by Mobius » Thu Nov 15, 2007 5:40 pm
Just a little interesting note about computing power needed for a flight simulator -
I am in Aerodynamics right now, and as part of the class, we just finished modeling a 2-D section of a wing profile on the computer. The way we modeled it involved finding the forces on different sections of the wing due to the airflow around the wing to give us a lift and drag per unit span term (like 50 lb of lift per 1 ft span of wing). Part of the project was to model the wing using first 10 different points along the wing profile, and working our way up to 1000 different points along the wing. When the model was run for the 10 different points, computer took ~5 seconds to generate a value for the lift per unit span. This model also gave a terrible approximation of the wing, with the airflow going in and out of the surface of the wing and other things that lead to a relatively poor model. We slowly worked our way up to a decent model of the wing that used 400 points along the wing to generate a lift term, and to do this, the computer took almost 15 minutes of just chugging away. Now, to model the entire flow over an aircraft, especially in changing flight conditions and configurations, would take hours if not days.
Now, I would imagine that with people's current views towards FSX, they would not be happy with a nearly perfect flight model and 1 frame per day. So, ACES had to simplify it a bit and use a simplified flight model. ACES could have stuck with the flight model from FS4 and saved a large chunk of resource usage, but people expect the flight characteristics in FS to be realistic and wouldn't be happy with a poor flight model and high FPS with all the graphics sliders all the way up. The same goes for every aspect of the sim. With improved visuals, flight models, sound, control, everything, you must devote more resources to creating those, so hardware must be built that can provide those resources. Right now, that hardware would amount to $8,000 worth of new computer parts, so it's really not feasible for anyone to do anything about it. An example of this is X-Plane. I can run X-Plane and it looks like FS8, but the flight model is great, and I get the same, if not fewer FPS than with FSX. So it's a trade-off.
Since the FS series is hugely popular, it is safe to assume that graphics play a major role in the flight sim that people choose to use. If it wasn't, this would be an X-Plane board, and everyone would be complaining about the awful visuals. People cannot expect to get FS9 performance in FSX, with their FS9 hardware. When has that ever been the case with any computer program? Never.
The bottom line to me is, be happy with what you have, because you might have nothing at all, and you can't expect anyone to make a perfect product, so weigh the good against the bad, instead of only seeing the bad.
