I tried - I really did !!

[Michael davies]

Exactly mate... I think I mentioned it here somewhere before, but can you imagine if they modeled all the ports in the world, and made a selection of ships, using the same engine as FS (I wouldn't think that would be too difficult) now imagine you could link the different sims together... I'll happily pay for a slice of that action.

There has been talk of such a thing post Acceleration, ie the ability to sail in boats, there is a reasonable ship sim around, problem is you cant develope for it, not payware or freeware, and so it will remain one of those boxes on the shelves that we, that know these sort of things, will look back in history and go ' there goes a wasted opportunity'

Quite a few of the ACEs FSx guys have moved over to the new Trainsim there developing, its going to usethe FSx game engine but will be choo choos, so there one step in the right direction, just cars and boats next, imagine driving down to the local habour, getting on a ferry, captaining ?,.... no should be piloting ?....hmmm l should know l work with the blessed things all day !,.... the ferry to the other dock and driving off to the local airfield, or walk to the station and drive the metro to the local airport and just for fun, fly back home, it'll happen one day l'm sure, but boy, l wouldnt want to develope for it LOL.

Re FSx a stepping stone, l sincerely believe so too, l also think its good to step outside the loop and come back later refreshed, year in year out of FS can leave one rather stale and jaded, l tend to hop between plane and train sim on a cyclic basis, the only problem with that is you can loose touch or more often than not, end up spinning too many plates.

Best

Michael

[Tweek]

People complain about the performance of FSX, but can you imagine the nightmare of having an all-in-one sim?!

It's all well and good having super detailed scenery for when you're on the ground (lets face it, who'd want to drive around the crappy trees and buildings we get, that only look good from a couple of thousand feet up?), but once you take to the skies, you'd have to start counting in Pixels Per Second.

Not to mention the amount of hard drive space the global scenery library would take up. :o

[TSR2]

Not too much of an issue in the open sea's though... I quite fancy captaining a ship. Warp speed Mr. Soulu

[Pielstick]

A ship simulator eh?

Here's an idea for a perfectly good ship simulator (from an engineer's perspective at least) that should work pretty well. First of all you will need to add several large consoles in your basement with lots of dials, controls and computer displays. Add some big speakers with lots of bass and pump engine noise into the basement. You should also install a main broadcast system with a speaker right outside your bedroom door. If you want to go the whole hog you can also rig up some kind of vibration device that makes your basement continually shake. You can also add some heaters to the basement so the temperature is always somewhere between 30 and 40 degrees (in fact crank it right up to 50 degrees for your simulated voyages to the Gulf) Next up, set your alarm clock for 2330, put a boiler suit on and go down to your basement at 2345. Sit down there for four hours watching the dials and controls, read a newspaper and have a moan about how stupid the mates on the bridge are. Once an hour or so have a wander into your garage and start pulling bits off your car engine or lawnmower engine. You could spice things up with a few alarms and the odd failure. At 0400 head back up to bed and set your alarm for 1100. Make sure you have a family member to make a totally pointless broadcast when you are sleeping, in fact get them to do it several times a day. Go for your lunch at 1130 (make sure its undercooked and no effort or pride at all has gone into preparing the food). Get back down in your basement by 1145, sit down there until 1600, then get yourself back up to bed again. Wake up at around 1800, get showered and dressed in your uniform, go and have dinner (make sure your wife/girlfriend/children serve you the food, and there is a photo of the Queen and the Greek idiot on the wall next to you). Go back to your room, watch a DVD, and then get yourself back down in the basement again by 2345. Repeat for 4 months, and every once in a while get your kids to rock the chair back and forth for a few days at a time.

If you can find some other ship simulator enthusiasts who are interested in a multiplayer experience get them round, dress them up in a uniform and get them to parade around on the top floor of your house like a bunch of tossers with an overinflated sense of self importance, give them binoculars and let them look out the window

Seriously though, the MSFS engine would make a pretty poor ship simulator for one simple reason - the sea is always dead calm!

[DaveB]

You have some very valid comments there Pielstick

An all-in-one sim as described/wished for dawns a new type of anorak not yet seen and one that not even Intel's 256-core could possibly accommodate It's a laugh and a giggle but I can't see it ever happening in my budget ;-) This really IS the 'science fiction' talked of in the 60's whereby in the year 2000, we'd all be on a 3-day week with computers doing all the work enabling us 4 days of leisure time

No. First-person shoot-em-ups are SO good, as with driving-type/ship-type sims in that they only deal with a very small area at a time and thus the amount of detail can be increased and the user is rewarded with almost 'real-time' movement in a 'real-world' environment.

Don't think my XP3200 will get there somehow, although it does run Call of Duty, FS9 and ShipSim 2008 very nicely in separate chunks ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

[Nigel H-J]

Well, I can't think of anything more boring than being on a bridge of a ship looking out at a featureless horizon with absolutely nothing around you to take away the boredom apart for instance, a couple of iceberges if you happen to be within the Arctic Circle or even perhaps the odd seagull when approaching land.

Can you imagine on real time taking a fourteen day cruise to idylic settings in the Med and when you get to the first port of call after spending three looooong days behind the wheel a message appears on the screen..........Ship run aground.........Restarting!!!......AAAARGH!!! :brick:

Nigel.

[Tweek]

Well, I can't think of anything more boring than being on a bridge of a ship looking out at a featureless horizon with absolutely nothing around you to take away the boredom apart for instance, a couple of iceberges if you happen to be within the Arctic Circle or even perhaps the odd seagull when approaching land.

About as bad as a transatlantic flight in a 747.

[JimCooper]

If you can find some other ship simulator enthusiasts who are interested in a multiplayer experience get them round, dress them up in a uniform and get them to parade around on the top floor of your house like a bunch of tossers with an overinflated sense of self importance, give them binoculars and let them look out the window

And once every 4 weeks you 'Run Ashore', get hopelessly drunk, have a fight, get another tattoo, hook up with a woman/bloke/transvestite and catch an exotic disease.

Regards

Jim

[Nigel H-J]

And once every 4 weeks you 'Run Ashore', get hopelessly drunk, have a fight, get another tattoo, hook up with a woman/bloke/transvestite and catch an exotic disease

Of course you could always ajust the realism settings for the last entry!!

[JimCooper]

If you can find some other ship simulator enthusiasts who are interested in a multiplayer experience get them round, dress them up in a uniform and get them to parade around on the top floor of your house like a bunch of tossers with an overinflated sense of self importance, give them binoculars and let them look out the window

OFFTOPIC
Which reminds me earlier this year I bumped into a Royal Navy Commander I had the misfortune of having to work with in the past...so I said politely "Hello Sir, how are you?" to which he replied "I retired from the RN last month, you can call me Richard" so I replied "OH?, OK Richard, but I always thought of you as a DICK! "

Regards

Jim