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An AeroGeek Enters the Hall of Kings
by Bob "Groucho" MarksA day later I wandered back to the Microsoft area. Once again, it was a sea of kids. I introduced myself to Tucker Hatfield, the Project Lead on CFS2. The amount of detail is going to be staggering. “Cowl flaps, prop control, fuel tank selection . . . even the ability to open or close your canopy and fold the wings are modeled. We tried to make this thing as scalable as possible.”
CFS2 looks to be a worthy successor to the classic Pacific Air War. In fact, Rob let on that the original CFS was originally intended to take place in the Pacific, but Microsoft’s European reps thought that the game would tank unless it took place in Europe. Oh well.
USAF file photo of the McDonnell XP-67
As for a “what’s next”, I floated my dream concept to Rob and Tucker separately. “How about a Luft' '46 scenario---a ‘what if’ the war carried on for a couple more years. You know, Lockheed P-80s or that weird McDonnell XP-67 escort twin dogfighting . . .”
“. . .Dornier D0-335s,” Tucker interrupted. “Now THAT is a cool airplane. Yeah, that is an idea we’ve kicked around. Can’t comment too much, but keep in mind that we have several people on our team who worked on the Dynamix X-Fighters sim . . .” Cool.
Abacus, well known for their FS2K and CFS add-on software packages, were also there. They were featuring their newest packages, Private Pilot for FS2K and Tuskeegee Airmen for CFS. Tuskeegee Airmen was running at their booth, and I played around with the Stearman modeled in there a bit. Very nice.
I talked at length with Jim Rhodes and Arnie Lee of Abacus about making an add-on package for FS2K featuring the Boomerang. Abacus had a booth that was doing brisk business at Airventure. Meeting him back at the Boomerang, Jim shot some photos and took down what information I could give him. We split company with the promise that I could provide him with any performance parameters they needed to brew up a wicked flight model. Could a Model 202-11 be coming for FS2K? Probably.
The Abacus guys are chomping at the bit to develop add-ons for CFS2. “We’ve learned a lot about tweaking the flight models . . . I’m the first to admit that some of our older stuff could’ve been a lot better.” said Jim, “The FS2K ‘.air’ structure gives us much greater flexibility. We can do some really cool stuff now.” Stay tuned for some stuff from Abacus.
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