When I reflect back on the SubLogic Flight Simulator II days, I was about 14 years old and I lived, ate, and breathed that simulator for a few years. One of the things that made that so great was that you got not one, but TWO fairly detailed manuals. Everything a kid wanted to know about flying the Piper Archer 2 was in those manuals. From flight physics to avionics to navigation and charts. It was all there.
I could, and did, carry it wherever I went, so I was immersed in that sim even when I was not sitting right in front of it.
The graphics capabilities were very little back then, and processors were single threaded and memory was, shall we say, a bit tight? Yet the manual set added a level of polish that pretty much washed away the fact that you were “flying” something very, very primitive and unrealistic.
How we got from that to this is beyond me.
Falcon 3.0 did the same thing. You got a combat flight sim that was actually quite advanced, and you got the manual on flying and air combat maneuvering. Again, a set of manuals that could go anywhere with you and which added another layer of polish on a great product.
Heck, they even tried to continue that with Falcon 4.0…I mean, we got a nice set of manuals but unfortunately that was about the only good thing we got from that product (until it “leaked” and because community supported/developed)
Yes, we live in a digital age and physical books are not really the thing. But nothing? No PDF’s, etc.
I too use the actual aircraft POH’s, and that would be a fine point to argue against the need for flight manuals, except not everything is modeled. Worse, it seems that the chance is pretty good that things that ARE modeled aren’t working as intended.
I can certainly understand how hard it would be to document this sim. Because as soon as they document a set of steps as being “the process”, as soon as the next update comes and that is accidentally broken, now the author of the docs is under fire.
Of course, I am making reference to the large number of switches and controls that became inoperative in SU5 but seem to be fixed in this update 8 (Yeah!)
We might be getting to a point where the sim is stable enough to document. But then next issue is “all the aircraft?” Well, no. Pick one of each class, and call that the “canon aircraft” and document that subset. Put that extra polish on those aircraft.
Regarding weather, I haven’t even looked at it so I have no idea how to operate it. I just set it to auto/real. Yeah, I know that has been problematic, but it works very good from my perspective.