The last thing before release is to actually fly through the missions looking for errors. One HUGE hurdle was to make it playable with a sky full of airplanes and a harbor full of ships and a lot of smoke and fire. We finally succeeded and now it's a scream.

It's always interesting to see how wrong we are when we start putting this together. The key element is play. Once you play it, you see what is boring, interesting, exciting. Some things are best done by AI off the side to be witnessed by the player rather than fly them himself. Some things need to be stories told with a joystick.

Pearl Harbor will be about 8 missions and they will not all be at Battleship Row and Hickam. They will be at Ewa, Kaneohe, and Haleiwa. (Sorry, no Wheeler.) But Wake Island will have 8 missions also and they will be better in some ways. I think when the set ends up in the hands of the AVG, it will be a great product and a great experience. Hope so anyway.

Here are some shots of Pearl Harbor Mission #2 which is named 411207_Kakuichi Takahashi for now. The lead Zero pilot from the Kaga commented that the "helldivers" in the D3A1's should not have attacked Ford Island causing so much smoke that it obscured the battleships. In fact they all complained about it. This is the guy they complained about and a very good dive bomb mission.





Fearing a US response and not wishing to be located, the PBY's at Ford and Kaneohe were major targets.















and oh look! Isn't that the Utah we were told to ignore? Definitely an AI target.



Let's see Zuikaku...Zuikaku...



...Zuikaku...Zuikaku...I'm guessing the one one the right.



notice the steam pipe?



Still needs the unit markings and decals. Decks need the crew. But we are in the final stretch now.



And, as promised, I will quit showing new arrivals landing on an angle deck. The Yorktown is now in the hands of the paint shop and it is going to be special even by YAP standards.







Frankly, Hinch, it is your best work. Thanks.

The smoke effects over pearl are marvellous! The more there are, and the denser it can be, the more realistic.

Again, looking forward to this.

Speaking of smoke, is there any way to add a haze effect to the target area? The result of many small fires that produce (not towering columns of smoke) but low ground smoke?

What? Asking for too much? Me?

Not impossible. Probably kill the frame rate dead again but worth the effort. It is rather cheery looking isn't it?

Happy Post Tax Day. I have enough for Chinese food tonight if I don't get any meat.

This week was details. Lots of details.

Got the water to work right at Wake and test flew some missions. It's going to be a flight sim classic.



Shot the engine off this D3A1 (or maybe that's the Ki-30) and noticed we did not paint the firewall. So I put a firewall texture on and spent two hours trying to shoot the engine off again and never did. If you spend too much time lining up for the shot, you get tailgunner in the face.



Do you know who Harry Brown was?



He was a 2nd Lt. who took a P-36A out of Haliewa along with two other guys and went hunting. He shared in a D3A1 and took part in dropping two Zeros headed back to their ship. More than 20 US fighters got into the air that day. We cannot reproduce all the stories but we will tell what happened before we send you off the sod strip to take your chances.

By the way, there is only one known picture of the 45th Pursuit Squadron's airplanes that were being flown by the 47th PS pilots that day. No clue if the roundelle is supposed to be on the fuselage, one has a picture of a number that could be a 16, THE expert says all attempts to paint models, etc. are using false information. So we will take a guess, confess to our ignorance, and hand you a very nice machine (originally by Wolf) that fought for the US on only this one day.



Decals. Unit markings and hundreds of decals.



Hey. Gas caps.



Zeros done now to start on the Vals.





Nothing new to show landing on the Hornet but we just got this in to show taking off of the Hornet.

It came in 5 minutes ago so no time to get it in game.







It will come in B, C and J...maybe one more.

Banzai.

Those screenshots look very nice.


Wheels

Screenshots doo indeed look brilliant. However you do need to get rid of those protruding cannon on the A6M2 Zero. Only the A6M5 version had extended cannon.

Five minutes when we get to the nit-picking stage. We are nowhere near that stage right now.

Zero, don't think it's nit pickin just tryin to help.

Indeed...The exaust tubes souldn't be visible on an A6M2 also.