As SC is to be a great "sim," can you clarify what a sim is by your definition?Would Freelancer for example fulfill your definition of a sim?Many are currently concerned over the "arcadey-ness" of AC, maybe a word from you, whether it musters up to what you want it to be, would be helpful to address these concerns.asked by Arglmauf

Well, I mean it's kind of hard to say. for me it's sort of, when I think about a space sim, I think sort of Wing Commander, Privateer, Freelancer, all qualify as space sims, they just have different approaches, and to be honest with you, I would say Wing Commander was pretty damn arcadey, in fact it's a lot more arcadey than Arena Commander is because there were a lot more short cuts taken in terms of the simulation, it was set up in such a way that you could just blast a whole bunch of Killwrathi because they were gimped so you would feel like the hero, downing wave after wave of the enemy, and I know people go back and forth, but I play all the games including all the other ones that are out here right now that I can play in alpha, and I'm pretty happy where we are.I think we're the most accurate on the simulation side to anyone by a long stretch, in immersion. I don't care what anyone else says, I'm pretty confident we are. And then it's really just a matter of the control input, and how that's translated into the computer that's controlling the flight. And you know, we're trying to make the game inclusive for a large amount of people.So the goal with the game is to make it pretty easy to pick up and play, and then as you get deeper into it, there's a lot of dials and knobs you can turn to make the dogfighting more interesting or give you an edge over another player who isn't as experienced.I always liken it to StarCraft or StarCraft II where you can just go around with a mouse and point and click and build units and fight people, but until you really know the rock, paper, scissors of all the units and you know every keyboard shortcut, it's pretty hard for you to compete with someone who's more experienced. And I definitely think that's going to be the case in Star Citizen.I've already noticed in a lot of the forum threads, and I talked about this last week in the post where we were talking about the flight model and everything, that there's a lot of people who in the beginning weren't used to what we're trying to do, because all past flight sims, including a lot of the present ones, go with a very simplified atmospheric model and then add some "space" trappings like I can go up or down or left or right, but they don't really simulate it to the level that we do, where we actually add... Every item has its own mass and gets added to the ship and changes the moment of inertia and the thrusters gimbal to fire at the specified directions, and actually apply thrust which changes the inertia, angular or linear, of that ship.So we're not doing any cheating and just saying all this sudden we rotate by 15° or 20°, it all comes out of the simulation, and that gives you a much higher level of fidelity, and also a difference in feel of ships. Maybe ships that would weigh the same and have the same class of engines, if one is more compact than another, then at that point it will actually feel different, it will rotate different at different speeds 'cause it has a different angular momentum, not angular momentum, inertia.So I definitely don't feel that we're arcadey, I do think that in every space game or space sim, you have to make some level of... You've got to make a call about what's fun and what isn't fun. Generally space combat in my mind would not be anything like the way it is in Arena Commander or any other space game you play because it would probably all be done by computers, well beyond visual range, and it would be about who's computer processes fast enough to create a firing solution.But we don't like that, we like to get on the tail and shoot people down and see the ships, and I definitely feel that Arena Commander does a good job of that.Are there things that can be improved? Absolutely, and that's what we're working on. We're gonna make it better with everyone's help and feedback out there, but I think, as far as a sim goes, we're probably more sim than pretty much everything out there.I mean besides just the physics of it all and the flight model, the ship itself, all the systems in it are individual systems that plug into that ship, and they all interconnect through power pipes and heat pipes and the CPU pipe, and the fuel pipe, which takes the fuel from the fuel tank to the thrusters and all that stuff. And they all interconnect, and if one fails, it can effect the other ones.Say if your power plant goes down or it gets damaged and reduces its power output, then everything that draws power from it may or may not operate or may operate at less functionality.It's all very system based. A lot of things should just fall out of it like a part of your ship gets ripped out with several systems on it, they're gone. So all this sudden if other parts of the ship required that system, whether it was a power plant or a heat sink or something like that, they won't function. But we don't have any codes "if wing is blown off do this," it all just falls out of the system.So I would say we're probably pretty sim-ish, and then the aspect is is it your definition of what you think is a sim, and I think it's gonna be so many people in this game, there's so many different takes on it, it's almost impossible to please everybody. I think in the long run if people stick with it, 'cause don't forget this isn't just about dogfighting, which is Arena Commander. Even right now the multiplayer dogfighting; team mode I think should be open to most people by now, but up until now, the team mode hasn't even been open to people. So you just watch people go in and it's a furball.Of course if two people are fighting and not looking at you, of course you can come in and start shooting at them and they're not going to be able to see you.So it's not really a good indicator of what the combat's really gonna be like long term in the universe, 'cause the Arena Commander combat's much more, ultimately, set to be fast paced than I think the final combat will be in the universe when you're out there for real, 'cause that has a lot more to do with your radar, and your signatures, and a whole bunch of other stuff that you would manage, and you would have a way's to go before you got to contact with someone who you were fighting, and so there's a bunch more that happens.Arena Commander's really the first pass to get out to the straight out there, rough and tumble fighting, work on the control inputs and the flight models, and a bunch of the little stuff that we need to balance.The ultimate game is gonna have so much more and we've built so much of systems in to allow it to do that. I think the potential's immense, and I think people are gonna have a lot of fun, beyond just dogfighting. Smuggling, or trading, or all the rest of the stuff.So alright, there you are. I don't know if that answered the question about it being a sim, but anyway, there you go.