Maritime simulator tech perspective

Hi, I work as the technician at a maritime simulator used to train / test pilots and tug masters, I bought this out of curiosity in the recent sale, thought I'd share my perspective:

• This thing does want to be a simulator, not an arcade game. It isn't wave race 64 and isn't supposed to be; if you're only interested in what happens when you smash into fenders and ships you're probably not the target audience.
• For the price the environment and ship models, and graphics are really pretty damn good. Buying certified environment/ship models for simulators costs tens of thousands of $$ a pop (and a few thousand even if it's not a new ship), and although they're modeled far more accurately they don't look half as good.
• The realism isn't great, if you were a professional you'd probably notice a lot of differences (hydrostatic forces, propeller/bank interactions, etc, etc) but it's not bad and gives a reasonable impression of reality
• It is a performance hog, but if you turn the graphics to low it's alright
• The full 3D scenario/environment editor is far better than what you get in a real simulator

For me the main gripe is the controls; a independent lever tug's main controls have 4 degrees of freedom, and you need to make constant adjustments. You can't expect people to have two joysticks, but they could have them controllable via the arrow and asdw buttons instead of by mouse.

[xcorps]

Thanks for your persepective (I know I'm responding to an old post).
I find it curious that this "game" doesn't match up to reality, considering the capability of 20 year old DP systems still in use in the GoM to match up to wind and sea conditions to hold a 3m position.