Hi folks. I'm the artist for a game being developed by a friend and I for PC and Linux (a psp port was originally planned, but the psp homebrew scene is looking fairly dead these days, and the project has become increasingly complex as we developed it)

Our team consists of myself, doing all art as well as art tooling, and Hernan, who has programmed the engine himself from the ground up as his first ever openGL project.

We would really like to know what you have to say about our efforts, and aim to try to build up a small community of supporters, so hopefully people will actually play and enjoy the game when we get around to releasing it (which will of course be soon)

Originally intended to be purely arcade-style dogfighting, we ended up making things a lot more detailed when the programmer randomly messaged me one day saying he had added some "proper" bernouli wing physics. Since that day, we haven't really looked back, and are implementing whatever realism we can without reducing the accessibility of the project from a gameplay point of view.

We know that RoF is by far the dominant ww1 flight sim. However, we have been fairly careful to differentiate our project from it, in the following areas.
-The project is free
-The engine is designed to be extremely easy to mod, giving any user with some 3d skills the ability to add not only paint schemes, but whole new planes and battlefields with relative ease
-We don't aim for extremely thorough realism. We're offering a lightweight game, with lightweight system requirements and small download size, to be played in short sessions for recreation, rather than prolonged, "hardcore" missions. Having said that, we do want to include fairly realistic physics but provide an accessible, quick interface to the combat flight sim genre and perhaps bridge a gap between something like ace combat and something like IL2 or Rise of Flight.

So, now that our intentions are fairly clear, I suppose I ought to summarise what we have done already.

-"Reasonable" flight physics. Bernouli planes, gravity, altitude effects, inertia. Torque is something we will be adding in the future which will really make the flight start to feel more natural.
-Structural damage. The planes can be shot to pieces as you would expect. Our damage model is functional, and our intentions for the future are mostly just adding more detail to this. Wings and tails can be perforated, wings shot off, engines damaged and set on fire.
-Multiplayer. Hernan somehow managed to write a fairly stable netcode and we have run quite a few tests on it - so far it's fairly fun! We would love to organise some tests with greater numbers of clients ingame though (PM me)
-Team deathmatch. Currently the only mode, but we have plans for other modes.
-Four flyables. First release will be bundled with an Se5, a camel, a dVII and an albatros dV. Within a week or so of the first release we will start releasing aircraft "booster" packs, the first containing two french aircraft and the second containing two austro-hungarian aircraft.
-One battlefield. The scenery for us is relatively low priority as it stands, but battlefields will definitely be added in future, and any fan-made maps which look great (don't let us down!), we will add as well.

As for our plans for the future,

-More planes, way more planes. The good thing about doing our work in "low-fi" is that new aircraft are reasonably painless to add.
-Balloon hunting modes - Both for multiplayer and solo practise
-Different plane layouts. Currently we only truly support biplane, single seat scout aircraft. We need to expand our scripting system to support observers, triplanes, monoplanes, etc. We plan to allow two players to crew the same craft.
-First person. We also plan to do some very neat things in first person which very few flight sims have done.

Now for the pictures...

http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/13/12070/se5_01.jpg
http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/13/12070/albatros_01.jpg
http://media.moddb.com/images/games/1/13/12070/september_updates_3.jpg

And to follow our progress...
http://www.moddb.com/games/dicta-boelcke

Be prepared for updates in the next week or so.

Thanks for your attention!
-Harry

Neat project! This should get in the SimHQ new (try e-mailing Dart).

Best of luck,

-Avimimus

Hello!

Very nice project. I wish you and your team lots of luck! Indeed contact Dart or Guod here at SimHQ.

I would stick with that plan, but maybe up the poly count on the aircraft a bit more (Round wheels and so on) as well as hi-res skin support (1024x1024 perhaps?)

Does this run in OpenGL or D3d? And will there be support for widescreen monitors?

For now, we want to keep the craft a consistent lowpoly look (as there is a possibility of porting to mobiles, low possibility perhaps, but it's there) as well as keep the whole thing quite lightweight and easy to download/run without having to go through installing processes or taking up a noticable amount of space.
However, in the engine's current state, there's no reason higher resolution meshes and textures can't be used. The textures are simple DDS format which can go as high as 4096x4096, but we have made a conscious decision to keep things low res for the aforementioned minimalism, and speed of production. Also, if we were to go much higher res, people would start expecting shaders and whatnot, which would bog down the programming side as well. The other thing is we don't intend to compete with rise of flight, but distance ourself from it - and one of the ways we've done this is opt for a low-fi aesthetic.

Of course, the system for adding in new aircraft really is very simple, and if there was enough demand in our "community" for users to band together and make higher resoluiton mods as a joint effort, we would not oppose this, and indeed, if it were popular/organised enough, we would support it wholeheartedly.
The plane meshes are simple OBJ files which can be made with any 3d package, or even notepad if you're rain man. The definitions for breakages and control surfaces and propellor positions etc are XYZ values in a text file. In 3ds max i've built myself tools with a clean easy GUI for exporting planes and maps, which will be released for people to use when making their own content.

It's openGL, which is why we can run a linux port. Clients across different OS's should be able to connect to eachothers' games without issues. Right now it runs in a fixed, windowed resolution, but in theory we can set it to any resolution. This is something we haven't given much attention to yet.

Thanks for your interest guys, I'll contact those two names mentioned.

Looks really promising, and great work on the clouds, they look really really good! There's always room for another flight sim, imho, especially a WWI sim!

This looks really nice! I like to fiddle around with 3D modeling myself, the idea of a sim we could make our own planes for sounds fun.

BTW, nice job on those models-- the wheels give away the poly count, and the lettering the low texture, but you did great with your set parameters.

Loving it!!!

That looks great! Looks like you're a good bit into development as well. This is definitely marked on my radar in Track While Scan mode

Looks fantastic!

I think the best part is the deliberate low-poly look. Not only it would make your life easier porting it to iOS, but it would also open the door to a Google Chrome OS version (remember that the Chrome App store has just opened)

Going Hi-poly is entering a weapons race that can only become too expensive. And your game looks charming as it is. Well done!

Well said, and my feelings exactly...

Very impressive all around.

Still folowing you with much interest, Harry

Thanks for the response!

Your design choices make sense, especially for mobile platforms. I do hope for a PC release that you have support for widesreen resolutions and higher ones at that at some point.

You screenshots do look impressive for where you plan to take it.

Great stuff all the best.

Looking forward to it. As Argonv I hope you can add higher resolution models, some ground action as well. If you decided to keep the generic secenario area, you should make it really detailed, with the trench line, railways, cities, rivers and bridges...

Plenty of people would like high resolution models but as I mentioned, this would put us in the category of competing with rise of flight - something we just dont have the resources to even try to do. Try to keep in mind how many staff members they use at 777 and the pricing system - It takes an enormous effort to research and create all those planes in as much detail as they do -
And rather than try to do the same as RoF. If we did this we would ultimately fail because we are only 2 guys with no capital to pay extra workers with, and would be recreating the same product again.

Ground details are of course a priority. If you take a look at the screens you'll see I've been working hard on forests and towns, I also have plans to make a harbour map for some derpy naval action.

Our aim is rather to provide a slightly more laid back simulation, but with a lot of variation. I imagine we will be supporting 2-seat fighters at least some time before RoF do. We also aim to provide a lot more of the lesser known planes of the war which RoF will likely never see, at least for some time.
We also want to try to cover more theatres - Our maps being as "small" as they are (12x12km), We will be portraying different areas of action such as mesopotamia, the balkan states, italy, etc - and the machines which took part in action in those areas.

As for a small update, Teamplay has now been added, as well as a balloon hunting game for single player. I hope Hernan will eventually bite the bullet and code some basic AI, but he has a lot on his plate as far as Dicta goes...
Furthermore, Hernan has recently rewritten the physics (Jorri and anyone else who has tried the alpha will know this is a very good thing) and our flight model now feels a lot more realistic. Structural failures can occur from extreme aerobatics, and planes stall more naturally, as well as fall into spins under the right conditions.
Before too long we will be creating external script files to tweak each machine's performance, allowing our community to offer suggestions for more realistic flight models.

Quite Immediately following the first beta, which will have 4 flyable planes, We will be releasing another 4, 2 of which aren't in RoF, hopefully marking the start of a trend for providing a wide range of alternative fighters. After that pack of 4 will come our 2 triplanes, and after that, It's too early to say for sure.

We've devised a new system for customising personal livery - Using one single texture map you can draw across the wings and fuselage of all planes you fly in (in addition to being able to change overall finishes of each individual plane)

I've also started a new map, which should liven up the screenshots a little once it's ready to show.

The groundwork is being laid for some first person work, but don't expect any of that in the first public beta.

Apart from all i've just mentioned, minor tweaks have been made such as adding detail to the current testing map (which will soon be outclassed by new maps as either a "classic map" or an "old piece of #%&*$# map" depending how you look at it), tweaks to the clouds and forestry, minor updates to some of the planes' models and textures, and the start of some other environmental stuff like low-fi sun blooms.

We know we've been quiet, but take my word that development is moving along very fast in 2011.

If you can't match RoF in plane detail then do things that RoF doesn't like add alot of ground detail and ground combat plus maybe some squadron management..or make this game...an idea I've had for awhile...

I love WW1 air warfare and games like Canvas Eagles really appeal to me. The problem is you need others to play against. So I'd like to see a WEGO WW1 Air Warfare tactical game with strong RPG elements. Perhaps being a Squadron Commander. I'd like the tactical battles to be in 3D and the planes have realistic flight models played in WEGO in increments of 5 seconds (would require playtesting to see if this needs to be made longer). A car wars style game called DarkWind that is free on the internet has a great 3d battle system that would work really well for air warfare though you'd add a z axis...to control you car you have a little screen with a dashboard pop up in the corner of the screen and this is where you control the steering wheel and speed. You move the wheel and click on the speedometer at the speed you want to go upto or down\brake...you then see a 3d ghost image and projected path of where your car will end up at the end of the 5 seconds...however your drivers have many statistics including driving which come into play so where you see the ghost car may not be exactly where the car ends up depending on how how your driver is rated and how difficult the maneuvre is and the speed your going etc...it's a physics based engine which works very well indeed. So swap the dashboard with a cockipit with stick and rudders and throttle...you then say move the stick a little down and left add some throttle and you would see your ghost plane moving up and banking to the left and so on...this is where your pilots skill can come in...if you've tried to do a difficult maneuver and your pilot isn't highly skilled then where your ghost plane is may not be where it really ends up (once you click end of turn)...could be a spin or not exactly in the place the ghost plane said it would be in etc etc....Similar to the cockpit pop up screen and you can access a damage screen, this would be similar to many plane cards you get with mini's..it will show you where any damage is. You will be able to choose your opponent to fire at during your plotting of movement phase...the success will also depend on flight angle\speed\distance and skill of pilot...also there would be a tailing rule which would come into play when tailing you would be able to see the enemies next move so you can follow until either they manage to do a manuavere your bus or the skill of your pilot can't follow (you may see a ghost of your plane following but once you click play to show the turn your plane could fall into a spin!) or you get shot at this would end the tailing rule.

Anyway add a strong RPG element were your pilots can rise in skills and become aces etc...add plenty of missions from patrols to recon flights with escorts...and even bombing missions. Add as many aircraft as possible...also have the aircraft skinable (if thats such a word)...make the game playable from both sides.....cover 1915 to 1918. Make sure all planes have a realistic damage model. Make it historically correct with all battles covered. Have visits from high command ie. Trenchard giving you an assessment of your performance. You could also be failed and sent back to the trench's (end of game)...die in combat..you could be transfered to an under performing squadron etc. I expect the amount of content would need to be released in more than one game. The RPG element is key to the game.

Also a 2D operational screen to plot movement of flights until contact and thats when it goes to the £d tactical view.

The best way to understand how I see the 3d tactical aspect is to download darkwind and give it a quick go..it's free...you will get a good idea how this could be perfect for an air war game if you add a z axis.

I feel the game will appeal to flight simmers, WW1 enthusiasts, Mini gamers and wargamers....

First person is arriving sooner than we expected.
You'll also notice some new lighting effects It's all very freshly added and rough, cockpits arent interactive yet, but it gives a good idea.

Wow, looks good! Do you have a website, a blog or something?