US Navy Fighters

USNF was the first sim with textured sky, land and sea in SVGA. Of course the game was a slide-show on a 486 with all the graphics options on high .

Graphics resolutions were available from 320 x 200 up to 1024 x 768.! The landscape included cities, Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor (don't blow it up please!) and numerous objects such as bridges and radar towers.

The aircraft could be shown as polygons, ...with gourad shading, ....and texture mapping,..... and your choice of nose and tail art.

Instead of an array of cockpit instruments as in most sims, there were pop-up windows to display essential data.

The concept behind this was to maximise time spent looking out of the aircraft, rather than flying around with your head stuck in the dials! The windows displayed summaries of the data a pilot would abstract from looking at dials and gauges.

The flight models were not the best, but quickly fans created editors to tweak every parameter of the aircraft and ordnance. The focus had been established in consultation with Chuck Yeager and it aimed to recreate the decision making processes of a pilot in air combat. It certainly led to hundreds of thousands of folks spending hundreds of hours each setting up scenarios and seeing what happened.

I was one of them – spending untold hours creating a campaign with hundreds of missions between NATO forces and China and taking place near Vladivostock. Of course I had to re-do the lot when the sim was converted later from DOS to Windows. The price of progress!

The sim (US Navy Fighters) proved to have flexibility and application far beyond what the designers intended, which is often the case in this type of software environment.

I found, for instance, the undocumented feature that you could allocate your pilot as wingman 2, 3, or 4 rather than flight leader. This relieved you of the burden of making the tactical decisions and issuing commands (drag left, drag right, approach high, approach low etc. etc. etc.).

The interesting thing was then to see whether the AI could apply effective tactics. Turns out it could! (They were better than my choices anyway!). I even found that the ground units such as tanks and artillery could be set to engage each other as the air battle raged overhead.

I spent many happy hours pitting waves of Chinese Shenyang (MiG-21) against F–14 Tomcats and F/A-18 Hornets.