To: devnull (Hitech Simulation Mailing list) From: devnull (Hitech Simulation Mailing list) Sender: devnull (Hitech Simulation Mailing list) Reply-To: devnull (Hitech Simulation Mailing list) Errors-To: postmaster@onion.rain.com Precedence: bulk Bcc: hitech-sim-out Subject: Hitech Simulation Digest V1 : I53 Hitech Simulation Digest Volume 1 : Issue 53 Fri Sep 24 06:50:39 PDT 1993 Compilation copyright (C) 1993 Jeff Beadles Send submissions to "hitech-sim@onion.rain.com" Send add/drop requests to "majordomo@onion.rain.com" Archives are available via ftp from onion.rain.com [147.28.0.161] Today's Topics: Changes to the digests jeff@neon.rain.com Helos and Harpoon Dave 'Philios' Prentice Do-it-yourself flight sim kit rogers@sol.instrumental.com (Bob Ro "Chains of Command" rogers@sol.instrumental.com (Bob Ro Air Warrior roster utility knutson@mcc.com (Jim Knutson) ------------------------------------------------------------ From: jeff@neon.rain.com Subject: Changes to the digests Because of all of the bouncing mailers in the world, I've had to change the reply address for both mailing lists to be directed to an address that is deleted automatically. As a result, when you reply to something on the list, you will have to make sure that it is sent to the proper address. (eg: hitech-sim@onion.rain.com or falcon3@onion.rain.com.) Later, -Jeff - -- Jeff Beadles jeff@onion.rain.com ------------------------------- From: Dave 'Philios' Prentice Subject: Helos and Harpoon I'd like to raise my voice in support of GS-2000 and Harpoon both, as has been done previously. I'd really love to see a good helo sim done, and if DI is looking for suggestions then thats the direction I'd point them, Until then, Gunship 2000 will have to suffice for me. I will admit that there is a certain arcadish quality to the game. Its not half the sim that Tornado is, but considering that it came from Microprose I think that it is pretty good. Commanche is nice and pretty but it just doesn't fly like I expect a helicopter to fly. In defense of it, I will add that it is supposed to be a FBW helicopter with all kinds of automatic systems. Regardless, it still flys like a fixed-wing plane. OTOH, the helos in GS-2000 actually seem to fly like helicopters. I'm biased towards low-tech in my sims. I admit it. I still enjoy FOTI because it models two of my favorite jets, the F4 and the A4, in a campaign scenerio we are all likely to be familiar with (Vietnam). When I play GS-2000 I stick to the Kiowa, the Cayuse, and the Cobra. I'd fly a Huey gunship if that was an option. Harpoon is a completely different sort of game. Harpoon is *not* an action game in any sense of the word. A single scenerio can take weeks to finish, since you have intimate control of large numbers of surface (naval) units, submarines, and aircraft. If your command includes a carrier battlegroup you'll have individual control of every plane, ship, boat, and helo. This control goes right down to controlling exactly how often and for what length of time a ship's radar lights up. You can program long complicated courses for each vessel, including multiple waypoints with different actions for each. Harpoon is the best modern naval warfare simulation I've ever seen. Very realistic, but almost unplayable if you don't happen to be a navy trivia expert. I love both GS-2000 and Harpoon for completely different reasons, but in writing this I happened to think momentarily about what I'd like to see in DI's next flightsim production, and what peeves me about every other sim I've played/flown to date. To begin with, I like to get down in the weeds when I fly. I like sims that let me fly low and fast and model the ground well. My normal ship in GS-2000 is a Kiowa warrior. Occasionally I'll fly the little Hughes Defender (I still slip up and call it a Cayuse occasionally). I like to get down so low its actually unsafe. More than once I've encountered a downdraft (yes, in GS-2000) and churned up a furrow because I was distracted at the time. Thats what I get for flying with max time compression without the autopilot. I have yet to see a sim that models a forest full of trees, and this ticks me off. GS-2000 is nice enough with the occasional grove. I've never flown Tornado to know what the ground looks like in it, but unless I see loads of trees with trunks and branches I'm not happy. Falcon3 is great above 500ft, but down low the only difference between a jungle and a desert is the color of the ground. I find this to be extremely unrealistic, and at times very disorienting. I have two ideas for DI's next production. One would be to totally remake FOTI from the ground (mud) up. I'd love to see a simulation of the F4 and the A4 with current sim technology. Actually, going one step better would be to model carrier air power in the Gulf of Tomkin from about 65-72, perhaps focusing on specific periods for campaigns such as Tet '68 or the Linebacker campaigns. This would necessitate modelling the A1 and A7 as well. You won't ever hear any complaints from me about this. I'm considering for a moment how campaigns work in Dynamix's recent flightsims and think that this idea could very well work. One idea might be to have campaigns follow a single pilot through the range of years covered by the game, while another would be for a campaign to put you in the role of CAG for the duration of a single rotation on station. My next idea is for a new helicopter sim. I know that SH is supposed to have an AH-64 sim coming along somewhere, and I'm sure that it will be totally cool when it comes out. Not to step on their toes, I'd suggest going back to Vietnam for a helicopter sim. Considering that the two workhorse helicopters for the duration of the war used the same engine and rotor assembly (the UH-1 and the AH-1) it ought to be simple enough to include them both in one sim. I know that the fly completely different from each other, so it won't be a matter of just changing a control panel and weapons options. With this I would also suggest covering the duration of the most intense ground combat. In order to be complete, the Cayuse and the Kiowa would also have to be modelled. Should also include a large number of support craft, including bird-dogs, Jolly Greens, and an ample supply of bomb-trucks of varying shapes and sizes (F104;F4;A1,4,6,7) for support. Along these lines, the ability to call for air and arty support would be nice. I'm not thinking about some sim that models an attack company of Cobras, but a complete lift batallion. Of course you can't fly or use all of the helos at once, but just having them available to fly would be enough. Alternatively, you *could* look at the evolution of the attack company through the war, beginning with UH-1B's and UH-1CM's wallowing down the runway grasping for transitional lift, and ending with S&D pink teams of Cobras and Kiowas ferreting out bunkers and troop emplacements. I guess maybe someone is going to complain that this would be too "dirty" of a sim. Too much blood. Maybe this is so, but I've gotten sick of the sterile atmosphere of GS-2000. F3 isn't much better since you boom along thousands of feet above your target. I want to see a sim where the target you are assigned to destroy is completely hidden in a wall of jungle and can only be seen when it starts throwing 57mm tracers at you. I want to fly a sim where targets of opportunity are not politically correct like SCUD launchers, but real things like *people*. Most of all, I want trees. I want lots of trees. Shrubbery in GS-2000 is nothing but eye-candy, which is about all that can be said about ground features in any MPS game I've seen. I don't care if each individual trunk has to be modelled with the same processor load that it takes to draw a mountain or a cloud. I want trees. I want to see people in the trees, I want to be able to hide behind trees, crash into trees, have branches in my windscreen, shoot people out of trees, and maybe even fly over a few now and again. Actually it seems that all they would have to model would be the breaks between a clearing and the forest. Over the tops of the trees it would be no more different than flying over ground. *EXCEPT* that it would not be nice and regular. As an aside, I've been flying in Nat'l Guard helos as a flight medic for several years now. Night vision goggles is just part of the job, and I can say for certain that the roof of a forest is *not* smooth like programmers would have you believe. Seems that the favorite planes to model are fast high-flying jets. Thats easy enough since you don't have to worry about how detailed the ground gets. Maybe I should get hold of Tornado (beg, borrow, of whine) to see for myself, but from the box photos DI doesn't seem to have improved very much over SH on this point. I think that it ought to be obvious where I think that processing power ought to go in new sims. We already have pretty good flight modelling, good weapons systems, and any improvement in graphics resolution would result in prohibative memory overhead for the currect architecture. The next most reasonable point to improve upon is the ground environment. Dave ------------------------------- From: d90-mla@nada.kth.se Subject: Tornado problems Hi there! Someone wrote earlier about having problems with getting to the flying stage in Tornado. I had the same problem before when I got it. My solution turned out to be to use MOUSE.COM in AUTOEXEC.BAT instead of MOUSE.SYS in CONFIG.SYS. Using the MOUSE.COM also solved a problem with Falcon (all digitized sounds were screwed up, Bitching Betty turned in to "bjelp bjelp bjelp"), but I think that part has been discussed before on the Falcon list. /Mats ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mats Lanner Royal Institute of Technology d90-mla@nada.kth.se Stockholm, Sweden ------------------------------- From: jay.lee@msbbs.mn.org (Jay Lee) Subject: Sim-Wishes Suggestions/wishes for future simulations: I agree with the gent who favoured a carrier battle group; this would be a fine* addition to the fine land based work SH and DI have done. Whether this is in present day, or Viet Nam era, I'm a little wobbly -- I'd love a first-line 'nam Sim. FotI is without doubt (IMO) the best available, it has some very nice features, notably the ability to switch between the aircraft flying in your strike group (both between A6 and F4!), on the down side there's a limited number of targets, and the terrain is as flat as a board. Still, I log a mission or four each week; the Intruder is a fine plane to drive, it has a good computer-based bombing mode along with smart bombs, shrikes, harms, lau's (with which I've downed a MiG!). Excuse me, this is turning into a testimonial for FotI! Other aircraft I'd like to see simulated WELL would include the AV8 Harrier, the now retired :( Blackbird (Your mission: Pre- and Post- strike photo's of Hanoi after the next Linebacker flight). More important than what you're driving is going to be the environment, levels of interaction with other units, the Electronic Battlefield concept. The way SH is adding different flight models to the F3 'world' is an excellent* concept, and I'd like to see any new work to be written with this premise as one of the fundamental concepts of the program. 'Padlock' can be scrapped, as far as I'm considered. What I've seen, I don't like. Admittedly, it is how you'd fly if you had the ability to move your head, but the way it's implemented just annoys me and destroys my SA in regards to where I am, my altitude, and the rest of my flight. I don't like the idea of impossing even greater hardware limitations -- I've got a 386 based machine, and upgrading to a 486-based system isn't a possibility for me. Bit-mapped graphics? Well, it would LOOK nice, but to move along at a nice clip would require both a fast machine and a lot of stored data. Excuse me for rambling, or free-associating, whichever fits! KFS j ------------------------------- From: Chera Bekker Subject: TFX a new flight sim by DID TFX, a new simulation by Digital Image Design. I read in the PC-Review (British Magazine) of September a preview article about Tactical Fighter Experiment (TFX) developed by the Liverpool based Digital Image Design. This group has been responsible in the past for F-29 Retaliator Robocop 3 and Epic. According to the article TFX is set in the near future. The United Nations have formed a rapid response force to deal with local trouble spots. You, as a UN pilot, get to choose from three planes to fly: The F117 stealth bomber, the F-22 or the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA). The player can choose either to fly arcade-like missions (something like IA in Falcon 3?), a tour of duty in a single hot-spot or a 'full blown campaign'. It was not made clear in the article what a 'full blown campaign' meant. According to the authors they have consulted various aeronautics experts to make the flight models as realistic as possible. According to a spokesman: (begin quote) ' [DID] wanted to create a game that was like F-29 and Falcon 3.0 combined, at one end ultra-realistic and the other arcadey, all in the same game' (end quote). For their campaigns DID have mapped almost 20 percent of the worlds surface to use in their world-generator. The graphics feature Gouraud-shaded planes with visible logos. One of the external view screen-shots showed an Gouraud-shaded EFA with visibly mounted ordnance and an UN logo on its tail. On the background were snowcapped mountains which faded in the distance. It looked quite nice. DID promises a landscape with bridges, big cities and mountains with tree-lines. They also suggested you'd better have a fast 486 if you want to fly it in full detail in the most realistic mode (Where did I hear that one before, SC maybe?) TFX sports a padlock view which simulates the helmet mounted sight: (begin quote) 'The only thing that will stay fixed in the view is the HUD and everything else moves around' (end quote). There was nothing in the article about the campain structure, also nothing about comms facilities and multiple plane flights :(. My question to other readers: who knows something more about this upcoming sim? Especially concerning the above mentioned topics of comms and campaign structure? Tally Ho! Chera 'NAPALM' Bekker FACTS: Title: TFX Developer: Digital Image Design Publisher: Ocean Contact: UK (081) 832 6633 Release date: September :):) Price: TBA (To Be Announced?) ------------------------------- From: rogers@sol.instrumental.com (Bob Rogers) Subject: Do-it-yourself flight sim kit The latest (October?) issue of "Computer Gaming World" has a preview of a roll-your-own flight sim kit from Domark. It's a Windows program (it's not clear if the sims it generates are Windows or DOS programs) that lets you design planes, scenery, scenarios (including combat), cockpits, and compile them into a standalone (you won't need the kit to run the generated sim.) program. Projected release date is October, '93. - -- Bob Rogers Internet: rogers@instrumental.com Instrumental, Inc. GEnie: R.C.ROGERS Minneapolis, MN Phone: 612-920-6188 ------------------------------- From: rogers@sol.instrumental.com (Bob Rogers) Subject: "Chains of Command" Readers of this group will probably enjoy Dale Brown's newest techno-thriller "Chains of Command". It's got some very detailed sections describing attack runs in F-111 bombers. As to the plot, well, let's just say that the end of the Cold War was a real disaster for techno-thriller writers and fans. - -- Bob Rogers Internet: rogers@instrumental.com Instrumental, Inc. GEnie: R.C.ROGERS Minneapolis, MN Phone: 612-920-6188 ------------------------------- From: knutson@mcc.com (Jim Knutson) Subject: Air Warrior roster utility Thanks to Mark "Cookie" Kuebeler, his Air Warrior roster utility has been placed on cactus.org in the /pub/genie/airwar directory as awroster.zip Jim "Red Beard" Knutson | n | Genie: J.KNUTSON ----(*)==(:)==(*)---- #5111, 666th FS Internet Daemons Check Six! knutson@mcc.com ------------------------------- [[ End of digest Volume 1 : Issue 53 ]]