I'm sure they probably have the source code and it's gotta have proper comments throughout. Any coders worth their salt could handle it. Look at Enemy Engaged 2: new graphics engine, compatibility fixed, and some minor revisions. Unfortunately, they started it prior to the biggest free community enhancements.

Amen!

I just hope someone will make a new Jane's USAF/F15/F18. I remember that it took all the space available from my HDD... with only 200mb available LOLLL

Actually for quite a while, particularly in the early days, flight sims were one of the hot tickets. The guys who were early adapters for computers were also people who could get into flight sims. I remember flight sims used to get magazine covers and there were monthly columns devoted to them. If they were a pimple they probably wouldn't have bothered paying to use the Jane's license and definitely wouldn't have had 4 teams working on flight sims all at the same time and each team lasting long enough to each put out at least a couple of titles. Also EA considered products to be successful if they made 5 times a return on investment. I know our team did that and I'm guessing others did as well so I think the bottom line was there.

The issue as I see it was that the number of people playing flight sims had remained fairly constant while the costs to create them were rising rapidly and the number of people playing other types of were also rising rapidly. Computers had become tools of the everyman and most of them didn't seem to want to bother with the time and learning it took to play flight sims especially when their interests were elsewhere. I think this poster sort of parallels what happened:

http://www.llbbl.com/data/RPG-motivational/target178.html

I think it would be more appropriate to say flight sims used to be big, just everything else got bigger.

Elf

Scott, I love that link to the Fantasy Football thing --- perfect.

And your comments also interesting about EA, thanks for this insight into the business side of flight sims. Damn, 5 times return on investment -- OK now I realize different companies have different definitions of ROI, so might not be talking straight-up textbook financial ratios here.... but still, geez. Imagine being able to make that in the real aircraft industry. or some other kind of heavy manufacturing. Think Boeing is knocking down even twice their investment, over a 10 year span? I guess in manufacturing you have to take the whole life of the bricks & mortar facilities and many decades of production to come up with that same comparison..... and the largest building in the world by covered sq. footage is the 777 plant in Everett WA. Sorry to digress, but that ROI number, that in itself is impressive. I'd invest in that, particularly in a short period of time like that.

Of course, you allude to something many here have pointed out -- why spend resources on this when you have EA sports and racing and that whole console gaming indstry that reaches what, 100 times more paying cosumers? And if I paid $40 ONCE for a Jane's flight simulator game ten years ago, I've flown the holy heck out of that baby for almost ten years now, and EA hasn't earned anything off me but my initial purchase. Now if I buy Madden 9 last year, then I am probably going to be tempted to go get Madden 10, and so on. Actually I kinda alternate -- one year I guy the college football game, and the next I get Madden NFL. But I probably have a half dozen different EA football games for computer, playstation, PSP, etc over the last 5 years. And I still want MORE! And that is just one kind of game, not even talking yet about other sports, racing, the SIMS series and on.

But all that said, even for this miniscule by comparison little market for flight sims, 5 times return on investment is still really nothing to shake a stick at. Just seems sad to see this great work not evolve, and get reused/recycled into something more modern and RESOLD.

Ripcord

Scott,

I stand corrected. No disrespect intended. In the waning days of the Jane's titles, I just remember seeing all kinds of references to the huge sales of the EA Sports franchise. As you point out, though, this was an evolutionary trend.

Never being much into sports myself, I did get addicted to one of the early of versions NBA LIVE..(98, I think) and had twin Gravis Grip Gamepads to play with my wife who has always been a big Basketball fan. I think we were pretty evenly matched on the Virtual court, but she seemed to be able to sink 3 pointers almost every time.

DAMN. 5 times on investment? Do you think ED and Lead Pursuit are getting near that? Heck, you should be able to get angel investors up the yin yang to dump money into flight sim development if you can promise anything remotely like that kind of return. If I had the dough, I'd put it in Scott right this minute. Jebus. It makes you wonder why on earth Electronic Arts would have canned it at all. I mean, Scott left for other things, right? What's the point in stopping a division with 5X ROI?! I would think you'd want to keep scaling your business up and ending one section of it when a lot of the coders are going to move on to different companies doesn't make any sense to me. The more people you can hire and the more product types you can move with those kind of numbers, the better. Is EA a public company? You'd think shareholders would get rid of whoever made such a dumb decision if they know what was going on. We are a niche. A profit potential niche. You don't ignore that. Managers and execs who do that should be gone in a heartbeat. It's not like there's actually some shortage of coders in the world.

The 5 times number isn't something that I ever saw it writing and I think was mentioned in passing so it's not like this was handed down from above like an official edict. Also this was to be considered a "Success". I'm sure if it only make two times ROI they wouldn't be crying but they'd also probably consider if changes needed to be made or if it was worth continuing with that product line. There are various costs that are project independent. This would be things like salaries, equipment, facilities for people like HR, IT, upper level producers and things like that. I'm not sure if E3 gets factored into a projects budget and I'm sure there are a bunch of other non project specific costs I'm not thinking of. I'm also not sure how licensing the Jane's brand factored into things.

Also this covers when other projects don't do nearly as well as they hope or get canceled for whatever reason. This also would fund the next iteration since if you only made enough to cover the project you're going to have to borrow/get advances for your next projects. Also if the 5 times number is correct then this means they had enough titles hitting it to make it a viable target. Yes, EA was making investors happy and around the time I was there or maybe a little later they moved from Nasdaq to the Dow and up until recently were the number one publisher.

As for stopping a division with 5X ROI well there were a few factors that came into play. First was that flight sims seemed to be losing their steam. Also a lot of the team I was on were also a bit burned out on them since we had been doing them almost non stop for probably 7 or more years with long periods of overtime. Then we had the stock market hitting a slump, we were a small team and our lease was up and we didn't want to leave the area. The funny thing was we were told by someone at Firaxis, who was being published by EA at the time, that someone from EA had just mentioned something along the lines of ours being a team that did it right. Oh well. As it was I wasn't really into the next project we were on so I was only so bummed out when the studio closed. Oh yes, I think there was also a bit of politics thrown in for good measure.

On a side note, I'm sure you all have probably seen this but I found it rather interesting, especially from the list of games that the team members have worked on:

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/2879084/Cascade_Game_Foundry_Forges_Ah.html#Post2879084

Recluse,

No worries. It was quite a while ago and the way things ended can color memories of how they began. To give you another idea of the change in things back when I was at MPS 100K was considered a success. I think about the time EA shut us down I think a game on a cartridge system had to be over 1 million units to be considered a success. I think I heard JF/A-18 might have actually hit this number in world wide sales but this probably includes when the price dropped down for the budget CD version. Still, I know "we done good" so I'm not worried about it.

Got to run.

Elf

I did not see that about Cascade Game Foundry.... thanks for the heads-up. Looking forward to hearing more about their projects.

Ripcord

The process of getting F/A-18 running without all those problems is not that difficult (within XP, have not tried W7 yet). In fact, the only remaining bugs to cope with are the intro video running poorly and a crash on game exit. Neither are show stoppers. There is even a 1 click updater available. Forget where at the moment but it's out there.

There are instructions here at SimHQ about the use of DXTWEAKER, as well. That is what makes the game run without all the graphical issues.