Screenshots on this page may be adjusted for gamma. The night gets MUCH darker than this first shot indicates!

Comments following are from Bill "Cowboy" Wilson on F15 under voodoo 2...

OK now that I have installed the new V2 drivers and looked at different light levels, situations, terrains, "world" areas ground objects and some other key graphics features of interest in F15 ... I must say that the Voodoo2 makes a good improvement in an already great looking sim under Voodoo1. The subleties would not be immediately noticeable but I saw the whole beta testing process under a Monster 3D and later when the 6Meg support was coded in I saw it under a Canopus Pure 3D. Both of these Voodoo1 cards made the sim run fast and look great... still the best out there.

The Voodoo2 goes one step further ... it is the subleties of graphic enhancement that the V2 provides over the V1 in F15 that add to the desire to have a V2 and with the latest drivers the cockpit glint from the outside looks perfect. I then fired up F22:ADF complete with the latest patch and ran it at 800x600 ... WOW now the V2 makes IMHO a HUGE difference in the way F22:ADF looks. I really disliked the way F22:ADF looked on the Monster3D and Canopus3D even with the patch but with the V2 patch and enhancements this sim suddenly has my attention...

I think I will be flying a little TAW now when it comes out. For you Air to Air engagement yahoos F22:ADF is a worthy sim under Voodoo2 but if you want a truly engrossing-superbly graphically pleasing-special effects festival of all encompassing-you are there sim with more configurability and variety of weaponry and flight model that will kill you like the real thing if you don't pay attention ... F15 is the greatest I have seen in 8 years and thousands of hours of flight simming.

More high points:

There are many more wingman/flight commands than in F22:ADF, the cockpit and MPDs are crisp and functional. The weaponry configurations are almost endless. The mission creator is a whole game in itself. The interface is layer upon layer of info and configurability. Since 1992 when F15 Strike Eagle III came out and I played it for a year or two (mostly multiplay cooperative) I have longed for someone to remake this very interesting plane into an up-to-date sim for today's hardware. If I had made a list of what I wanted to see, I would have sold myself short... this sim, like Longbow 2 will define its genre for a long time to come.

If you don't have a Voodoo2 then start saving for one or steal one... these are all they are advertised to be... BTW ... Quake2 looks pretty darn good in 800x600 on a 21" monitor (yeah like the rest of the free world I use Quake 2 to judge 3D performance). You do not NEED a V2 to run F15 but it actually does make a difference in the way it looks, do not buy a card like this for one sim but for all the others that look good on it, the only problem so far is a smearing or ghosting on Flying Corps Gold in virtual padlock view with the V2 and the new drivers did not fix it, time for another patch from the Corps.... I think I will go buy another Voodoo2 now and see what the SLI mode looks like on some other sims (F15 should not benefit from 2 Voodoo2's but some other sims and games can handle high res with Hardware Z buffering)

Bill "Cowboy" Wilson

Comments on the Mission Planner

You can add your voice as if it was a distress call from downed aviators, enemy planes trying to contact you, special orders from the AWACS, a patch through from Bill Clinton after you toast a target in Iran... whatever your imagination suggests. This game will have an amazing amount of amazing missions created by the public, all for free download and I bet many equal or superior to the stock missions that come with the game.

Q: I have a small and some-what feeble question to ask. In the campaign play does the play, have to involve the human player in all missions or can we assign ourselves to the side lines to watch the action from the computer controlled units. I only ask this, because in the absence of a mission recorder it would be nice to watch the other participants now and again, in what is obviously going to a very busy simulation?

CJ Martin: Unfortunately, not really. Since you are the flight lead, your flight will follow you. If you don't fly, neither will they. :-) You'll fail the mission. What you can you do is set up a mission using the mission builder with lots of AI's and let it run. It's pretty cool, IMHO.

Q: I must say after having looked at Len's screenshots I am very impressed. The explosion effects in particular look very good. I am interested to know how persistent smoke from bomb hits is ? How long will an oil field burn ? Len Hjalmarson: As the hapless originator of said shots, let me give you the good news and the bad news...

The good news is that you won't believe the persistence! The many smoke trails from missiles gives a whole new sense to the active engagement airspace. VERY COOL. And the smoke doesn't just hang there like toothpaste either.

Ditto with fires, they burn for quite a while, especially the oil and gas fires. No kidding, I should time it I suppose, but I flew over some tanks I hit ten minutes later and they were still burning! Oh.. the bad news? There isn't any!

Q: There must be a performance hit with that much smoke in the air though: How bad would you rate the hit on frame rate? Is it as noticeable as ADF or EF2000?

The pause is there when you are VERY close to the explosion, but nothing like in ADF or EF2. If you are this close you will likely take damage.

From Bill Wilson on AI (again!)

During testing I made a big stink about feeling like every gun in the theatre was pointing at me (and it really felt like that on the first couple of betas I received ..... I don't know exactly what was changed but I don't feel that way when flying it anymore. The enemy will preferentially target you unless there is a much more inviting target... now this is actually realistic and if the enemy has fired a SEMI ACTIVE at you and you fired an AMRAAM then he will have to break lock on you or surely die so frequently the SEMI ACTIVE missiles will miss because of this fact alone... but since you also have limited AMRAAMs in a campaign and carry AIM7's you had better learn how to use them effectively.

The "setup" of the engagement once you have detected your enemy at long range (you had better see them first) by positioning your wingman/element/division or flight properly will usually count the most to determine the outcome of the engagement... you are not alone up there and you better learn how to work as a team or you will not get far... I assure you of this point. By the same token you cannot "hide" and send your men to deal with the threat alone all of the time either or they will die and not gain vital experience you need them to which enables them to help you later in the campaign. The information above also applies to enemy SAMs and AAAs as well.

Q: Is "losing sight" modeled in enemy (and friendly, for that matter) AI?

If you think about it, if you manuever hard to avoid a missile, you won't immediately turn right onto the bogey. Sure, you'll turn in the general direction and begin another radar search, but (and this *is* a tactic) the enemy could have made a major altitude change after launching, making it difficult for you to regain contact. Usually it would be pointless to make such a manuever in a sim because the computer always knows where you are and the AI just points down or up and finds you right away, anyway.

Same as for turning dogfights, etc, etc...

YES, the AI will lose you like a real pilot would, the AI are simulated to have blind spots like real pilots.

Commenting on the screenshot that opens this page:

Q: What I found impressing in the screenshot sent to the list was that the Sidewinder was actually hitting the rear end of the engine(s)... I don't know if it was just coincidence, but at least it looked like the game might actually model the missile homing on the hottest spot. Maybe a beta tester would care to comment on this? Especially regarding shoulder-fired SAMs, do they tend to destroy one of the engines like they should, and do IRH missiles get direct hits more often than SARH/ARH missiles?

Heat seekers WILL guide on engines, and using flares while in burner is a bad idea too. :-)

Continued: And now that I started asking questions, another thing I'd be curious to know about missiles is how much detail was put into modelling the guidance logics, flight paths, IRCCM/ECCM capabilities and seeker sensitivities of individual missile types? (Hopefully the AMRAAMs and AIM-9Ms, or enemy R-73s and R-27s for that matter, won't be as easily fooled by chaff and flares as they are in most sims...)

CJ Martin: Quite a bit of work, actually. Even so, there are no "wish 'em dead" weapons in the game; even an AMRAAM can be defeated.

On Views

Q: Can I incrementally scroll the view, and only padlock a target once it's within our view. Can we set up a similar view system in F-15? If so, what are the commands to incrementally scroll the view? Which padlock option lets us padlock the target in the center of our view?

Alex Pavloff: Yes. Mouse or arrows scroll. Its uhhh.... / to padlock the center target.

- What key command do we use to toggle through the air-to-air radar sub-modes (VS, RWS, TWS)?

None predefined, but you can map them yourself with the keymapper.

- Is there a key option to cycle through air-to-air targets on the radar (if so, what is it), or must we manually designate with the mouse?

Not in full realism -- this doesn't exist in the real plane. You've got to click with the mouse.

- When padlocked to a target, can we 'snap' to the front cockpit view, then 'snap' back to the padlocked target?

Yes, but there's a time limit, or you lose the padlock.

- Can we move the 'captain's bars' to designate targets on the radar (AA or AG modes) via keyboard commands? If so, what key commands scroll the 'captain's bars?' What key 'locks' the target when the 'captain's bars' are placed over the target?

Mouse, and mouse click unless you are in EASY mode.

- What is 'POPUP_MPD'?

Puts the 3 forward MPDs (displays) up on the screen while in virtual cockpit.

On the Flight Model and FLIR

I am a US Navy Flight Test Engineer on the F/A-18 (LOTS of hours in an F/A-18 simulator), and was a member of the F15 Beta Test Team. Although Sean Long is best qualified to comment here (he IS, after all, a REAL F-15E driver), I will express my opinion that F-15 has the most realistic jet sim flight model I've ever experienced on a PC. Don't horse around the stick when you are slow, or you WILL get in trouble :). FWIW, I'm totally unimpressed with the Hornet 3.0/Korea flight model.
Mike 'Vila' Smith

Q: Did you try Su27 Flanker by SSI/ED/Mindscape ? It has the best flight model I ever saw on a PC flight sim, and I spent more time loitering and doing aerobatics with the plane than chasing a foe ...Can any of the beta-testers compare the flight model of F15 to Flanker's? I hope it'll be at least the same? Cdr David 'Zip' Pierron.

Yes I loaded Su27 Commanders edition on a customer's computer last week and flew it for a couple hours ... I flew it last year too. There is no comparison between the two... not only are they radically different in weight, role and engine specs, but Jane's flight model uses much more sophisticated algorithms than Su27 ... Su27 seemed pretty weak in some areas to me but I am not an Su27 pilot. Hornet was very weak in many areas. F15 is strong on the flight model aspects. You will find it superior to Su27 ...

Su27 seems to have been programmed in large part so that you get certain turn rates performance at incremental settings without a huge amount of number crunching required for the computer to plot what the plane should do. The flight model in F15 feels far far superior to anything I have ever flown from the desktop and deserves to be compared with nothing that has been produced thus far... a new era is dawning.... light the fires! Bill "Cowboy" Wilson

Q: Pilots reported that they experienced "washout" when following previous strikes (light from flames/secondaries saturating the FLIR image). Do J's F15 pilots have to [get to] overcome this effect?

CJ Martin: Yes.

For a great virtual battlefield story check out Eagle Strikes