PC Flight Simulation

Computer game quality has improved by quantum leaps over the past 20 years. When I was my son's age, Pong was the new thing. I'm sure some of you can remember the image of the Pong screen burned into the phosphors of the family TV. Pong was, for those of you too young to remember such things, a tennis game. Each player had a knob to control a player. The "ball" would travel in a straight line, changing direction only when it hit the top or bottom of the screen or a player.

As computers became more powerful, games increased in complexity, and had more "moving parts." Game designers had the freedom and flexibility to pursue a different philosophy as PC technology became available, and computing power of the desktop platforms increased. The games were able to achieve an unprecidented level of realism, called suspension of disbelief This phenomenon is familiar to each of us, even if not by name. Have you ever been so completely absorbed by a book or movie plot that the outside world was put on hold or you lost track of time? Ever been drawn up in the emotions of the characters or the situations they found themselves in? Were you were able to overlook technical discrepancies? Consider Star Wars. We know that something as large as the Death Star (which was the size of a moon) would be impossible to build, let alone support, and that there aren't really starships that roam the galaxy in hyperspace. But that doesn't stop us from getting chills when Han Solo comes out of nowhere to blast Darth Vader's wingmen, or from cheering when Luke's torpedoes drop down the exhaust chute. Why? Because although we know that this entire universe is fictitious, the product of one man's imagination, for those two hours, we were drawn into his universe, we were actually a part of it. Our disbelief (and the real world) were suspended.

What once was exclusively the purview of Hollywood can now be found as close as your home PC. Game and simulator writers (and I do make a distinction here) have caught on to this concept. Many of the new generation of games and sims are first person, meaning that you look through the eyes of the player into the screen. Lets look at the Star Wars example again. I was 13 when it came out the first time, and the concept of flying an X-Wing fighter in combat was so neat...17 years later, the game writers came up with the PC sim which gave you that ability. Two years later, you were able to fly the TIE fighter. Today's simulators give you the ability to fly and fight and play and lose yourself in a world on the other side of your monitor.

There is a fine distinction between a game and a simulator. Most people do not even bother with this. A game is, in simple terms, a source of amusement. The objective is to complete a level and move on to the next. Examples would be Defender, Space Invaders, Commander Keene, and others. They are third person perspective, and your main goal is to attain high score.

A simulator, on the other hand, strives (with varying degrees of success) to emulate the real world, or what life would be like under a certain set of circumstances. They are invariably in the first person perspective, and tend to be goal-oriented rather than aiming for a high score. In many cases, scoring is not a consideration (at least not in the direct sense. Scoring is used to determine success or failure of a mission or campaign, and may be transparent to the player. High score is not the purpose or the goal of the sim.

One genre of simulators is the flight sim. The original Microsoft Flight Simulator was written for the PC-AT, and sported four colors and allowed you to fly a Cessna 182 over several major cities. The graphics were, by today's standards, unsophisticated, with 4 color CGA graphics. The cities were just colored (non-green) flat patches and the flight model was quite rudimentary. It was rough hewn, but it was a start.

A subset of the flight simulator genre, combat flight simulators, took flight sims to new heights. The combat flight sim gives anyone the opportunity to fly and fight in air combat. Early CFS' include a combat mode in Microsoft's Flight Simulator where your Cessna 182, equipped with a machine gun, could ight against WWI biplanes. The Chuck Yeager' Advanced Flight Simulator series was one of the first to allow you to fly multiple aircraft.

A milestone came in 1991 with the release of Spectrum Holobyte's Falcom3. Falcon3 is an F-16 simulator and was revolutionary in several ways. It was the first flight simulator that gave the option of using a realistic flight model on a 386 with a math coprocessor. (Unfortunately, it would not switch to the high fidelity flight model until about 300 knots, causing a noticeable change in handling characteristics. Another problem is that all other aircraft in the sim used the complex (but unrealistic) flight model, giving them an advantage in combat, since the hi-fi model tended to bleed energy more accurately (and more quickly) than the complex model.) However, you could use real fighter tactics and strategies effectively in the sim. It was one of the first sims to force you to manage your resources on a theater-wide scale. A player realized that the high-tech weapons are used up very quickly in modern combat, leaving squadrons with unguided munitions and iron bombs.

Graphics were 16-color EGA gourard-shaded polygons (simple shapes). Falcon also had one of the best campaign engines ever written, giving you the ability to manage an entire wing of aircraft in battle. The campaign tracked the number of weapons your wing had remaining, which meant if you wasted all of your advanced bombs, you would be left to go into combat with older, less capable munitions. You allocated your pilots to assorted strikes, and after a certain number of strikes, pilots would have to go into crew rest and be unavailable for a period of time. During the period you were flying missions, the world was going on around you. The skies were full of flights of B-52s, F-15s, MiGs and other aircraft, each on its assigned missions. The world did not revolve around you, much as war in the real world does not usually hinge on a single pilot's or squadron's action. Falcon spawned two other simulators, F-18 Hornet and MiG-29. Both were able to connect via network or modem, and missions could be played head-to-head. Falcon/MiG/Hornet was on the leading edge of the sims that could be played across the Internet. Th e IHHD engine was written by fans of Falcon to make it able to pass packets across 'Net. It was, for the first time, possible to fly your F-16 against a MiG-29 flown by a Russian pilot. The sim was the most intense of its time. Falcon went on to become the defacto standard in flight simulation for years.

Enter Microprose. In 1998, they released the much-anticipated sequel to Falco n 3.0, aptly named Falcon 4.0. The creative team, lead by Chief Creative Officer Louie "Chopstick" Gilman, released one of the most beautiful and realistic simulators ever.

As in Falcon3, you are an F-16 pilot in the midst of a war on the Korean peninsula. You a fly a variety missions, doing what you can to influence the outcome of the war. The sim is truly beautiful, framing one of the best simulation engines ever with a 3D world that is fairly realistic (though I haven't buzzed Seoul looking for Namsan Tower...yet.)

Falcon4, like Falcon3, runs two separate simulations. The flight simulator is the player interface. Around the flightsim is the war simulator, which manages the world beyond the bubble around the player and his aircraft. Objects and actions which are happening in the virtual world and not within this bubble (which is several miles in diameter) is managed by this campaign engine. As objects interact with the player's bubble, they are handed off to the simulation engine, and the player can interact directly with the object(s).

And like its predecessor, Falcon3, patches, add-ons and modules are available for Falcon4, including realism patches, a patch which will allow you to fly any fixed-wing aircraft in the sim, enemy or friendly (including the MiG-29 Flanker , the B-1B Lancer and the B-52 Stratofortress). Each aircraft has its own flight model, so the flight characteristics in the simulator are very much like its real-world counterpart.

Microprose has subsequently gone out of production on Falcon4, however, a number of coders have found many of the secrets of Falcon, and have begun to code patches and edits, all for free, with the sole intention of making the sim better.

This impromptu army of coders who modify the sim as a labor of love, have done a terrific job in immersing the sim pilot in the simulation. From the tunnelling of your vision as you black out from pulling Gs to the desperate calls of other flights engaged with the enemy sounding across your radios, the sim is completely engaging. Falcon 4 serves to push the suspension of disbelief concept of PC flightsims to new and higher levels.