught up with it. It was good for its day, but it's reaching end of life.

Oh, and flaps are controlled up there because F-16s don't have manual flaps so it's an add on to the original engine. So yes, it's not a frequently used system that you need quick, easy control of...if you're in a Falcon. You also would use it a grand total of twice a flight, for takeoff and for landing. This is not a WWII prop fighter, you don't need to use flaps for BFM.

Go try DCS A-10 or DCS Black Shark. Sims aren't dead because designs stayed in the dark ages, it's dead because people's attention spans have shortened significantly and nobody's really willing to put in a few weeks or even months of "training" to fly a sim hardcore. (By months, I'm talking about say a few hrs a week)

[CaptHawkeye]

Go try DCS A-10 or DCS Black Shark. Sims aren't dead because designs stayed in the dark ages, it's dead because people's attention spans have shortened significantly and nobody's really willing to put in a few weeks or even months of "training" to fly a sim hardcore. (By months, I'm talking about say a few hrs a week)

Yeah, because forcing the player to spend hours at a time just trying to figure out how *not* to fuck up and die is a great design philosophy. Especially when you're Falcon 4.0, and you have the worst training missions ever. But lol must be shorter attention spans or something. I guess it's pointless for me to complain though, most of these guys admit they're making games for a niche of an already niche crowd.

Yes, the reason sims are dead is *precisely* because they're stuck in 1997 and refuse to leave their parent's basement. I don't understand how anyone can think otherwise when the entire genre has to fight so hard just to transition from Windows XP to Vista. How's Third Wire doing lately... oh right?

I *did* play DCS and while I think Eagle Dynamics is one of the smarter sim developers out there (LOMAC was brilliant) i'm not a fan of their recent business model of releasing new content for DCS, veeeeery sloooowly.

[Dendrobius]

I don't disagree with anything you say. Falcon 4, DCS A-10 and Black Shark, they are definitely targeted at the niche of the niche groups. They're what Operation Flashpoint and Steel Beasts are to FPS and tank sims respectively. Dumbed down training tools would be the better way of looking at them rather than as games with a big focus on pure entertainment value.

Third Wire is a one man band with an aging engine, no advertisement, and no multiplayer. Its games I view as the spiritual successor to the Jane's US Navy Fighters series, which first sucked me into the entire combat flight sim genre. If Fighters Anthology got modernized, that would probably be your ideal game. Ridiculous amount of flyable aircraft (142), a sim-lite style flight model and avionics modeling, easy to run on then current systems, and it's focused on fun, not fidelity. I remember flying the AC-130 in Fighters Anthology for laughs and managing to land a hit on a friend flying something else with the howitzer, that was hilarious.

Then again, even games like Ace Combat and HAWX are not exactly blockbusters, so maybe people nowadays just prefer to pew pew pew each other in the face rather than do it with an aircraft?

[Stark]

Or maybe it's because they're dead fucking boring. HAWX at least tried to make flying a plane more interesting with their silly 'follow the Macross path through AA' displays and shit; most people just have zero interest in playing a game which is RUMBLE RUMBLE BEEP BEEP YOU'RE DEAD. You may note the age of the flight sim was a period where there were totally different expectations and technical limitaitons for games, and the only sims these days are unnecessarily opaque, obtuse and obfuscated... and wouldn't be fun for the far broader and deeper gaming population of 2011 anyway, even if they did waste weeks of their life memorising the 125 button combinations.

Frankly, nobody with fake cockpit gear or Track IR has a leg to stand on when demeaning other gamers. 'Dumbed down training tools' indeed! 'Delusional' doesn't cut it.

[Dendrobius]

The thing is, DCS A-10 and Steel Beasts are dumbed down training tools. Both were developments out of existing training software which was already in use by the military and turned into "consumer grade games" by the developers, not the other way around. They are games only in the loosest of terms, their starting point was high fidelity simulation of the real thing, NOT FUN. It's not unnecessarily opaque/obtuse/obfuscated, it's simply exactly how you fly the real bloody plane. Go complain to the USAF if you find that needing 10 steps to launch a Maverick is stupid.

The audience these particular "games" cater to are not your typical gamers. However, this really is a bit of a diversion from the main discussion of why flight sims are no longer popular. Falcon 4, Free Falcon, DCS series, etc are not designed for mass appeal. LOMAC, Ace Combat, and HAWX are, but yet they're still not exactly blockbusters (Ace Combat inside Japan excepted). Maybe you're right, flight sims just are dead fucking boring because shit doesn't blow up every 5 seconds.

[Chardok]

Will a maverick fire on the ground?

[Stark]

The audience these particular "games" cater to are not your typical gamers. However, this really is a bit of a diversion from the main discussion of why flight sims are no longer popular. Falcon 4, Free Falcon, DCS series, etc are not designed for mass appeal. LOMAC, Ace Combat, and HAWX are, but yet they're still not exactly blockbusters (Ace Combat inside Japan excepted). Maybe you're right, flight sims just are dead fucking boring because shit doesn't blow up every 5 seconds.

Even saying LOMAC and HAWX in the same breath really highlights how outrageously divorced from the market you are. An obsession with detail does not make a good game, no matter how much JUST LIKE THE USAF you think it is.

In the 80s and 90s, flight sims were often at the technical forefront of gaming, where the market was matched closely to those who used PCs for gaming (ie, nerds). Once technology caught up with shooters, adventure games, and other genres, flight sims lost their 'wow factor' (which was important even as late as the late 90s) at the same time as they became increasingly anal and obsessed with 'fidelity' and the playerbase broadened to include people who didn't wear anoraks. This process continues; while other genres are more appealing to the much broader base of PC gamers these days while being more attractive and more fun, the forum/enthusiast driven nature of the hardcore sim market (ie, people stupid enough to consider LOMAC a game with mass appeal) has driven it deeper and deeper into the niche.

If we were pretentious and butthurt we could just say 'lol attention span, babies play Starcraft', but I think the huge gulf between games like Falcon 3.0 and Falcon 4.0 speak for themselves, both technically, 'fidelity'-wise and in sales. If the market changes, and your product changes only to further to reduce its appeal, don't blame the market for your low sales. The final nail in dickless morons whining about the babies who don't like increasingly opaque and obtuse flight 'sims' is really that games like Sims outsell their genre by factors of hundreds or thousands, and yet involve not a single explosion.

I guess I missed the part where Shift-F12 was just like a real plane.

[Artemas]

what the fuck does "wearing an anorak" mean?

its cold some places dude

An obsession with detail does not make a good game, no matter how much JUST LIKE THE USAF you think it is.

he already said that stark

[Stark]

He also said these games aren't designed to be fun, and yet believes they are unpopular because people have shorter attention spans. Excuse me while I feel repetition might help him follow along with the class.

It wouldn't even be particularly hard to scheme a simhard flight game that gave actual positive feedback and sense of accomplishment before putting pilots in a cockpit where a light flashes, a beep sounds, and they are instantly killed. The nature of the developers and community ensures that this doesn't happen, which is just another example of why nothing good ever comes from listening to your forums.

[Artemas]

fair enough

yeah, forums are like the siren call of indie or basement devs, tempting them with positive feedback and glimmers of popularity, then dashing them on the Rocks of Shit.

[Dendrobius]

Let me preface all following comments by saying that I agree 99% with what Stark is saying, and I'm only clarifying where I believe I differ from his opinion.

He also said these games aren't designed to be fun, and yet believes they are unpopular because people have shorter attention spans. Excuse me while I feel repetition might help him follow along with the class.

Hmm, my fault on the communication side. I'm referring to games such as Ace Combat, HAWX and LOMAC with the shorter attention span comment, not DCS/Falcon/the hardcore stuff. I'm saying it is easier to get an entertainment kick out of any other genre other than flight sims, and that's why they're not popular nowadays. No matter how you make a flight sim, it will always have a learning curve, and when you have games such as The Sims and your run of the mill FPS which can be picked up and played instantly, there is no comparison.

Or Stark, if you can explain to me how Ace Combat and HAWX are "obtuse" and "obfuscating" and how that affected their sales, I'm all ears here.

[Stark]

It's sad but those more 'casual' flight games don't have the simhard cachet to get the simulationists, but still suffer from all the other disadvantages of the genre, like being visually unimpressive, smaller interest, and limited narrative and multi potential. Even reviews generally single these games out for repetitive missions and bland presentation.

I guess I feel like the popularity of flight games in the past was more due to an accident of technology and audience rather than any widespread popularity. Even the very 'casual' end of the genre, the space fighter game, is essentially dead, and have much more 'mass market' appeal than a game about moving the goalposts on your radar with [ and ].

EDIT - BTW, claiming shooters and strategy games have 'no learning curve' is wrong, pretentious and missing the point. Play any shooter online and you'll suck for weeks, but you'll also get constant reinforcement and reward. That's why people stick with games, even when theyre hard; rewards and feedback; fun. If your game doesn't make players feel good as much as it makes them feel bad, why the fuck would they play it?

[CaptHawkeye]

It seems to me like a lot of wannabee sim developers automatically associate high cost with sims, which it's true, they're time intensive games to make. I feel that a lot of this cost comes from graphical overhead, with many sim developers feeling hard pressed to waste precious time and energy on developing 25% more sun glare. Then whining when they don't make even the modest sales figures they'd hoped for.

Apparently sims are not *so* expensive as to be impossible for small time groups to develop though. Look at Seven G, or even Fighter Ops if they ever finish it. Better than both of these, Rise of Flight. An indie sim that both looks good and is well designed.

[Feil]

Casual flight and vehicle games are doing just fine, as far as I can tell. They're just mated with shooters or sandboxes, these days. Games seem to be blending more and more as the technology to blend them gets easier to use - and getting better as a result.

[AniThyng]

I personally am a big fan of Ace Combat, but it's really more of an arcade game with a flight sim skin then any actual flight sim...

That said, Strike Commander and USNF(and all its offspring - I could spend hours fooling around with Fighters Anthology...) struck the right balance of being just complicated enough to be a "sim" and yet arcade-like enough to be fun (I've played my fair share of classic Combat Flight Sims back in the day, and I don't think spending 45 minutes flying from point A to point B, then 5 minutes of tossing a bomb at a aim point, then running home for another 45 minutes is something I could stand anymore - this has less to do with my attention span, and more to do with not wanting to invest so much time in 'pointless busywork' in my games.)

[Tolya]

I am among people who find it fun to twiddle around with pre-flight checks, procedures, switching buttons etc. And even I found the 10 minute starting procedure in Falcon a bit too much. It was fun for the first few times, but then it just gets tedious.

I've also spent some time with DCS Black Shark and I must say that after I've learned the basics (starting the damn thing, emergency procedures, weapons) and started toying around with tactics I've discovered that it is IMMENSELY boring.

You either shoot someone from afar or get shot at - and usually die. I know this is how it is in the real life, but if I wanted a goddamn brick laying simulator I would just go to a construction site. Oh, forget Top Gun-style manouvers, it is a helicopter. So you hug the ground and stay as invisible as possible and hope that there isn't a MANPAD along the way, or you are fucked.

In DCS: BS you start your engine, navigate the waypoints, shoot some shit and go home. That is exactly why I prefer to waste my time with a competent but mediocre shooter like Red Faction Armageddon instead of spending time in the cockpit.

Im waiting for someone to bring back the good old days of Pacific Strike and Strike Commander, where there is an actual plot, an actual story to follow. I don't care about dynamic campaigns: what is so good in them that people rave about? I still can perform one of few predefined types of missions which are all BLOODY SAME. I don't give a shit that 20 kilometers away a tank has engaged another tank on its own, so fucking what? Am I in this tank? Do I care?

Fuck dynamic campaigns, bring back good old linear campaigns and add some meaningful plot. Maybe then would the sims at least be interesting.

I remember that the last game which at least tried to include something apart from flying was Team Apache. Flying itself was easy and fun in there, but you also had to manage your airwing: choose your pilots for a campaign, decide how many birds to assign to a mission and who will fly them. There was also a broken fatigue (pilots get tired quickly but I've never seen them recover even if they haven't flew a mission in 48 hours) and motivation system (which was pretty lame, since you only could either politely talk about their problems or chew them out - and nothing indicated which option would be better in a given case).

Simulation developers, hear this: staring into a screen for 10 minutes with nothing happening IS NOT FUN.

[AniThyng]

I don't think there's anything wrong with modelling other elements involved in the mission doing whatever it is they are doing even if its not exactly relevant to what you are doing - a lot of the fun in Ace Combat 6 was watching friendly squadrons and ground elements actually doing something during the mission (the smoke milling about the AEGIS ships after they salvo their missiles always warms my heart).

I agree fully on the management of the squadron/wingmen aspect - Gunship 2000 did that fairly well, as did Strike Commander to an extent.

[Sarevok]

Hardcore sims were and always will be boring once you learn to play. Back in the 90s the most fun I had with Janes aircraft sims was reading the manuals, ingame encyclopedia, watching the videos and so on. The trainings were hard but learning about various new aircraft systems kept my curiosity going. I imagine this is the real reason why people buy hardcore sims. They are like interactive books about military hardware.

[Tolya]

Hardcore sims were and always will be boring once you learn to play. Back in the 90s the most fun I had with Janes aircraft sims was reading the manuals, ingame encyclopedia, watching the videos and so on. The trainings were hard but learning about various new aircraft systems kept my curiosity going. I imagine this is the real reason why people buy hardcore sims. They are like interactive books about military hardware.

Please. Jane's simulations were arcade games compared to Falcon and DCS new "commercial military trainers". They were also fun: Jane's USAF let you into the cockpit and shoot missiles at stuff straight away. Plus every mission was based around some interesting idea, like when you had to sneak in an F-22 and then go up and rapidly shoot down 4 enemy planes that hijacked a passenger plane and were flying in formation. Or hit a POW camp with an A-10 to pave the way for the rescue choppers.

Calling them "hardcore" sims is like calling "Bully" an education game.

[Stark]

Older sims were generally a lot less simhard than modern, truly niche toggle switch simulators. Popular games of the time, like Strike Commander or Gunship 2000, were closer to Freespace than Falcon 4.0.

Amusingly, the ridiculously simhard mod for World in Conflict (Modern Warfare or whatever it's called now) includes a ludicrous level of detail in the modelling of radar, fire control, and all that shit... and doesn't bog the game down. It doesn't ask players to swerve the TADS to each target manually; it just represents (to a frankly daft level) the behaviour of a bunch of systems working in harmony. Sim detail, not sim boredom.

[CaptHawkeye]

I've also spent some time with DCS Black Shark and I must say that after I've learned the basics (starting the damn thing, emergency procedures, weapons) and started toying around with tactics I've discovered that it is IMMENSELY boring.

This is why i'm not a fan of what ED is doing with DCS. The games consist of too little content for too high a price. 3 years after release they've added....the A-10. A dynamic campaign generator like Falcon's would go a long way to helping the game stay fun. I strongly believe though the thing that leads to a good sim is quantity of content. People like to have options and be able to customize how they play which a sim tightly focused on one type of aircraft cannot deliver. This is probably why the Jane's games were on average so much better than other sims. Not to mention how well designed the controls and system management was for those games. You could take individual instruments from the panel and paste them to the screen!

[Mr. Coffee]

Will a maverick fire on the ground?

Yes, but you have to unlock Louis Gossett Jr.Chappy as you wingman first.

[Starglider]

It's sad but those more 'casual' flight games don't have the simhard cachet to get the simulationists, but still suffer from all the other disadvantages of the genre, like being visually unimpressive, smaller interest, and limited narrative and multi potential.

I grant limited multi potential, in that the multiplayer scenarios aren't terribly interesting. Usually straight team versus with maybe token defence of objectives. Taking a look at where FPS multi has gone over the last ten years would help. Then again, plenty of people enjoy playing racing games multiplayer and those generally have even less options, so this isn't a fatal problem.

For visuals and narrative, what exactly do you want? Ace Combat 6 and Blazing Angels 2 both had IMHO pretty good graphics for 2007 console games, and about as much plot as you can reasonably get into a flight sim. Yes the writing could have been sharper, but very few games have really good writing, it certainly wasn't any worse than the average 2007 FPS.

Unfortunately I haven't seen any arcade flight sims since then that even match that quality, never mind improve on it. HAWX was horribly flawed and HAWX 2 was just outright shit.