Just Flight & Just Trains blogs

Water, water everywhere but….

Water, water everywhere (in sims/’games’) but….do we really want any (more effects)? There seems to be a (irrational and misguided in my mind) fixation of sim and games developers to think that water has to have some kind elevated status in these programs and that is what we the simmers actually want above many other things.

A recent public blog from a large flight sim developer/publisher said: “Given the globe is 70 percent water or more - water enhancements still make sense.”
 
Sorry I disagree. How many simmers fly over water a lot of the time and how many sufficiently low down to see the effects? Just because it covers 70% of the globe, does not mean that 70% of the time we fly over it – I think that is flawed logic, if that is the logic of course! I would make a decent sized bet that the majority of sim flights are over land and not over large tracts of water. 

Forget making the water better, its good enough already, please address the aviation aspects first and then when those are tidied up a bit more the yes by all means go back to the sea/water. I would think that the vast majority of simmers would say that, yes, water must look like water and in a ship sim it must interact like water with the ship/boat of course, but in a flight sim as long as it looks ok then I am happy, I.E. they can see some kind of movement and that the colour of the sea off the end of Brighton pier is dark grey/brown and not bright blue from the Pacific then they are pretty happy, but these days it seems that the aviation side seems to have slipped down the priority list a bit to allow development time to give even more realistic looking water more headway. Well thanks for that effort but personally I think the priorities here are wrong and the whole reason d’être of a flight sim is being missed in this particular case.  Yes fantastic to see the wispy white tops of the waves as the wind speed increases, but frankly I would rather see uneven runway surfaces, improved Ai operations and regional accents for the ATC system given priority over the purely eye candy that only improved water effects are. Those three suggestions alone (and I am not for one moment saying they would be easy or quick to do, nor am I saying that better water is easy to do either), would make the whole sim a more realistic experience for a lot of people then an improved water display system.

Yes, now I very much know that eye candy sells products and without sales there will be no products but products must have more depth than that kind of candy, so yes add the eye candy but also address the other more serious/in depth aviation aspects as well please.

I have looked at screen shots from several new flight/ship/train sims/games recently and the water looks – well frankly, not real – so massively reflective it actually takes away from the flying; “lousy landing shame you trashed the aircraft – yes but the water looked lovely on approach”. For me it seems that developers are using graphics technology to get these effects not because they are more real (not in my mind anyway) but for the sake that they are now ‘doable’ with the latest graphics drivers, cards and DX10 that are now on offer. I am convinced that in the future this ‘water period’ will be looked down upon as a ‘bum steer’ and that sense will prevail and that ‘proper looking, but realistic’ water will make a comeback and that ‘shinny water everywhere’ was seen as a wrong path – let’s get back to basics in flight sim, and that is a more realistic yet flying experience.

Till the next time.

Keep safe,

Scotty.