by curt » Wed Nov 15, 2017 2:33 pm
I've always thought we could at least export the flight path and orientations to the fancy hollywood render farm, but maybe that's not exciting enough either. Reminds me of a story one of the original flightgear founding consultants shared once. I'll probably get all the details wrong, but let me try to remember it. This one dutiful flight simulation engineer (let's call him Steve) worked on a boring high end military training sim. One day management decided the sim needed to become more exciting so it could potentially be marketed to the entertainment industry. So they brought in a 'fun' consultant. This consultant evaluated the sim and immediately determined all the enemy planes were too small. They needed to at least double in size. So ... ok, Steve and his team did their duty and doubled the model size of all enemy aircraft. The consultant came back to check on their work and said, yes, yes, this is a good start, but now it feels like the airplanes are moving too slow for their size, we need to double their airspeed. So the team set off to work on doubling the airspeed for all the enemy planes. The consultant came back again to check on their work ... and blew a gasket when he discovered the team and undone all his recommended changes. Well Steve and team defended themselves and explained that by doubling the speed of the aircraft, they now moved twice as far away, and looked the same size as before, and I'm sure they added a comment on how entertaining the whole process had been. Finally in the end, the 'fun' consultant got the boot, and the dev team altered the AI rules for enemy planes to encourage them to fly closer in.
I like this story because it is a 'fun' analogy that you don't always get what you intended when you start making changes to things. Often you discover there's a little more going on than you thought ... but if you can turn that into a learning process then it's all good.
Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics
University of Minnesota