Oleg Maddox posted these new images from the upcoming Storm Of War. They show the capabilities of their new engine to render the view up to 40km. It looks great but there is something else to see other than the atmospheric model. In fact these screenshots show that they created this engine thinking already to what will come after SOW. You would not need such high altitude for a WW2 simulation. And to prove this here’s a hint from him:

You may see that we are thinking about third party developers and our own upcoming after BoB titles using this engine.  Hope you all understand what I mean.

So what’s coming after SOW? According to an interview I read on the June edition of  ”Combat Aircraft” there are plans for North Africa and Korea. This was mentioned also in other interviews. I’m really interested in the second scenario. We all love WW2 prop planes but a Korean campaign means that we get to fly on the first jets, we are talking about Sabre against MiG-15! Anyone else thinking about Rowan’s “MiG Alley” here?

When Falcon 4.0 came out in 1998 it was a huge step forward. Yes, it was buggy, but after several official patches and non-authorized mods it become pretty solid. After the source code leaked some talented people started making changes and optimizations and thanks to them we still fly it today. The devolopment story of Falcon after the leak is quite intricate and it would require a post only for that so I’m not going there now.

But we can all agree that in 1998 things looked bright for simulators. If at the end of the ’90s MicroProse was able to develop Falcon then what would we be flying 12 years after? This is what I was thinking at that time. I had great expectations for the future, after all when it comes to computers and softwares every year things evolve and get better right?

But then the market changed. Or were the people who changed? Probably one was the consequence of the other. But at the end the result was the same: making simulations become too expensive and the profit moved from these serious games to no-brain shooter games that are accessible to anyone. Casual gamers today don’t want to study the documentation in order to fly a jet in a virtual world, that’s too hard. They want instant graphical reward at the the minimum intellectual cost. They want instant gratification. I’m not saying that every videogamer is like this, I’m just saying that the majority of them are. And that’s enough to change the market. When a company wants to make money it has to go after the majority, that’s a simple business rule. This is exactly what happened to simulations like Falcon, they stopped being developed because the profit wasn’t there anymore.

So today when I want to feel immersion and complexity in a sim I have to go back to the modded versions of Falcon. I have to keep the old good Windows XP on a separate partition of my hard drive to assure compatibility with a simulation software that is more than 10 years old and doesn’t run on the new versions of Windows. I have to forget about DX9 graphics, high polys, normal and bump mapping, specular shading and HDR. And you know what? It’s still worth it. Even with their flaws and their degree of unfinished work simulations like Open Falcon are still the best you can have today in terms of realism and immersion.

In the recent years some heroic companies (mostly only russian) decided to ignore the rules of the market and produce desktop simulators. I have great respect for what they are trying to do but it’s hard to hide some disappointment. If you exclude “Battle of Britain 2″ (which is based on a code that goes back to the Rowan times) there isn’t a recent sim that features a dynamic campaign like Falcon. They all use pre-scripted missions with random triggers. And their avionics and flight model are not there yet. So the truth is that today’s sims are still technically inferior to a simulator made in 1998. This is why my development work for now is only for Falcon.

But I still have hope for the future. “DCS A-10C” could be something to look for. There is no dynamic campaign unfortunately but the systems and the flight model seem to be accurate since they originally developed it for the military personnel. If only it wasn’t just a CAS aircraft! I would love to fly a multi-role with dogfighting capabilities. But it is what it is, these days better get whatever we can. And let’s not forget about “Storm of War”, these guys have already my money!

So even if there is no joy for me in the recent sims I have to agree that this year things are not as bad as in the past. We’ll see what future holds in store for us!