What Has Happened To The Future Of Combat Flight Sims?

C

casey jones

Charter Member
CFS2 has been around for years and is still as popular today as when it first came out 10 yrs ago. But with the release of other Combat Flight Sims in the past years such as IL-2, OFF, there has been no new releases. I can remmenber in 1997 there were all kinds of Combat Flight sims being made such as modern, WW1, WWII franches....I recall Red Baron 3D was very popular, and CFS1 was big...now all have disappeared.


Cheers

Casey
 
Reply...

Casey,

This answer is complex, but I believe that the root of it lies with us, in a sense. Third-party development for combat flight sims has allowed CFS2 and CFS3 to expand well beyond their initial intended audiences. CFS2 has been expanded into virtually every CFS2 theatre, not to mention Korea, WWI, and Vietnam, and CFS3 has done the same.

Accordingly, we have become in a perverse sense victims of our own success. Sims like IL-2, though not impossible, are much tougher to keep alive because much of the development is software-based, and developing third-party add-ons becomes that much tougher. Additionally, CFS2 and CFS3 do not require a high-end computer to run, increasing their respective audiences.

Lastly, the Mission Builder feature of CFS2 allows those who get familiar with to have virtually endless ways to keep adding to the sim; all you need is a vision and a modicum of skill. This is in addition to the other add-ons, including aircraft, guns, and the shining examples of Malta, Gibraltar, Pantelleria, and many of MaskRider's Pacific airfields, to name a few.

CFS2 and CFS3 provide their users with many ways to keep the game alive and kicking. I do think that CFS1 may have been a bit too primitive to be sustainable long term, CFS2 really picked up where CFS1 left off and ran with it.

Did you really think that Microsoft ever envisioned that we'd come this far, nearly eleven years after the fact? I don't, and I love it!
 
"...CFS2 and CFS3 provide their users with many ways to keep the game alive and kicking. I do think that CFS1 may have been a bit too primitive to be sustainable long term, CFS2 really picked up where CFS1 left off and ran with it.

Did you really think that Microsoft ever envisioned that we'd come this far, nearly eleven years after the fact? I don't, and I love it! "

I wholeheartedly agree with what he wrote. :salute:
 
A wish of mine for cfs2 is if we can correct some dlls that seem to work incorrectly,like rain and snow buttons, Have never been able to go from rain to snow.I wish we could have weather like fs2004.If we could get programers onboard what a sim this could be.I hope the knowledge for this sim never wanes.It got better over the last few years, I hope it does not run out of aviation fuel.
 
Amen to that Rami. After building a $3000 ++ sit-in-simpit designed originally around CFS 1 and 2 I'd hate to see them disappear!! SOH has given this thing thousands of more hours of flight time to look forward to.
 
CFS2 is still a great game for all combat flight simmers, and I agree it’s in some way simple to create add-ons for it. The only thing I liked to see would be a combination of cfs2 and fs2004,that would run smoothly on today’s PC’s.
 
Yea, it's sad CFS3 strayed so far from the path. If they would have stayed the course I think your idea of CFS2 + FS2004 would have been the result, or something very close to it.
 
Besides the aforementioned dynamics of the individual game packages themselves, market evolution plays a major part in the development strategies of game designers. The faithful users stay the course and just bounce from one combat sim to another as the community sustains itself with upgrades and add-ons. This is the driving force that keeps the niche alive. But most CFS players just move on to other interest they're willing to pay for. Consequently, game designers move with them in developing new games and sims in other genres. This is mutual attrition -- the users "bug out" and so do the developers, leading to an general decline in the market.

To the CFS faithful, this is a freeware hobby. Most of us are old enough to affectionately remember the vintage prop planes and early jets. But as we get older and the next gen steps up to combat flight simming, they want less props and more modern jet action. The developers are in this to make money and rightly so. But if the vintage CFS community is shrinking due to attrition, there's no money to be made and no foreseeable future for a developer to bank on. While we stare wide-eyed, gripping our joysticks, at screens filled with virtual WW1 and WW2 combat, the developers are staring at market analytics. And the numbers just don't favor vintage CFS development in this present economic climate.

What we need is a BIG player with very deep pockets or money to burn, a large set of stones and a near total disregard for market research who will be willing to risk packaging the next-generation vintage combat sim for a declining market niche. Until we get that...
 
To the CFS faithful, this is a freeware hobby.
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Also, keep in mind that much of the development funding for "gaming" is now earmarked for console programming, PC versions are derived from that. No doubt that a tremendous flight simulator could be made for the XBox or Playstation, but most of the interest(and money) is elsewhere; first person shooter games like Call Of Duty and Halo. Many of the people playing(or developing) these games have never seen an airplane with a propeller.
The attraction of CFS2 is similar to other open source foundations, like Linux is to computer enthusiasts, much of the fun is fooling around with the programming instead of actually using it. I would be surprised if Microsoft ever releases the CFS2 code as open source material, they just don't do that kind of thing, but if they knew there was no more money to be made, they might do it as a PR move.
CFS2 will always be around as long as there are people who use it.
 
Yea, it's sad CFS3 strayed so far from the path. If they would have stayed the course I think your idea of CFS2 + FS2004 would have been the result, or something very close to it.
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CFS2 + FS2004 could been done a success,a cfs2+autogen at least to get trees and houses, that was waited by the simmers but Cfs3 seemed to be done like Il2/fb in a closed map ,leaving the world map and btw the "no limit" spirit of the previous fs/cfs series.

JP


JP
 
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