Obiter vs Reentry

IDNeon

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It seems to me that you are mixing "immersion" and "realism". Those are different things. Immersion is subjective and has to do with human feelings and emotions, realism is objective and has to do with cold rows and lines of figures. Its like Art against Science. I think both are good, but they are not about the same thing and have their own definition of the "Truth".
I'm aware of that. I suppose what I am most curious about is how real either are.

Immersion is great. Seems those are nailed down by both parties
 

N_Molson

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I suppose what I am most curious about is how real either are.

You want someone to tell you that immersion might eventually be less realistic than realism ? Err...
 

IDNeon

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You want someone to tell you that immersion might eventually be less realistic than realism ? Err...
No, I want to know how truthful to reality it really is. Like how any other simulators are evaluated. What is their fidelity?
 

N_Molson

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What is their fidelity?

That's better, at this point words have weight.

OK so what you need to do is to establish some kind of theorical benchmark, with a set of objective criterias to rate what you want by those criterias.
 

Urwumpe

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That's better, at this point words have weight.

OK so what you need to do is to establish some kind of theorical benchmark, with a set of objective criterias to rate what you want by those criterias.

I remember that Orbiter pretty much nailed the LROC mission back then, with merely <500m difference from the real data sets.
 

GLS

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No, I want to know how truthful to reality it really is. Like how any other simulators are evaluated. What is their fidelity?
I don't remember who the user was (the thread should be somewhere in the forum), but an Earth-Mars trajectory was simulated with Orbiter, and after 9 months of travel the arrival time was within 40 seconds of the software that NASA uses to get their real probes to the real Mars, so I'd say that classifies the physics in Orbiter as "more than good enough". As for what is done with those physics, it's up to the user.
 

Sbb1413

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But story aside, basic question above, which simulator actually offers the most immersive simulation? And how to achieve it (if Obiter requires a bunch of mods etc can someone list what they think is needed?)
Orbiter does not "require" mods (we call them "add-ons" to distinguish with the KSP mods). However, D3D9 and the Orbiter Sound are so much used that they are "essential" to play the simulation.
You may look for other add-ons in Orbit Hangar, if necessary.
Versus a flight simulator where you're trying to simulate an atmosphere that's very dynamic and how it should affect your surfaces changes very rapidly.

I suppose the king of those problems would be the Shuttle itself, having to actually fly through an atmosphere at the last leg of its reentry.
Orbiter is a combination of space sim and flight sim, according to my experience. You can use Delta Glider (a spaceplane in Orbiter) to fly in both air and space. If you practice landing from space by using Delta Glider, you can probably land the Space Shuttle without problems. Of course, the only difference is that you can accelerate the Glider in air if you are offshoot, which you can't in the Shuttle.
 
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N_Molson

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the Orbiter Sound are so much used that they are "essential" to play the simulation.

I use XRSound and have only good things to say about it, even managed to implement custom sounds for an add-on .dll project as it comes with a library ;)

Also, the author (dbeachy) is one of our forum administrators :cheers:
 

Sbb1413

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The fact is we don't have a lot of aircrafts working with 2016, which is a pity. I remember someone did a whole lot of jets for 2006 and even if the flight models were simple, it was quite cool.
I would like to create a list of real-life aircraft add-ons working with 2016.
It seems to me that you are mixing "immersion" and "realism". Those are different things. Immersion is subjective and has to do with human feelings and emotions, realism is objective and has to do with cold rows and lines of figures. Its like Art against Science. I think both are good, but they are not about the same thing and have their own definition of the "Truth".
I generally like to live and die with science, and don't care much about aesthetics. Therefore, immersion is better than realism IMO.
 

Face

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I would like to create a list of real-life aircraft add-ons working with 2016.

I generally like to live and die with science, and don't care much about aesthetics. Therefore, immersion is better than realism IMO.
I think you either made a mistake in your last sentence, or you did not understand what N_Molson wrote.
 

N_Molson

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My fault as well, I can understand that those philosophical concepts quite specific to the Western European "post Age of Enlightenment context" may sound a bit weird from India. The whole concept of aesthetics, is AFAIK, a german thing (A. G. Baumgarten, Prussia). To be honest most of my philosophical knowledge comes from German (especially German-Prussians, it was a real intellectual boiling cradle at some point, Kant, Hegel, all are from there !), French and English authors, and some Americans for the 20th century. I clearly remember fellow students saying to teachers it was a bit sad we have nothing on Indian, Chinese or African philosophy, all having ancient, after all more ancient cultures than Europe. This is the way things works nowadays in France, not sure about the rest of Western Europe. I'd stay we're intellectually still in a very "XIXth century" spirit.
 

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I think you either made a mistake in your last sentence, or you did not understand what N_Molson wrote.
You're right. I don't quite understand what the "Art against Science" means. I thought it means that realism is like unscientific aesthetics.
 

N_Molson

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Yeah, the idea was more "imagination, romantism, illusion" are one side of the thing, the "creative" way of seeing thing ; that's where I'd put "immersion" because immersion is something you feel, like love or despair, with your emotions.

Typical example are Box Office action movies. Realist ? Really not, I mean flying people defying gravity and throwing fireballs at each other... Starfighters behaving like WW2 warbirds... That's not reality. But visually attractive, very entertaining, and simply put "fun" ? Immersive ? Yes indeed, it works because at some point you put a part of yourself in the characters shoes. The ancient Greek tragedies or the even more ancient traditional live artforms you have in Asia all work on that idea : you invest that emotive part of yourself into the play. That's what I call immersion. In those antique plays everything about human feelings and passion is a lot exagerated, and Hollywood action movies took that to another level thanks to technology. Next step ? VR, and a VR that will be more "V" than "R". If we have the opportunity to start another life in a virtual world, do we want to be subject to the same (boring) laws of physics ? Clearly no. We want superpowers, nothing less, we want to be the overlords in our own universes.

On the other side you have "logic, math, science" much more rationalist way of seeing things, all about depicting things in form of theorems and figures. Very accurate but often not very funny. But that's the only reliable way we have to build knowledge that describes the Universe in which we live. You can add religion there, in the end it doesn't change the big picture, still you have a way to explain the Universe, that's good as long as you manage the science-religion relationship, that can be even be something personal (as long as you don't publicly throw "You're wrong I'm right, the Earth shall be Flat !!" at Newton's face, very fine, it works). That where I'd put realism.

And Orbiter is designed in such a way you can really strip the whole Graphic Client thing and decide to make a "command-line engine". Realism will still be as good, it might even be more accurate because your FPS count is going to be insane, which opens the possibility of creating very complex interactions. I think this is the kind of sim they have in universities or laboratories : they enter command-line parameters or use a very basic UI for that and monitor the flow of output values. Immersion will be... not so good.

"Simulators", in the context of videogaming world, are caught right in-between, and that's a delicate situation. Say this is a big Windows GUI slider between "Art" and "Science". If you and I decide to start a new space sim (as a commercial project) and look for a dev team we need as much artists, for everything from 3D models to textures to cool landscapes ideas and inspiring background, than coders and "good-at-maths" people that will crunch as much real-life data as possible into our sim.

I'd say Orbiter stays more on the science side (Doc. Martin Schweiger is a real life scientist), something like KSP leans a bit more on the art side (it allows so much creativity) while still simulating a lot of "general physics" (and was very successful doing so, also made possible by the Unity game engine package that was a new thing). Maybe one day we'll have the best of both worlds but I'm not so sure, because... people really are more likely to use their free time with action movies than with maths problems. The users of this forum myself included being probably quite an unique species ?
 
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