Well, it's all done but I am so used to posting pretty pictures on Friday that I thought I would again.

IJN destroyer popped at Wake.



Engine detail on the Ki-27



Corrected skin color.



Landing at Highland Queen after running from Ki-43's.



















Gone to testers. Fixing website. Always something to tweak. All the little men on the ground there in case you look.

Banzai. Have a good weekend.

I'd definitely give it a try.

So is it still only for XP users or will Win7 owners get a shot at this game?

X2

My dollars hang on the answer to this question....

Am I the only one? I am not too impressed with the graphics. I am sure the gameply is great but I guess I am spoiled by BOP and Flaming Cliffs.

How about World of Warcraft. Their stuff is really amazing. I think there are probably a thousand games with better graphics out there.

Somehow, we all must squeeze what we want out of the same chipsets. Buttons on the shirts? Give up something. Better smoke on the bullet tracers? Give up something else. I can draw you an airplane with all the detail of BOP...1000000 polys or more. I can paint it with HUGE bmps, too. I can use all the available memory in your computer to just put it on screen and you will smell the Castrol leaking out of it. It just won't do anything I want it to do. Same for flight models. X-Plane is really good but that's not our angle. Want to fly? It's more realistic in a real airplane.

We tell stories and this engine allows us to do that. If someone is looking to buy the best make-believe airplane, we can recommend a lot of choices. Our demographic has been from the beginning, people interested in history, military history and aviation history. In that venue, we will bump heads with any program written for normal-range computers.

We know why nobody does Pearl Harbor and why fighting in the snow-covered tundra is easy...or why fighting high over the Yalu River is a good choice. It's called Random Access Memory.

I played EAW long after it was considered a graphic beauty (was it ever a graphic beauty?) so gameplay has always been the biggest thing for me. As long as the game delivers good flight models, excellent game design and an all around fun experience and the graphics are secondary.

The graphics have to be good enough to help suspend the natural disbelief that we all have when we fire up a game.

I like your mindset. I think if more development houses would stick to this, we would have more "keeper" simulations and less need to rush out and buy the newest graphics card. There will always be the next greatest and latest graphics / physics engine. Those people are too busy making eye candy for the masses to care about the nuts and bolts that make make it a simulation.


This is true, but at what point does your fun filter the disbelief.

I still enjoy Combat Mission Beyound Overlord. I am sure if I reloaded Falcon 3.0 onto the computer I keep for DOS games I would enjoy the campaign mode as much as I did back then. I bought my second mother board because 16Mhz was not enough for the best Falcon 3.0 could give. I learned my lesson of eye candy and Mhz after trying F3 on a 100 pentium.

I hope they continue to develop there sims with minimal dependancy on eye candy.

A busted hard drive on the XP game machine (we auto-back up daily so it's just an inconvenience) and rootkit malware on the Photoshop machine prevent us posting any pictures today. Most of it's just HTML pages anyway.

On the other hand, the weird process of getting this to run on SF2 is underway on the one machine that works right. It's surprisingly simple bookkeeping but there are some effects that are going to take some figuring out. The DX10 is an serious improvement. But there are some really strange things to deal with. We will probably stop until the Zeta testers approve the game at this level.

But I have a question: Since this is going to be a WWII game with pilots of various nations represented...but only in English, what are the most irritating speech phrases in your opinion? The one that grinds at me is "Get him off me!" We want to replace the ones that just have no relevance.

What's yours?

Has something been done about the AI and damage models?
I do like the detail on the planes!