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Unsung Heroes, Part III - Eight Titles Covering Air, Land, and Sea
by Aaron "Spectre" WatsonArticle Type: Feature
Article Date: April 3, 2001
Links: | Part I: Background and Falcon 4.0 | Part II: Fighter Squadron: SDOE and European Air War |
In my previous Unsung Heroes articles, I pointed out that a few combat sims allowed (albeit, unintentionally) end-users to create add-on skins, missions, and utilities, and that one in particular, Fighter Squadron: Screamin' Demons Over Europe, was designed specifically to allow the end-users the ability create add-ons with its OpenPlane architecture. This seems to be the wave of the future, as it should be, in my humble opinion. Without add-on capability, new game titles have a very short shelf life. With add-on capability and good intitial reviews, a title can maintain its top sales sticker price and not be relegated to the bargain bin for five bucks. Some of the combat sims mentioned in the my two previous articles, however, didn’t get that good community buzz early on, but because they could be added onto, they are still being sold by retailers two and even three years later. I figured I would also close up the series with a roundup of other third-party add-ons.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
F-111F in MSFS5.1
The Microsoft line of flight simulators has had the “skinning” capability since the DOS-based version 5.1. With the introduction of the combat series, the capability of mixing the terrains and aircraft into the civilian sim side have produced remarkable add-ons, or so I am told. I collected quite a few aircraft back in the version 5.1 days, but lost interest after a bit. You just couldn’t do much with them except take screen shots, and I have CD’s full of sim screen shots! The Combat series never felt right to me, so that didn’t re-ignite that particular flame.
Tornado
Old, but superior flight sim.
Another early entry into the combat simulation add-on fray was a very nice site by Eric Joiner called The Tornado Command and Staff College, or TCSC. This was a very nicely laid out tutorial for that very well made sim by Digital Integration, Tornado. As I recall, Eric did a lot of work on EF2000, F22: Total Air War, and went on to found an add-on repository of sorts called Game Tool Technologies or gttweb.com. He is still making great things for sims at his Aluminum Cloud site, dedicated to heavy bombers in WWII.
M1 Tank Platoon 2
Armor on the move
Another pleasant diversion I found along the way was good ol’ MPS’s (MicroProse) M1 Tank Platoon, and the second version of it. A lone bearer of the torch was John Sponauer. Sponauer created some very nice options for gameplay, and was attempting to recreate the manual for the original game. Check out his site: The Unofficial M1TP Edits and Missions Site.
Enemy Engaged: RAH-66 Comanche Versus Ka-52 Hokum
Desert Dressed Hokum
Along the lines of US Army machinery, there is a very nice simulation of both the RAH-66 Comanche and the opposing KA-52 Hokum by a bunch called Razorworks. Grassroots editing has begun by a consortium called the EECH-MODS team. An interesting sideline of this team is that one of the programmers, Dave Lomas, has been actively assisting in these endeavors. He is a class act, and this is a very cool thing to do! Some rudimentary skinning utility is soon to be released by Blaze, aka Jan Löbzien, called TexImpEx for Texture Import/Export. It has been a bit tricky, as I’ve witnessed in the lurkers area of the EECH-MODS group that is on Yahoo now. The textures are separated into two different flavors, one for GLide, and one for everything else. Tying them together seems to be one of the greater obstacles, but it is looking good so far. Another member of the group, DeStRo, has created a Weapons and Units Tweaker, hence the name EECH-WUT. It is pretty handy for `what-if’ situations. There is a Naval mod that comes with it that allows the ships to engage land or sea based surface threats. One of the first participants in the EECH realm is Richard “Flexman” Hawley whose EECH Ground Support System covers quite a lot of options, on-line items, pilot skins, sounds, command line options and more. As of publication, he is on version 1.84, and it’s a beaut.
Jane's Fleet Command
Missile Launch!
Tying in with the Naval mods mentioned above is a group that has seen fit to do a major revamp of, well, basically everything in this sim. It is called The Warship Database Project - Advanced Fleet Command (WDP-AFC), and is currently up around Version 12. This is one of the most all-encompassing mods you’ll find with graphics, tech data, even the original missions have been modified to work with the new databases.
Command And Conquer: Red Alert 2
The pentagon under attack!
Now some may say that the real-time strategy genre is not, technically, a simulation, but I feel that the Command and Conquer series is a good combat simulation, taken to a slight extreme. I have been a fan of this series since the original, and even bought a copy of Dune 2000, to see its roots. The newest incarnation deals with all aspects of simulated warfare, the land, the air and the sea. It even deals with aspects below the ocean's surface. There is an add-on called Deezire, which taps into some items that were coded into the game, but were left out for reasons related to gameplay balance. Westwood has become known for leaving neat things hidden in their code, like the famous ant mission. There are also completely new aspects introduced and maps and units from some of the previous incarnations of this rather large series. Deezire has done a very good amount of work, and all, as this series has highlighted, for the love of the game.
Flanker 2.X Combat Flight Simulator
USAF Aircract featured in Flanker 2
And, in keeping with the semi-chronological nature of this narrative, there are rays of hope on the horizon. The gentlemen at “GameStudios/SSI” who have produced Flanker 2.0 have made there own add-on, Flanker 2.5. The last incarnation was sold separately, (Flanker 1.5), but this version has released as a free download! It is roughly 80 MB, or will come bundled with newly-released box versions of Flanker 2.0 with the upgrade on a separate CD. Add-ons by folks that have the source-code tend to be pretty good ;-> From what I've seen of Flanker 2.5 so far, it looks good. Matt Wagner and the Flying Legends crew have done VERY well!
IL-2 Sturmovik
Aftermath of IL-2 run
And, in the not too terribly distant future, a much anticipated prop sim, IL-2 Sturmovik, will be released. I seem to recall an interview where expandability being factored in from the beginning was mentioned. I cannot lay hands on this particular quote, but seems like a genuinely great idea. I, for one, cannot wait, as COMBATSIM.COM's own Len "Viking1" Hjalmarson has painted a beautiful picture from his pre-beta stories.
Conclusion
I have had fun writing this series, and hope it will give everyone a few ideas on the Simmies, which are proposed awards for the greatest add-ons, in the opinions of the people that reap the benefits of these talented folks’ hard work. Let’s show `em that we appreciate `em, and vote soon!
Click to join a discussion about this article.
Tip! If you are interested in learning more about the history of combat simulations, check out Migman's Flight Sim Museum.
Publisher's Note:
COMBATSIM would like your input for a new category of awards devoted to the efforts of end-user-created game enhancements. We would like your suggestions for not only the categories of awards and those who should be nominated under each category, but also what we should call the awards. For example, award categories could include the following:We will use the Article Feedback forum for the input and then, when we've all agreed on the categories and nominees, we will create a publicly-accessible poll (i.e, you won't need to subscribe to the articles and forums to vote). COMBATSIM.COM will arrange for some prizes for the winners and we'll also create a special, and again, publicly-accessible section of the site to display all the winners' names.
- Best Skin
- Props
- Jets
- Chopper
- Etc.
- Best Terrain
- Best Add-on
- Best Modification
- Best Utility
- Etc.
We do not want these to be a COMBATSIM.COM awards per se; rather, we hope these awards will be something like the People's Choice Awards for movies. Perhaps an appropriate name for the awards would be Players' Choice, or Simmers' Choice. We can vote on that issue too if required. All we ask is that we be allowed to remain the main sponsor of record for these awards.
We hope this will become a regular event each year!
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