Computer games are complicated things. Flight sims frequently even more so. For Flight Unlimited, Looking Glass Technologies went along with an idea of recent hiree Seamus Blackley, a particle physicist. He pictured an aerobatics simulator based on a computational fluid dynamics model. That is, he wanted to create a model where the air acted as a fluid affected by objects in it, producing something closer to the feeling of real flight than other similar games had been able to produce. Apparently he succeeded in this and the game allows for more complicated maneuvers.
I also got closer to the feeling of real flight from Flight Unlimited than previous rivals, but it doesn’t have anything to do with computational fluid dynamics versus Newtonian models versus whatever the ZX Spectrum was running. I am, when it comes to flight sims, a very simple thing, and Flight Unlimited makes allowances for me. After its welcoming interface in a room with arcade machines and a globe and model aeroplanes and a whiteboard, I went through some tutorials and slowly learned how to fly.
The first lesson is a matter of keeping the plane flying in a straight line, with on-screen diagrammatical aids and few buttons to press, and I still managed to crash into a mountain. This got noted into a log book with an encouraging tone for the bit of the lesson I had managed and an oops, and I was ready to go again. And I felt like I had some control over this plane, and could move it around how I wanted! After a while I went to the free flight, started off in the air, and enjoyed it for a bit before another crash. I’m not going to get to the most difficult maneuvers, but it doesn’t really push me to anyway.
Flight Unlimited doesn’t look as good as Flight Simulator; it doesn’t have a detailed model of Chicago to point out bits of to you. It doesn’t have the same kind of attempt to be all-encompassing and set up to be expandable to the whole world. Yet in simultaneously adding in (apparently) more sophisticated flight and giving all of the help and arrows possible to let someone new come in and actually get a grip on it, it offers something more valuable altogether.
The complications of satisfying such a wide range of players from particle-theorist-obsessives to total newbies are going to be an increasing theme. We move further and further away from games where anyone was assumed to be coming in new and with plenty of time and repetitive energy to work out what they were doing, where the total bafflement of an Armour-geddon would be fondly remembered by many players. People will be increasingly used to having all of the information at their fingertips, however complicated the thing they’re dealing with is. The different ways of dealing with this are going to be a whole lesson in themselves.
