I've naively never understood why we Brits put the month in the middle and you put the month at the begining?! lol. (And nope, I'm not being serious, I do relise that 07/07 can be viewed both ways...anyhow a belated 'Happy Independance day or 4th of July' for Monday, we carried out a flypast over a US base near Lakenheath, Suffolk, UK several times and got some good waves back, hope the crowd enjoyed it )

Here's the Update from the Aerosoft forum:

Quote Dante >

Yes, summing up, a brief report:

- Lead programmer is working in specific Pucará programming like battery drain/electric systems, propeller pitch etc

- Realtime shadows previously only worked in the cockpit as shown by last video posted here (it's a self-shadowing cockpit) but now it has been implemented globally (every object casts shadows to the terrain, the Hermes superestructure casts shadows over the deck and it is done accordingly to the sun position in the sky). Previously we used only some simple non-realtime shadows called technically as "blob shadows". Some may argue that the South Atlantic is mostly overcast and so shadows aren't a priority, but because we're looking into a 2D monitor with no natural view depth, without proper light and shadow any game looks unconvincingly flat and outdated. This (now rather famous) fake photo explains better why proper light and shadows are so important everywhere: http://www.dailymail...uled-world.html
(well, not only that, but, notice that the one in the Moon is slightly more convincing than the original; the secret: shadows )

- Lastly, ouch this one gonna hurt, but here it is in the words of our Lead Programmer: "We still need to add in a keymap program. Currently we program the keys by looking at a series of keycodes in one, and writing those keycodes to functions in another text file which is obviously unacceptable in the release."

Other major issues need to be solved before I can post a Pucará in-game video, for example, when we look to the sides from the cockpit view, we can't see the wings or propellers in action - this is a major 3d engine coding issue which has been reported already.

In the positive side, while this programming is being done, in the art side I've been polishing the GUI with themed backgrounds (render of a military briefing room with Falklands/Malvinas map in the wall etc), and also polishing some of the exclusive Pucará-only ordnance like the LAU-61 rocket pod and the 110 kg Argentinean general purpose bombs, while also assisting the programming with their graphic-related technical requests as they go on in their tasks.

We're sorry for not having time to keep the community informed as much as we'd have liked to, but we're moving forward.

/ Quote Dante