F.L.A.R.E. (Falcon Landscape Advanced Re-Engineering) is the name of my Falcon development project. The last word of this codename is the the most important to understand the purpose of this work. This is the definition of the word “re-engineering” described by Chikofsky and Cross in their 1990 paper:

“The examination and alteration of a system to reconstitute it in a new form”

This is the perfect definition for this project because my intention is to alterate the terrain of Falcon and reconstituite it in a new and improved visual form. For years we flew over a Korean landscape that is just not good enough for today’s standards. Yes, there are many things that can’t be changed without editing the source code and F.L.A.R.E. will not give you DX9 features but there are also a lot of other technical and visual changes that don’t require a re-compilation of the code. All the previous attempts of this kind (HiTiles, AFTiles, etc) improved the original tiles but ultimately they are just not good enough for my personal taste and showed also many errors and imprecisions (lack of realism, wrong alignments, very visible seams when flying low, etc).

I will publicly release the completed work but the real reason why I am doing this it’s me and my passion. I feel that the full potential hasn’t been reached yet and I know that I can push the quality level much higher than what we have right now. I am lucky to have a job that taught me a lot of skills and techniques that are very useful to support the development of F.L.A.R.E. in its different milestones.

Here’s a few detailed notes about this project:

• The platform for this project will be Open Falcon (because that’s the version I like the most at this moment) but it will be compatible with FreeFalcon.
• My work is divided in main and secondary milestones. The main one will be the creation from scratch of all the required tiles. The secondary ones and their goal will be announced after the main milestone is completed.
• The H tiles will be created at high-resolution (2048 x 2048) and then scaled to a size that Open Falcon can handle. Most likely I will offer two versions, 1024 x 1024 for good PCs and 512 x 512 for less recent systems. I work on the original PSD files at 2048 x 2048 because I want to to reuse this work in the future if a new release of Falcon will come out and will support higher texture sizes.
• M tiles and L tiles will also be included and resized to the best dimension that will be possible without creating memory problems or artifacts (like shimmering or flickering).
• FarTiles will be regenerated to match the new textures and will also be provided in the final package.
• All the textures of the main milestone will use DDS DXT1 format.
• Falcon 4 Allied Force will not be supported because of its technical limitations.
• For the first release only the Korean theatre will be supported with one default season. Other following releases may include different seasons.
• The priority is quality and not release date.
• I work alone and I am not looking for collaborators. It’s just the way I prefer to work. Keeps the quality level constant and the visual style homogeneous.
• I initially wanted to release F.L.A.R.E. as freeware but because of the amount of hours it requires I will have to ask for some returns. But the price will be very affordable.

There may be some points that I did not cover. So if you have questions I will be happy to answer them if you write in the comments of this post. I will release some preview images soon and I will keep you updated every once in a while with the status and progress of the project. I know that waiting can be frustrating but have patience, it’s a big undertaking but I will get it done.

I love Falcon and I hope that F.L.A.R.E. will keep us flying it until some other sim reaches or passes its level.

EDIT (July 18, 2010): Project F.L.A.R.E. will be released as freeware.

EDIT (Sept 07, 2010): Project F.L.A.R.E. will not be released for FreeFalcon.

EDIT (Apr 06, 2011): This post is outdated and doesn’t reflects all the new changes I made recently. Please follow the monthly development updates to get a better idea of how the project is coming along.