So, I recently read "Fast Movers" by John Darrell Sherwood, a USN historian, this book is an oral history of the Vietnam air war. Specifically that of the jet pilots (hence the name - "Fast Movers"). Also in the past year I have read "Red Star Against The Swastika - The Story of a Soviet Pilot over the Eastern Front" an autobiography by Vasily Emelianenko, as well as countless other oral histories, memoirs, diaries and biographies. All of this feeds into my love of the sim.

You see, I read a book like "Fast Movers" and then have a compulsion to play Wings Over Vietnam, which is a lot of fun - but it lacks something. Its certainly not the most realistic of games. Its definately not the best looking. But it is very accessible, has a very large mod community and lets me use nukes on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Excessive? Maybe. Amusingly over-the-top? Definately. But, the game lacks a certain something - and its something that all sims lack. The visual acuity of the human eye.

Its the timeless saying, that the Mk1 Eyeball remains the most reliable sensor on any battlefield, and most sims try to assist you with this, giving you padlock options, targeting icons and any number of visual aids and guides to help you. But it still feels wrong. Its nearly impossible to visually ID a target at anything other than point blank range. And while this isn't wholly incorrect, it feels "wrong". There's no happy middle ground really. You can either have the visual aids turned on, which often makes it far too easy. Or you can have them turned off and never see a target because the graphics engine of these games and the scaling of ground units to air units is horribly skewed. The planes are made much larger than anything else to give an illusion of speed and, probably, to make air to air combat a lot easier for players.

But it makes players (like me) who love playing air-to-mud missions grumpy. Having to attack a tank that is minute compared to my plane is infuriating, because it breaks suspension of disbelief and because it makes my life VERY difficult.

Speaking of difficult, I would dearly love to get a TrackIR system - which would allow me much greater freedom in flying and looking around, but the cost is prohibitive at the moment. And this is where most sims fail to be easily playable - its too hard to maintain situational awareness. You either need to constantly be flipping from mouse to joystick, or using hatswitches, or keyboard shortcuts. The TrackIR is a joyous invention, but surely there is a way to make such actions easier to deal with. Don't get me wrong - I've become very proficient at the acquisition and tracking of targets, SAMS and AAMs in games using the variety of methods which I've mentioned, but surely there is some way to allow more seamless integration of the ground/air visual search mechanic into games.

I seem to recall one game which featured a "snap to padlock on SAM/AAM" button. This was one of the most useful buttons I've ever had the pleasure of using. As soon as you got the Missile Launch warning you could hit this button and see where the missile was launching from and begin maneuvring to avoid it. I like games that allow me to padlock any target - friendly, enemy, air, ground... But how about expanding the controls a little, so your thumbhat controls how alter your view around the target, rather than the cockpit, so pushing right would pan the view to the right of the target (and probably to the right in the cockpit too, but not the snap to 3 o'clock view which it is usually mapped to).

All of this lead me back to my original point (well not really, but that ramble had gone too far), and it was one that was highlighted for me last year while having a weekend away. While staying for a weekend in Launceston the Roulettes (the RAAF display team) was performing overhead. Now, with the Mk1 Eyeball I was able to clearly see the planes, and see enough detail that even if I didn't automatically know what they were (Pilatus PC-9s) I would have been able to make a VID based on colouration, patterns, design and, on nearer approaches, their markings. However, when I pulled out a digital camera to snap a picture, even on the highest resolution and bit-rate settings, the planes were little more than insignificant specs, a series of cruciform dark pixel blobs against the blue.

This lack of visual acuity in games is easily understood, after all, the human eye is not limited to 1280x1024. And the rendering requirements for the close-up LoD that the real world has is quite high. And game developers spend a great deal of time on their scaling LoD systems for a very good reason - to have this LoD at the kind of visual ranges that the eye can begin to pick up detail at is not only system-intensive, but its redundant, because there aren't enough pixels being pushed through to give you the resolution required. Its the same issue - what was easy for the human eye to see unmagnified, would be reduced to a few pixels arranged into an amorphous blob.

This is why, despite being a "hardcore" sim lover, I despise those who live in hoity-toity land and stare down their noses at people who use IFF-type icons in game. "Its not realistic" state the snobs. Well, its not realistic to have to guess from a handful of pixels what something is meant to be. Technlogy, thankfully keeps marching ever onwards and as resolutions and processing power increases we'll see more and more visual acuity in games.

Now - onto part 2 of my rambling rant on sim gaming. Multiplayer. I miss it. I miss good multiplayer. Too few games now allow for a multiplayer that is not "team based" or "adversarial" in nature. For all of its flaws, one of the greatest sims I've played was the hybrid of M1A2 Tank Platoon 2 and Gunship!, both from Microprose. Why? Because it allowed me to play a wonderful form of co-op. You could play as a helicopter pilot/gunner team with a friend, you could form multiple helicopter teams for scenarios. You could play with each person manning a helicopter individually and switching roles as needed. Then, there were the tanks. Each tank had multiple roles which could be played. And they existed in the same gamespace as the helicopters. Sure, 99 times out of 100 the tank would lose in any adversarial match, but that's where co-op became such fun. Being able to communicate tactics across air and ground forces was of course, difficult, but the rewards when a scenario was completed with no losses was well worth it.

Few games allow this kind of integration, especially in the sim genre. Aside from Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault, and to a much lesser extent the Battlefield games and Joint Operations - there haven't been any of these "cross genre" multiplayer games, at least, not that I'm aware of.

I'll be intrigued to see if Lock On will contain multiplayer capabilities with the upcoming Black Shark addon. To have a modern fast jet sim, with multiplay compatibility with an attack chopper sim will be great. But why can't we take it a step further?

Because it would be boring. That's why. Playing as a tank in the M1A2/Gunship games was fairly dreary, mainly because unless there was a massive AAA/SAM network, the gunships could sweep the map clean before you'd managed to get out of 2nd gear. And it takes a certain kind of gamer to enjoy the coordinated actions and reactions that a multi-levelled sim such as that brought to the fore.

But why not give me access to the 2nd seat in flight sims? I love playing Wild Weasel missions in any sim - so why not let me have a real backseater? Or why not let me play backseater to another pilot? Having a second pair of eyes and someone who can call targets, course corrections and manage intercepts and ECM would be a great help. Again, its that rewarding co-op experience that I crave. However its been a long time since a game delivered this in any more than the most token form.