rec.autos.simulators

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On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 13:36:39 -0600, "Greg Cisko"

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Now if it's just a matter of the number of buttons you have to press
then a flight sim obviously comes out on top compared to a racing
simulator. Then again, your average word processor has many more
functions and buttons than a flightsim.

Responses outside of the trained envelope. What I mean here is that some
responses are automatic, they require no thought apart from 'do this'.
When I fly simulated aircraft, many of my responses are automatic. I
don't really have to think about throttling back as I reach level flight
I just do it. In a military simulator, let's take longbow, a high
workload environment might be where i have to assess tactical
information and configure the avionics with targeting information. The
interaction with the aircraft systems should be part of my trained
responses, the workload aspect is all to do with the environmental
situation, assesment of risk and actioning of (or perhaps off) immediate
threats. The same aspects are present in a driving sim, the actual
driving responses should be pretty much automatic, it's things like
overtaking and track position over pit stops, changing weather that will
occupy the untrained 'thinking' part of the driver. Although there
aren't so many buttons to press, all the information assessed by the
driver has to be translated into action on the road. It would be
interesting to get some actual metrics on the differences, rather than
speculate, but I don't think there would be major differences in
magnitude, rather there would be different patterns of loading.

Different levels of concentration (brain occupancy)? Perhaps this would
be the easiest metric to obtain, we could simply measure the heat output
of the brain while engaged on the different entertainments. Here again
we can expose one of the misleading aspects of your comment. Rather like
processors have only an ability to excecute a fixed number of
instructions in a fixed ammount of time, the same brain albeit engaging
in different tasks has only a limited capacity to give, or perhaps
that's better put as it has a maximum potential which cannot be
exceeded. Both types of simulation might show peak activity near the
limit of the individual's ability to give. Again, the main differences
are in the pattern of brain behaviour over the course of the session.
You may well find that a combat flight simulation has long periods of
low activity interspersed with short peaks of high activity. With a
driving simulator you may well find that the mean level of activity is
quite high - providing the driver is driving to the limit then they are
doing so pretty constantly, and the peaks are therefore less pronounced.
Given then a one hour session, single mission (ie race to win or kill &
stay alive) the energy expended by the race driver over the course of
the session will undoubtedly be much greater, proving that they infact
have a higher average workload.

Ahem.

We now return you to your scheduled flame fest.

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Suck The Goat

On (say) my P200 there are x instruction cycles available in any given
time period. As you say, a flightsim has to use some of these to
model/render large chuncks of terrain, perhaps going back to disc for
areas when the player view scrolls off the loaded area. In (say) F22 the
ground is textured with pixels, each of which approximates 10m^2, this
gives the developers a suitable 'workload', i.e. the game engine can
cope with terrain at that level of aggregation without getting bogged
down. In something like F1RS the ground textures are much smaller with
each pixel representing a few cm^2; you can see that both flight sims
and driving sims set their workload for processing these details around
the available processing power and their need to render/resolve the
calculation in real time, given a lower limit for the target machine.

The apparent differences are obvious in the two types of simulation, but
the workload for the processor (the only meaningfull definition of
workload) is much the same.

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Suck The Goat

I have flown SU-27 but am at a loss as to what your point actually is.
Perhaps if your frame was robust enough to support both your large ego
and a double figure IQ you would be able to explain it to me.

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Suck The Goat

On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 14:56:56 -0600, "Greg Cisko"

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Nos


http://www.cris.com/~nosfer/index.html                

On Fri, 30 Jan 98 10:40:55 GMT, "Piers C. Structures"

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Nos


http://www.cris.com/~nosfer/index.html                

On Fri, 30 Jan 98 10:47:23 GMT, "Piers C. Structures"

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Nos


http://www.cris.com/~nosfer/index.html                

:-)

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I wan't talking about workload on the computer I was talking about workload on the user.
Nosferatu
Talking about "workload on the user", I am trying to learn something, here, about N2, and you seem to be the biggest "workload" here.
Take time from your ranting and look at the name of this board.
Why don't you take your 3dfx board and your flight simm, and go to a flight simm board and spout your baloney ?
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JerryD(upstateNY)

On Sat, 31 Jan 1998 10:35:02 -0500, "Jerryd(upstateNY)"

I don't want to get off the beaten path with the direction of this message,
but, I just wanted to tell you all that I'm proud to have started the
longest thread I have EVER SEEN in a newsgroup.  The nice part is that
almost none of it has anthing to do with the original post.

Happy typing everyone.

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you know that, in the United States, they're Un-Constitutional!.
George, Adam, John and the rest of the gang saw something comming!

RR #3 Box 96
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Go to chi.general and look at the "Non-smoking Bars" thread... got you
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Joe