The F/A-18 etc. is a joy to fly, but it kills realism seeing a lot of them at commercial airports. As Top Gun is also coming, at some point it will only get worse.
I’d love for there to be an option in the multiplayer settings to include or exclude different classes of aircraft from appearing in multiplayer sessions.
Examples of different kinds of aircraft:
Military aircraft: Would be strange to do your casual approach into EHAM for example locked in the glideslope with your airliner and a fighter jet whooshes by you.
Fantasy aircraft: Aircraft that don’t exist in real life
Period aircraft: From different periods. Maybe you want to fly the PMDG DC-6 and you want to exclude present-day aircraft.
There’s a setting in the cfg file I think that disabled them showing as AI. I know JustFlight did this with the last Hawk update so that the AI doesn’t use the T1 model.
I don’t think those settings will affect MP in any way, only live/AI traffic.
If we were in an MP session, and I spawned in an F18, you couldn’t stop that…that said, perhaps one way would be for me to uninstall the F18 from “My Content”. It would be subbed out for something else then, and I wouldn’t see the F18 at all.
Some way of maintaining the realism for the player’s chosen environment, perhaps via an optional list of chosen aircraft types, eras etc, that they would be able to see.
For example, if WW2 era aircraft is your bag, then this would provide an option for “hiding” present day airliners, or if you prefer flying present day airliners, the ability to “hide” fantasy aircraft like a Millennium Falcon or Tie Fighter.
This facility would be optional, so the user would still be able to see every aircraft, if they choose to.
What if each user was able to categorise aircraft in the way they wish and those categorisations stored against that user’s account? That way, it wouldn’t matter how other people categorise their aircraft and as it would be an optional feature, people who don’t want to use it would be able to just ignore it.
That would work, but the list would end up having to include all first, and third person products. A rapidly expanding list. It leads to the question: How do I filter out an aircraft I’ve never seen before? What is its designation, so I can add it to my list of planes I don’t want?
And if you exclude it does it essentially stop that other person from even appearing? By not owning a plane, you still don’t see something like the Darkstar, but a plane with the tag DARK still appears, subbed out as something else.
For the list to really work as intended, the player themselves would need to be hidden somehow.
It certainly wouldn’t be an easy problem to solve and it might even be impossible, but that’s the benefit of users being able to just specify what they want it to do, without too much consideration for how. If this gets enough votes, that will be the challenge for the devs.
I spent enough time in IT being on the “receiving end” of potentially unreasonable requests, so it’s nice to be able to “get my own back”.
The overall objective would be to allow more control for pilots to determine their own environment and increase their level of immersion.
It’s also not a simple binary, gamers vs simmers argument, as on some days I might prefer to fly a dropship or even a broomstick and might want to hide WW2 or even older aircraft from the skies. Alternatively, i might want to fly Concorde across the pond or an A320 from London to Athens and wouldn’t want to see fantasy or other anachronistic aircraft.
Turning multiplayer off would be an option, but that would reduce immersion as I then wouldn’t be able to see any other pilots at all.
That already is an existing problem with plane makers using their own brand as plane manufacturer (Blacksquare with their 208B mod, for example). I think this approach is very confusing and the Reno planes showing up as unique instead of liveries and variants doesn’t help a lot either…
