From a gaming point of view, Orbiter is evolving from pure simulator to a "sandbox" style game where you have lots of freedom of movement. We don't have NPCs or opponents but this issued I see is being addressed.
yeah, as i mentioned i see this happening as well, not in the orbiter core of course, but through the 3rd party addons... I did briefly discuss this with doug, how cool it would be but of course it would be tons of work.
You can already see the seeds of this with the simple combat addon and orbinomics. The real challenge would seem to be either getting online functionality or AI opponents. Thinking back many years to Frontier - the sequel to elite, ships could be generated to fly from planet to planet, they were shockingly dumb at times, flying into the ground occasionally but it worked well enough and that was long, long time ago now.
In fact just having some more traffic, regardless of whether you're competing with them in any way, would be fantastic. Orbiter, for all its beauty and detail, can feel very lonely and bare at times - not a big deal if you're only into re-creating Apollo missions or things like that, but imagine a whole system populated with something like Greg Burches or Doug Beachy's addons flying from place to place, landed at spaceports, docked at stations... all flying with their own computer controlled agenda.
It would be awsome to see a Space Traffic Control addon, it would quite possibly be the most important addon for orbiter to date since it could add to the experience in the sim and open the door to all sorts of possibilities.
Moonwalker said:
Orbiter itself is a space flight simulation. But there is some stuff in it and also addons which makes it a fun game too (Delta Glider, the Lunar wheel and other science fiction spacecraft gimmickry...).
I see where you're coming from, but just because you're flying a DGIV or an XR5 or whatever it doesn't instantly make orbiter a game, it's just simulating something conjectural, fictional, rather than something thats actually a real thing like the shuttle. Again, a game has 'gameplay' set goals, a score, things to accumilate, ways of competing against another player - all of which can exist within a simulator framework, but a simulator for it's own sake, like a simulator to teach someone to fly ignores features of gameplay because someone else is rating you - you have to pass a test or do it for real eventually, thats a 'real' simulator. By comparision, no one is going to go from Orbiter to flying the shuttle for real.
So, in terms of gameplay features, Orbiter has very little of these things, the closest you get are the scenario missions which give you a set goal. There's no actual conclusion to it as such though, it's open ended like a sandbox mission and there's no consequences, though with some addons you can destroy your craft and kill your crew - which is another gameplay feature thats sneaked in. As a simulator in it's purest sense Orbiter is only useful for curiosity, education and recreational fun. So really it doesn't matter what you're flying, whether it's an entirely accurate re-creation of Apollo or a delta glider, as long as you're having fun, and maybe learning something along the way.
Though initially it seems from the poll that most people don't call it a game.[/SIZE]
