Outside of multiplayer servers, none of the commercial combat simulators I know offer a true free flight mode. You get a wide choice.Īnd the final area I will mention is free flight. With FS, we get a huge selection of pre-built aircraft, with the potential for more to be added all the time both payware and freeware. If you fly in "real weather" like I do it adds another enemy to the game. The ability of FS (with a good weather add-on) to replicate real weather is a game changer. Real weather has always been a huge factor in military planning. It's true you can design missions that include adverse weather, but it's not dynamic or realistic. I think the reason is that so many are dedicated to multiplayer aerial dueling, and people who are into that just don't want the weather to get in the way. And there is the unlimited capacity to alter scenery to suit any particular local requirements - and with a huge base of products and utilities to help you do just that.Īs for weather, it's usually at best an afterthought in commercial combat simulators. With the ESP/FSX/P3D world of flight simulation (hereafter just "FS") there's only one map and you get it with the base package: the entire world. They have a revenue model that requires constant selling of new content, so they have no incentive to expand to a global scale, only to continue to sell (often for a premium price) more aircraft and maps and scenarios. They offer content only as it applies to that narrow focus.
They also are quite narrowly focused on an era and a location. I can only answer from my personal perspective.Īll the alternatives available (and I've tried most of them) are missing two elements I think are essential to realistic military flight operations: Global scope and realistic weather. Why does one want to have such a thing in the civilian world? What is the "market"? Anyone interested in shooting and being shot at already has at least one of these installed and play them. They were designed from the ground up to be combat flight sims, and therefore can do things we can never do in the FSX/Prepar3d world (for just one example damage modelling for aircraft and buildings.) They have great graphics and detailed aircraft with realistic flight models. Why work to create a combat simulation environment inside a flight sim that wasn't designed to support it? There are several highly detailed and realistic combat flight simulators out there already and have been for many years under constant development and improvement. This board here is the place to do that, and to communicate with us - the developers of FSCAI.Īlthough I've seldom heard it spoken or seen it written, I know a question prople who know what this project is about have to be asking: why bother? We hope you enjoy the "game changing" nature of FSCAI, and that you'll report back to us here with bugs or suggestions as the program develops. But right now during development we are making a separate stand-alone version available that can be installed on any FSX, FSX-SE, or Prepar3d system (including Prepar3D version 4).
We realize that some simulator pilots would like to use FSCAI for purposes outside of FSCaptain, and ultimately, when finished, it's intended for that purpose. (I won't tell you how it's used, but if you get too curious about the shady activities going in the the remote location you're assigned to fly to, you just might find out!) It's even used in the "Special Mission" scenario available in two stages from KOLM in the sample set of assignments. There, it provides intelligent opposition to the pilot/player in a hostile scenario. But even in its state now its first application is to support the Assignments/Missions environment of FSCaptain. In particular, the configuration of the FSCAI program gives weapons to objects, which they can then use to shoot at each other - or at you, the pilot. You can think of it as an offshoot of the more benign "living world" simulation. It's a separate program that adds "intelligence" to regular AI SimObjects in the simulated world so that they can function as combat units.
FSCAI: Flight Simulator Combat Artificial Intelligence FSX/P3DįSCAI stands for Flight Simulator Combat Artificial Intelligence.