Damage model possible?

Is it possible that there will be a damage model for mfs in the future? Or will this never happen.

I mean, like breaking a wing and flying with one wing. instead of game over.
Things like that.

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I remember in FSX there was a mod which would cause you to break a wing if you hit e.g. a building. I doubt such a thing can be done in MSFS in the near future

Obviously the ask is not to hit a building. It is to lose a wing if you are wreckless enough to take your GA straight into a TB cloud. Which would actually make you care for the weather which is the #1 concern in aviation, especially GA aviation. In MSFS you simply don’t care about weather except visibility, unless there’s some crosswind during landing.

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IMO, very unlikely to happen. Apart from the technical work involved, damage modelling (as opposed to failures) moves the sim more towards the combat side, which is not where I think MS/AS want to go. Also, I don’t see this as one of the top items listed on the wishlist charts shown in the last DevStream.

to add to the above; most planes in MSFS are licensed, and the plane manufacturers don’t generally allow physical damage modeling on their planes.

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With Wbsim Cessna 172, you can end with broken front gear and twisted propeller. It happened to me while hitting top of the tree while landing. I ended with nose in grass runway and ETL alarm crying. It was quite experince :smiley:

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Thanks all.

@CrashnGo1 sounds pretty good. I think I’ve also experienced a similar thing.

Oh, and I guess terminal damage is also kind of a damage model. So I’m glad with what we have. =)

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I’m OK with the terminal end of flight too. Can’t say I haven’t enjoyed belly landing the Wildcat on grass more than a couple times though.

I’d much prefer to be able to physically damage the aircraft.
The Commanche does it I noticed too I’ve noticed.

Really if you mistreat your aircraft, or use the wrong technique on it and fail, you should be able to see that failure. Now imagine a persistent world… :sweat_smile:

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That would be Youtuber’s heaven. F… around in FS for clicks, with clickbaiting titles involving all kinds of crashes. That would be a kind of advertisment for a sim MS sure doesn’t want.

But this is a SIM, not an arcade game. In Ace Combat I wouldn’t care about damaging my aircraft (well, OK perhaps as long as health stays above zero)

In MSFS I should care to not overstress the engine or to not break the landing gear with a hard touchdown or to not stray from the runway tarmac to the mud or to not cause structural damage in any way by avoiding severe weather conditions etc (plus all these could slowly accumulate in a persistent model).

This would give us an order of magnitude of increased realism and would actually make us care if our little Cessna is not fully aligned with the runway during final due to crosswind or is porpoising on the ground, which would force us to try a go around. Currently I’m just “lol, what do I care, I’ll just land this one way or another, as long as I don’t touch down with 1000fpm or don’t fall on a tree”.

Currently only a very few these are possible and that’s not because of Asobo but because of A2A, WB Sim and a few other 3rd party devs who are stressing the boundaries of what’s possible.

So let Asobo expand the API to be able to accommodate such damage. They don’t have to implement the damage themselves in their vanilla aircraft if they don’t want to. But they can at least allow others to use that API and increase realism of 3rd party aircraft, thus creating an even more immersive sim platform.

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Agreed, and the main strength of a sim is practicing what you cannot do in real life. You fly the plane through the crash. You don’t give up and cover your eyes, which is what the sim does when it immediately goes to a black screen.

They don’t have to visually model the damage itself, if that’s the real issue: Textron not wanting to see their beautiful products mangled. But the effect on the aircraft could still influence the flight model, perhaps with a post-crash analysis wireframe model showing the damaged areas.

Lots of simmers simply turn crash detection off, claiming, “I know when I crash”. Do you? Was that a hard landing that damaged your gear? Did you clip that taxiway light? I think a lot of simmers give themselves the benefit of the doubt, look the other way on stuff like that, or just don’t even realize when something bad happened. You can’t ignore that prop strike you incurred on the left engine on that botched touch-and-go if the sim actually models the damaged state of the aircraft.

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People are so sensitive. If I saw a modern flight sim with decent damage model I would be super interested.

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And realism is something we should all be striving and pushing for with a simulator. At least the OPTION for realism.

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How far should it go? Destructible buildings for people to fly into and film for youtube ? Damage simulation is not needed in my opinion.

In reading the comments since I last posted, it occurs to me that we need to define what we mean by “damage”, since it can be broadly interpreted. For example, a hard landing “damages” the aircraft gear. What does this mean to you?

a) No visual difference to the aircraft, but you can’t take off or taxi as your gear is unusable.
b) The gear is visually “bent” in some way, and/or the tires are deflated, and you can’t take off or taxi.
c) The gear collapses and/or parts break off the aircraft and spiral off back down the runway as per the laws of physics, while your aircraft pancakes & stops.
d) C, above, + your aircraft bursts into flame as it hits the ground, due to a punctured fuel tank.
e) Any one of the above, plus changes to the aircraft systems that accurately represents various failures associated with the damage.
f) Something in between these, or something else entirely.

I’m not suggesting any of the above options are “right” or “wrong”, just examples of a few variations on a much broader range of options that need to be considered by the developers.

I think what would be acceptable to most people would damage that is modelled as a system, similarly as to how ice build-up is modelled today, plus visual representation that does not display violence or encourage violent behavior. It seems that the aspect of violence in the simulation is what disturbs people the most, and this can be conflated with “damage”.

I have not checked, but I would guess that this sim has one of those “suitable for all ages” ratings, and MS/AS is not going to want to change that, IMO. So, there is probably a limit on what damage could be visually modelled in order to keep that rating. A bent propeller is one thing. A burning & exploding aircraft, on the ground or in mid-air, is quite another.

Just the plane of course.

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Maintenance wise and day to day operation wise, bent props, and gear damage is probably the most visual damage I’ve seen on an aircraft, other than actual crashes. Things like flat tyres, prop strikes, tail strikes, leaky oleo struts on the gear. Smoke, fire (both engine and cabin), and fan blade damage on jets should also be permitted IMO, as whilst they are rare, they do happen.

Full on crash damage as you mentioned probably would hurt the rating and limit sales, but that shouldn’t discount us from having realistic effects for typical mechanical failures that can occur, and that we train to handle (IRL).

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