Realistic 'Flight Simulator' Puts Players in Economy Class | Hacker News Reader

Realistic 'Flight Simulator' Puts Players in Economy Class

motherboard.vice.com

97 pointsrbanffy62 comments

DLC Ideas:

  - Three hour wait in runway queue, rand() for seatbelt sign on/off
  - Delay for de-icing, fail to take off within 20 minutes, delay for de-icing, fail to take off within 20 minutes...
  - Watch from window as your luggage is loaded onto wrong plane
  - Spill beverage on aisle seat while passing over to window seat

- Passenger next to you spills over into your space

- Passenger in front of you reclines seat

- Player is taller than average or inconveniently sized

- All passengers near you are young children.

- With emotional support rabid wolverines.

This goes well with the “air steward breakdown” DLC, I gather, and together provide a fulfilling and cathartic experience in which the children who just pushed over the drinks trolley get jettisoned at 45,000 feet.

> Passenger in front of you reclines seat

To this day, I fail to understand why airplane seats recline at all, much less as far as some of them do.

On my last Delta (international) flight, the person in front of me managed to recline so far back that her hair was directly in my line of sight. She wouldn't even put up the seat for when meals were served and then she got mad at me for "breathing in" her hair.

At least I got quite lucky and the seat next to me was vacant so I could use the tray table behind the other seat whose occupant didn't recline once the whole flight.

Couldn't you just move over if the adjacent seat was empty?

But yes, airplane seats reclining always seemed to be some kind of holdover from the days when there was plenty of room between rows. It probably should have been done away with at some point, but likely was never quite worth changing.

I could have, for sure, but I am broad of shoulder and 90% of the reason why I get a window seat is to not get whacked by the carts going up and down the aisle 7,308 times per flight (not to mention the other passengers). So I stayed put and just angled to my right a bit. It worked out in the end.

Hopefully I have another empty seat next to me on my return flight. That would be amazing.

-Watch from window as your luggage is loaded onto wrong plane \n that must be worse than heartbreak

Dont forget United DLC:

Watch your pet get killed on the tarmac

Pay $15 for garbage lunch

Fight Club Mode: get tazed and beaten by the police for having the audacity to sit in your seat.

And they break your guitar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo#

Please don't use code formatting for text you'd like people to read - it makes the text unreadable on mobile

Someone really needs to fix the thing where it's impossible to post single-spaced lists without using code formatting. What is that even for?

- Works

- for

- me.

Just put a blank line after each item.

That's not single-spaced, but it is better than code font and formatting.

The issue is that long lines don't wrap into paragraphs as is done normally with quotes. Instead they extend far beyond the width of the mobile display, making them unreadable

> Just put a blank line after each item.

...That would be "double-spaced."

Force-feedback seat back.

There's a small genre of boring games. The classic is "Desert Bus".[1] Penn and Teller had this made mostly as a joke. Watch the intro. The game is 8 hours of driving a bus on a straight, empty road. The bus pulls to the right, so you have to steer.

More recently, there's "Papers Please".[2] It's about carefully checking paperwork, but there is a plot.

Someone with artistic pretensions should make up this "Flight Simulator" in a coin-op case and get it into SFO's art collection. SFMOMA currently has a Oki dot-matrix printer printing out RSS news feeds as an art piece. So why not?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LtiHla1dNg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTu0GniB2rc

Don't forget Densha De Go! Practice being a very precise train driver. It's a shame the best versions were only available in Japan, but it is the reason I have modded a couple of old consoles to play out of region games.

I wouldn't put Papers Please in the same category since everything you do is on a very tight time deadline and the whole thing gets really stressful in the later levels. So it's not simply about carefully checking papers, it's about carefully checking papers as quickly as you possibly can while under the constant fear of screwing up, missing some tiny detail, being docked pay and not having enough money to both feed your kids and buy medicin for your sick mother.

Personally I love the game.

Those are different though: Desert Bus is an intentionally boring game about a boring activity, while Papers, Please is a tense, exciting game about a boring activity (or certainly one typically seen as boring). Then there are the for-srs bus, truck and train simulators, which clearly don't set out to be a non-stop thrill ride but don't seek to be actively boring either. Aaand then of course there are the many games which are supposed to be about thrill-rides of fictional adventure but are full of grind gameplay.

Papers Please doesn't belong with the others you mentioned.

Need the NPC in the next seat who wants to tell you about Jesus, or sleeps on your shoulder. Also, the more times you play it, the smaller your bladder is, and the more likely there will be a food cart in the aisle between you and the toilet, which will be occupied.

I figured out the best way to shut up evangelists in those situations, it is 100% not rude, 100% effective. They start in with Jesus or Allah or Kraznor-The-Many-Headed, and you... get techical. Don’t engage the subject matter of whichever god they’re peddling, just use a flimsy rhetorical “oh that makes me think of...” and whip out the dryest topic you can imagine. I like to start with the differences between a scalar, vector, and tensor, then move on to the differences between Newtonian, Einsteinian, and Quantum field theories. Make no accommodation for your audience’s level of interest and expertise.

Inevitably they become the ones who suddenly have to do something else, and you get to read your book in peace. It can only backfire if they’re also highly literate in the field you chose, but then at least you’ve changed the conversation. One time a guy next to me on a bus tried to turn me on to Jainism, I started talking physics, and it turned out he worked in non-linear optics! We still stay in touch.

You cannot lose with this method.

I've had a 100% effective rate saying, "JC is a cool dude. However, I have not been saved yet. When JC wants me to be saved I'm sure I'll be the first he speaks to." For reasons I don't understand this works flawless every time. It is almost as if Jesus wanted me to be saved he will let me know. Maybe they all know to stay out of Jesus' business when he is working.

I thought Jains weren’t into conversion....

Reminds me of The Onion sketch : Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo

You can have that with ArmA or Squad (the later to a lesser extend).

At least in two ArmA games I've had to lie down in the dirt for an hour and when it was time to move in, most of the enemies had been bombed out by air support already (who also bombed out a few of our own squads because aiming bombs is for losers). Of course once it's your turn for action it can get quite hectic too.

Reminds me of Desert Bus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_...)

The truth is that airlines are just responding to what people value- they value low price above everything. There is still business class for those that value comfort more than low cost.

My guess is that the inflation adjusted price for business class today is similar to the economy class price from before de-regulation.

Agreed. You can tell by the offering of bare bones tickets - ones you can’t even bring a carryon that is too big to put under the seat.

People aren’t even willing to shell out another $20 for that.

I think the problem is that the base, cheapest ticket prices have been generally increasing while at the same time losing 'features' that now cost an additional amount of money to have. It's not like airfare is decreasing when they arbitrarily decide you must now pay for water.

Hmmm... I guess it depends on your timeframe, but I’m constantly amazed at how much cheaper airfare has gotten over the last decade, when you account for inflation.

Particularly if you look international. 10 years ago a US to Asia flight was $1200-$1400 at the absolute cheapest. Now you can often find flights in the $600-900 range, regularly.

In my own experience ticket prices have been plummeting over the years. This [1] article provides data indicating a > 50% drop since 1979. That article is up to 2013 and they also seem to have been constantly dropping since then as well. Interestingly the article gets into the reason that many individuals seem to have not noticed this.

[1] - https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...

I think there's too much randomness in air travel to evaluate anything besides price.

Pay more for more legroom? Is that before or after the person ahead of you reclines their seat? Will there be room to stow your small bag, or will that be where you want your feet to go? Will the person behind you put their feet on the arm rest and force you to lean forward? Will the person next to you be too tall or wide for the seat?

Flying is truly awful, no matter your size or shape. It's a cute demo and I get that it might be trying to help folks relax who have flight anxiety. However I think a lot of flying anxiety could be cured if airlines treated us, you know, like humans instead of revenue generating cattle.

It's a utopian idea but study after study shows we'd rather be treated like revenue generating cattle than humans if it means a cheaper flight.

Honestly the only way the cheapest seats are going to get any larger is if the government regulates them to be larger, otherwise passengers will continue buying the smallest seats for the cheapest they can because price is all they care about.

Personally by the time that I get to paying for my seat I’m so frustrated by the experience that I refuse to give them a single cent more.

Some of my frustrations include their unpredictable pricing changes. Pricing flights with an extra stopover or two cheaper than a direct flight. Advertising a price that isn’t actually available.

Clear cookies before purchasing a ticket. A lot of airlines will raise prices the second time you look at a flight, to try to push you to buy before it rises more.

If the government regulates them to be larger, the. The prices will simply go up.

You can easily be treated better by paying more. You don’t even need to go full Business Class - Premium Economy is great on some carriers and routes (BA, LH, AC and others).

Most people just prefer the suffering of economy in order to save the money. Truth to be told, the 2x fare increase to Premium Economy (not to mention the 4x increase to Business) on a 10 hour flight is easily $100 an hour you can save by shriveling inside your sparse Economy class seat.

What I’m saying is that it’s a two sided deal: pay less and get less, and judging by the advents of low cost carriers it’s a good deal for all.

Just as it is with most anything else, the world economy is becoming more bimodal - it’s either low cost or business class, a Ford Fiesta or a BMW, a $200 Chinese smartphone or a $1200 iPhone Xs. That’s the outcome of the changes in income distribution (and it’s no one’s fault really).

There have been so many failed attempts to get people to pay slightly more for more leg room. American Airlines had "more legroom in coach" back in the early 2000s and it was a disaster for them. The fastest growing carriers are the ones that treat their flyers the worst.

I pay what it costs for a seat with more legroom. No, my flights aren't $225 round trip, they're more like $300, but flying has been upgraded from the worst thing in the world to sort of enjoyable.

Makes sense though really. It's a pretty rare service in that it can be price comparisoned so easily.

The core service is pretty much exactly the same. Get you from A to B in the same amount of time. Even comparing a bus and train isn't as similar even if it does the same route as the bus is likely to take way longer.

The additional differentiation is pretty hard to be concrete about. Eg, you may pay a load more vs another carrier to have a flight with WiFi and power outlets but then find out it is out of service or they swapped planes.

I love flying, but I hate everything surrounding it.

Air? You hate air?

Maybe I'm just lucky, or have an incredibly thick skin, but I don't mind flying that much at all.

I certainly don't enjoy it, aside from takeoff and landing, but I find it easy enough to just take my seat and zone out for a few hours.

I think a lot of it's psychological, people hype themselves up so much about flying. Really, it's just like taking a bus, but in the sky. People hype flying up as this big event when it's not.

I sit for 8 hours a day at a desk, so a few hours on a plane isn't really that bad. I will admit that my desk is a lot more comfortable than a plane seat. I have no problem just sitting there and watching movies or reading books for a few hours.

> I find it easy enough to just take my seat and zone out for a few hours.

not on long haul flights (10 or more hrs). It's quite cramped, and your muscle all ache due to the lack of movement. The other passengers don't help either...

It's been a while since I've done proper long haul, but a while back I did AKL-HKG (12 hours) and didn't mind it too much. It was an overnight flight though, departing midnight, which meant I managed to spend most of the flight sleeping.

I guess I'm really really weird, but even long haul doesn't bother me too much. I just put on my noise cancelling headphones and have 10 hours to just sit in silence with my thoughts, a book, a movie or some music. At regular intervals a nice person brings me a glass of (admittedly often mediocre) red wine. There are definitely worse ways to spend a day.

Can’t wait for the upcoming DLCs “Flight Simulator: Security Check” and “Flight Simulator: Baggage Reclaim“ – now that’s realism!

Blue Gloves are an optional extra for more... extreme... gameplay.

Apparantly the author hasn’t flown much if he thinks it’s a “harrowing experience “.

I hate flying simply because it’s annoying. The only time I actually enjoyed flying was when I was in the Navy.

I upgrade to business or first class as often as I can at this point. Economy seats are literally painful to sit in. Fortunately I live in east Asia now, where economy seats are cheap and I’ll ride them in short two hour flights. And you still get treated really well, unlike in the States where economy makes you treated like you’re a piece of shit staining the inside of an aircraft.

I know this will sound weird but are you Italian?

Nope! American

You must not have flown much on domestic Chinese or Indian airlines.

Ah yes, domestic Indian airlines is a true adventure. Whatever visions you have about the crowded Indian second class bus, take that and put it in a place where you can’t escape for multiple hours. Stinky food, screaming kids, arguing with the stewardess and all sorts of other hilariousness and hijinks ensue

I live in China now and fly around or in/out of the country about four times a year. It’s a better experience overall imo

Don't know about the details of the game, but what would be great is to have all the harassment that's a normal part of air travel be a part of this simulator.

But does it include the option of joining the Mile High Club?

It looks like this is on Icelandair for hard mode it would be on Wow.

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