This game vs Armored Warfare

[iamfritz]

On 2/7/2024 at 8:56 PM, Captain_Colossus said:

and so i will add, and this not meant to discredit the idea that substance does matter, but what i am saying is that graphics do matter, and it is largely subconscious that they matter, you do not have a choice of it. if you were not born blind, your brain is attempting to map the world around you by estimating what it thinks is out there based on the information coming in through your eyes- therefore the external world you believe that you see is an experience inside your skull. your mental map of what is 'out there' is inside your brain. and what you see is your brain attempting to make sense of the world visually, combined with your sense of hearing and smell and balance and other tactile simulation.

 

i had not played many computer games or simulations outside of steel beasts for the last 20+ years. as such i did not realize how far computer games graphics had come since then, because i had not been paying that much attention.

 

then i played dcs and skyrim for the first time and i was quite astonished what i was seeing.

 

flight sims without special cockpit simulators cannot replicate g effects and the feel of the aircraft and the feel of wind currents buffeting and things like this to really get an appreciation of what real flying is like- however what i saw in dcs and microsoft flight simulator comes as close as they can just with graphics techniques however they are doing that- without the aforementioned aids in the real world to orient your sense of movement in the environment that you would have in real life- nevertheless say what you will about the simulation or whether it is fun or not, i found how far they come with a sense of scale and distance which i never saw before. take the water in the below screenshots- you intuitively sense how close or how far away it is visually at different altitudes and distances- whether it is the lighting or texture results or rendering techniques at far distances or whatever it is- it looks like real water at the distances and altitudes they are trying to represent. this is much different than i remember where in the past the water really looked the same at any distance but for perhaps at a few simulated meters distance from the ground level, you may see some pixels or a few lines flash by to try to give the impression of the surface beneath the player's point of view.

 

so this is not to put steel beasts down at all, because i will argue that the steel beasts terrain engine has improved and come far so that there is more plausible representations of an actual environment than what tank sims used to be doing.20 or 30 years ago. just look at m1 tank platoon 1 and compare it with any game which is released now and see immediately how utterly artificial those environments were and therefore could not generate results that would look anything like reality

 

 

Curious thing I have discovered about myself, and a few other long-time simmers agree: I have been flying sim planes since MSFS 1, and tanking since Spectrum Holobyte's TANK. And now that graphics are a dry eye away from absolutely lifelike.... I don't like them. I am fine with near-realistic appearance. Let my imagination -developed over 50 years of gaming- do the rest or I can't get into it.

 

[Captain_Colossus]

3 hours ago, iamfritz said:

Curious thing I have discovered about myself, and a few other long-time simmers agree: I have been flying sim planes since MSFS 1, and tanking since Spectrum Holobyte's TANK. And now that graphics are a dry eye away from absolutely lifelike.... I don't like them. I am fine with near-realistic appearance. Let my imagination -developed over 50 years of gaming- do the rest or I can't get into it.

 

 

i think that a lot of games are just boring as hell whether they are visually attractive or not. i give the example of mechawarrior on the pc. all iterations of this game are boring to me. the gameplay remained the same boring, and shallow experience because the actual engine was so shallow- the combat is akin to repeating the same thing over and over again, circling an opponent at close range with the fire button held down until one of you dies first. usually killing the leg is is best way to achieve that. walk around the map, repeat this over and over. ironically the tabletop 2D sets have more drama with rolling dice than that. call of duty and those kinds of games- really just interactive movies on rails. over the years the graphics improve, but i wouldn't know because the very first one was boring. i honestly cannot understand what people get out of that. but people enjoy it, different strokes and this sort of thing.

 

i think it is a misdiagnosis to say that graphics = bad for quality experience or something. i think there is a lot of a strange nostalgia effect and maybe some other kind of phenomenon where primitive games forced players to use their imaginations and maybe constructed or projected their imaginations onto them. As we go along, of course the new technology that people used to want eventually becomes familiar and it becomes not interesting as it once was. kids today are comfortable with and exposed to technologies that kids 40 years ago would have been astonished to see. but kids today aren't as impressed because it looks normal to them.

 

there is a retro style that some developers have brought back -- essentially new simulator games using 1990s graphics, and i have no interest in returning to those. they were acceptable in the 1990s, but i have no interest in them now. in general that technology is obsolete not even from a graphics standpoint, but the standpoint of such primitive looking environments are limited in their function as well.

 

 

i think also just as species we are becoming over-stimulated. all this stuff and technology and advertising if you are constantly plugged in to the internet, to television or to some kind of stimulation is doing something weird to attention spans.

 

about a year and a half ago i saw some program which i knew was popular and i thought society had lost its mind. this is what i mean.

 

 

 

Edited April 8 by Captain_Colossus

[iamfritz]

Wut.

OK, good example of over stimulation.

 

That being said... I love commanding tank platoons and F-15 flights. I recently switched from DCS/FC3 to BMS because of this: the BMS F-15C is full fidelity. I have to work the radios, radar modes, flight members, and intercept realistic foes that use tactics and maneuvers that the books say they do and accurately. I don't want "you are there" graphics, but I do want to feel the experience, from the "Gotcha now" to "Oh sh^4!". I want it to be realistic enough for that.
Something in me is also saying, "If I can't hear the crunching metal or fortissimo ringing in the ears after taking a hit, or feel the shockwave go through me as the main gun fires or the missile clunks off the rail, what's the point of total graphical immersion?"

Edited April 8 by iamfritz

[Captain_Colossus]

and so i think it all comes together as a whole. if you are not interested in the subject matter, the graphics will not really matter either.

 

this video popped in my news feed of some new helicopter combat simulator using the older representation of late 1980s c:\ prompt technology when we might mess with autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

 

i do not really understand why anyone would go back to this except out of a  sense of nostalgia, since the environments are so artificial. you might get away with this with a flight simulator depicting operations

in a desert environment, which is still a major concession to reality, but it works even less with ground based representations of anything. ground combat / tactical FPS ego shooters always trailed their flight sim peers in terms in results, since the technology was primitive but at least facilitated generating environments from empty sky more plausible than the information content necessary from a ground level perspective. i can find no examples prior to the late 1990s where this started coming together to produce more natural looking, functional environments. sometimes the original m1 tank platoon is held up as some kind of gold standard, but again, this was always a very primitive representation of armored combat with modern forces in europe in the 1980s because the technology was so bare. but it is all there was. cutting edge for its time, but i would never go back to that.

 

 

 

 

 

[Maj.Hans]

On 4/7/2024 at 10:14 PM, Captain_Colossus said:

there is a retro style that some developers have brought back -- essentially new simulator games using 1990s graphics, and i have no interest in returning to those. they were acceptable in the 1990s, but i have no interest in them now. in general that technology is obsolete not even from a graphics standpoint, but the standpoint of such primitive looking environments are limited in their function as well.

 

I have no problem whatsoever playing games with the 1990s style graphics look, IF it's because it was a game MADE in the 1990s!
If I want to play a sim with those graphics I'll fire up DOS-Box, get a nice cup of coffee, and start up Falcon 3.0, Fleet Defender, Aces of the Deep, or LHX, put the difficulty on low, and enjoy a chill day of retro gaming.

 

If anything I think my complaint about the direction of sims these days is that they seem to be splitting into "easy" and "hard" branches with little to no overlap.

I took a look at DCS World but elected not to drop the coins on it because I figured that it would bring more frustration than satisfaction.  I don't have a problem with realistic flight models, realistic weapon and radar modeling, etc.  What's a problem for me is that I do not want to have to take the time to learn each and every aircraft's clickable cockpit and/or memorize keybinds for each and every clickable switch in there just to fly the jet.

 

So I'm left with choices like playing Falcon 4.0 or it's updated versions, with their great dynamic campaign but flight models that are somewhat lacking for everything that's not an F-16, playing the Strike Fighters 1/2 (Wings Over Vietnam/Europe/Israel/North Atlantic) series where everything has it's own unique but simplified flight model and where I'm essentially always stuck on easy mode, or learning to the same skill level as a real pilot so I can shell out thousands of dollars to play DCS and act superior to everyone else because there aren't any difficulty options.

 

What happened to making a product that could allow you to work your way up to the high realism settings?

[Captain_Colossus]

6 hours ago, Maj.Hans said:

I have no problem whatsoever playing games with the 1990s style graphics look, IF it's because it was a game MADE in the 1990s!
If I want to play a sim with those graphics I'll fire up DOS-Box, get a nice cup of coffee, and start up Falcon 3.0, Fleet Defender, Aces of the Deep, or LHX, put the difficulty on low, and enjoy a chill day of retro gaming.

 

If anything I think my complaint about the direction of sims these days is that they seem to be splitting into "easy" and "hard" branches with little to no overlap.

I took a look at DCS World but elected not to drop the coins on it because I figured that it would bring more frustration than satisfaction.  I don't have a problem with realistic flight models, realistic weapon and radar modeling, etc.  What's a problem for me is that I do not want to have to take the time to learn each and every aircraft's clickable cockpit and/or memorize keybinds for each and every clickable switch in there just to fly the jet.

 

So I'm left with choices like playing Falcon 4.0 or it's updated versions, with their great dynamic campaign but flight models that are somewhat lacking for everything that's not an F-16, playing the Strike Fighters 1/2 (Wings Over Vietnam/Europe/Israel/North Atlantic) series where everything has it's own unique but simplified flight model and where I'm essentially always stuck on easy mode, or learning to the same skill level as a real pilot so I can shell out thousands of dollars to play DCS and act superior to everyone else because there aren't any difficulty options.

 

What happened to making a product that could allow you to work your way up to the high realism settings?

 

 

there is a market for these games - and there is a market for armored warfare and world of tanks and so on. you often see a criticism of one but not the other, since

they each have their respective audience, and may times either one does not abide the other i.e., users of DOS era software think that armored warfare players are squares or something, and vice versa. i do not relate to either case, but it is there.

 

i think it is a misdiagnosis to come up with the theory that the graphics are mostly unrelated to the experience, which is false. if that were true, there would be no difference in experience in what you see in the below screenshots- they all imply the same experience, even though you can clearly see the progress in technology, even though the higher resolution and more detailed environment will generate very different simulation results and user behaviors. somewhere there is the idea that it makes no difference and graphics are unrelated to either to fidelity or entertainment. that said, there are users who love the older tech for whatever reason- which i do not deny.

 

 

 

 

 

[SippyCup]

I like 2 kinds of graphics: Very high fidelity, or very muddy and pixelated; one has detail, the other lets your brain fill in the gaps to create your own. It's the in-between games that I don't like, as they look sterile and there is no room for your imagination. For example, I love Jane's Longbow in software mode but think it's incredibly boring and ugly in Glide mode when it is glaringly obvious that there is nothing but a flat texture below you. The shaky, shimmery pixels of software mode at least hint at something being there. One game that gets away with looking good in Glide is M1 Tank Platoon II, in the desert at least... because it's a desert, and tanks are made up mostly of flat faces. Nothing really needs to be hidden.

[iamfritz]

No kidding about the difficulty levels. DCS, BMS Falcon, Arma 3, etc. there is no easy level. There's die sooner or right now modes. That's one of the many higher qualities of SB Pro PE is you can dumb AI units down to inept. Back in the 1990s armor, flight and other sims had an easy, medium and hard level. Tank Platoon I and II had this. Falcon 1-4 had this. Steel Beasts and Steel Beasts Pro PE do this.
Two points about this:

1) Easy modes shorten the learning curve, learning the buttons faster easier better.
2) In actual combat, enemies goof up. Some armies are inept (cough cough Iraq 1991-2003), frigate captains go to the can during a cruise missile attack, Naval surface action group commanders retreat into flanking enemy fleets, etc. Then there's bad luck and the fog of war (not everyone has massive intel drone forces). Having an easy enemy simulates this well.

[ripper253]

Apex is the best game guys) Who hasn't played, try it right now, recommend.

 

I regularly play in the evenings with friends. Recently a friend found the apex hack, so we get through the harder levels without any problems)

 

 

Edited November 29 by ripper253

[Ssnake]

Okay, this is the kind of posts I do not wish to read on this site. If we wanted plain advertising we could just as well accept banner ads. I don't mind SB Pro to be compared to other games here. I don't mind other games being discussed without SB Pro being mentioned. But random posts in random threads advertising some random game - stop that.