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To Dream, to fly - adventures in flight simming
1996 - Power lines at last! Using the clunky DOS based mission editor I had managed to set up a training mission near Vladivostock where I was going to drop dumb bombs from an F/A-18 Hornet on an armoured column. Good clean fun. The really exciting part, or one of the exciting parts, was that I could plan the route on a genuine Operational Navigation Chart (ONC) and be confident that the sim would reproduce the landmarks, elevations, built up areas and, yes, even the power lines! I had originally bought the ONC to use in US Navy Fighters but it turned out the terrain in that sim bore only the vaguest resemblance to the real area. This was different. Mission Studios had taken great pains to simulate the real world with over 14,400 elevation points in this area alone. Not only did the world look great at low level but the sense of speed was astounding. Taking off in the F/A-18 and getting up to 300 knots at 500 feet felt.... dangerous! Whooooah! This was good, fluid and convincing. I pushed it a little lower and glanced left to see my wingman keepimg perfect formation as computer wingmen do. I had set up enemy armour on an island South East of Vladivostock called Ostrov Askol'd. The flight plan was simple. Fly directly South down the Peninsula and across a small strait at 200 feet, simulating a 'below radar' approach. Then pop up at the island and drop iron the targets which were neslted on the Southern slope of Ostrov Askol'd. Piece of cake! I'd done similar runs hundreds of times in other sims. Simple, a walk in the park. Easing down to 200 feet I hugged the coastline and prepped the bombs. That only took one button press. Another thng I liked about his sim - the emphasis was on flying rather than switchology. Feet wet and - yes there was the island, 5 miles out and dead centre. I pushed the Hornet into burner and the airspeed leapt up. Here's the island, up, up the hill and .... what.... !! Holy moley! That was quick, too darn quick. This sim really moved. 300 knots felt... fast. Flying over a hill then trying to sight a target was .. impossible! I'd have to seriously rethink my tactics. Jetfighter 3 was released just as 3DFX graphics cards came on to the market. The Jetfighter box promised "up to 16 times the speed" with the new cards and, as hard as it was for me to believe, this new technology actually delivered on the promises. With the cards taking over the burden of drawing the pixels, creating and Of course, really bad coding could still slow the display down but for a while your CPU speed became irrevelant and were were all enjoying smooth frame rates. Previously I had considered anything over 5 frames per second to be a bonus, suddenly I was seeing, 15, 20, 30, 40 frames. The sky was the limit! |
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The contents of this website are copyright © 1998 - 2007 by MiGMan |
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