Part I

The major weakness in version 1 of WARGEN was that it did not integrate ground action. WARGEN made use of SAMs and AAA to be sure, but limitations could be seen in EWR modelling, damage and reconstruction modelling, and there really is no ground war to mention. Look for improvements in all these areas in version II of WARGEN in Total Air War.

After Tactcom, the next military flight sim to be released with a dynamic engine was Longbow 2. Longbow 2 has a following far beyond the original because it is much more immersive. How does it accomplish this? Read on.

Around the same time as Longbow 2 was being released, Interactive Magic released their iF22. The campaign engine was very similar to the structure of DiD's award winning EF2000, and though the simulation had similar depth the beauty of the dynamic engine was obscured by mediocre graphics and a variety of bugs and problems.

So what are the essentials of the dynamic engine as seen in EF2000 and iF22? In short, when you fire up iF22 the campaign engine generates a set of missions based on the current situation. These missions are determined by the AI to be a realistic tactical response to a fluid situation. The player selects from a list of missions presented and at any given time may fly a CAP, Strike, Escort etc.

Then at the end of every mission the player generally elects to either exit the program or to fly a new selection that is generated by the AI based on the progess of the war. Its logical, and there is a flow and connection to what has gone before. But there's more to it than this.

Some of the essential elements that lead to the sense of immersion that I value so highly in this type of engine are these:

• a logical flow and connection between missions, the success or failure of one mission impacts the selection process
• objects stay dead between missions, realistic repair times
• resources are a factor: loss of resources (aircraft, weapons) on both sides impacts ability to continue or succeed in the campaign
• dynamics within the mission itself; no two missions are ever exactly alike. An element of unpredictability.

Other elements that add to the depth of the campaign:

• levels of strategy: alliances may be made or broken during the course of a campaign that will in turn influence difficulty and complexity
• tactical control: the player can actually task flights and perhaps control the flights once in progress
• management of intelligence: the player is presented with updates on the tactical and strategic situation and this informs his decision making process
• resource management is tactical: the player determines the allocation of resources and priority of resources. For example, he can request new supplies but then must task his limited aircraft to escort truck convoys or incoming supply aircraft.
• A high degree of interaction between assets; a sophisticated system of communications and control (as of wingmen)
• Resource management extended beyond military assets to economics and industry: hitting a factory may affect their ability to produce weapons or fuel
• A real time campaign vs. a mission generation system.
• Detailed briefings and debriefings including pilot records.

Longbow 2 meets all of the first criteria and at least two from the second list. No currently published military flight simulation on the market meets all the criteria on the second list.

Not long after LB2s release we began hearing more about Janes F15. Some of my earliest questions on its structure had to do with dynamics. Early on, I asked Andy Hollis to describe the campaign, since it had't been clear to me as to how it was classifed: dynamic, semi, or...? In an interview a few months prior to the release Andy commented on the campaign engine:

Andy: F15's campaign system is very dynamic. It also is not like any currently existing system, so trying to use labels like "semi-dynamic" or "fully dynamic" as people have come to use them would be inaccurate. The goal of a dynamic campaign is to provide a compelling series of missions that combine together to provide a sense of : 1) overall purpose, 2) progress and cause/effect due to the player's actions, 3) being part of a much larger world, where the actions of others have causal effect, not just your own, and 4) continuity through resource management (planes, ordnance, aircrews) and world integrity (dead things stay dead and regenerate over time as appropriate).

The final key element, though, is variety, which provides for replayability and a strong sense of the unexpected. This can be accomplished in more than one way and each way has its advantages and disadvantages.

The "fully dynamic" approach that is in vogue right now obviously does a good job of each of these things when it is executed well (Yes, Martha, there are bad "fully dynamic" campaigns out there, too. In my opinion, Jane's Longbow 2 was a really good example of executing well on this theme. But then, I am biased. ;-)

The typical flip-side of fully dynamic, though, is that the kinds of mission types tend to be more generic, and the subtleties that a human mission designer can come up with are not implemented by the algorithmic mission/campaign generator. In LB2, this was alleviated somewhat by the "special case" hand-crafted missions that came up once in a while. This added a heightened sense of "what is possible" within the game world.

So, what's another good direction? F15's campaign system is yet another hybrid. For variety within the mission, things happen differently every time that mission "shell" gets played out. Bad guys come from different places, some things may happen this time, some may not. And the combinations of all these variables make playing the same mission shell completely different every time. Next, there are a variety of mission shells that can be selected from by the campaign director as the campaign progresses. These will depend on a variety of elements ... more variety, but with a definite sense of cause-and-effect.

Finally, missions are not in a tree. There are a collection of whole campaign phase possibilities (groups of mission shell possibilities) that may or may not be a part of the actual campaign you will fly. There's a whole defining set of logic that dictates what phases can come before and after each other, which ones are prerequisites for others, and finally, which result conditions determine a final outcome.

Just to give you a sense of the scope of this, a single run-through of a full campaign will probably encompass only 25-30% of the total phase possibilities that are built into the campaign system."

To me it sounds like Janes F15 sports a strong but semi-dynamic engine, with an unusual and sophisticated strategic management system with a good dose of randomness thrown in. And this is indeed the feel I get when playing it.

F15 is ground breaking in some ways, most especially in the comms and control dimensions. It's that factor that was the largest attraction for me in actually playing the sim, although other factors, like excellent effects and high object detail, help in immersion.

I have long believed that dynamic campaigns were the wave of the future. When I first fired up F15 I thought: "I was wrong. The dynamic campaign is not THE most important factor." But Janes F15 didn't keep my interest. The world was not enduring enough.

In Janes F15 I can stop anytime. If I start a new campaign I know what to expect. And although it's an excellent simulation and a great deal of fun to fire up in a spare hour, I don't find myself drawn to return. Even though individual missions are dynamic and connect in logical ways, I'm not immersed in a believable world.

Longbow 2 Dynamic Lighting. Click for 60 K image.

So.. what is it I am really missing? What really composes that enduring world? Is this just my own psychedelic rumination, or is there something definable here?

Some years back I was studying literature in graduate school and I came across the writings of JRR Tolkien. In one particular essay, "On Fairie Stories" (In "Letters Presented to Charles Williams") he discusses the philosophy behind the creation of his world of Middle Earth.

Tolkien argues that the creation of sub-worlds is part of the human experience, the right and need for creation that we all possess as humans made in the image of a creative God. He says a great deal about the creation of persistent, consistent and believable worlds and his thoughts brought new light to the creation of fantasy worlds.

But the key point is that we have a desire to create these sub-worlds and to live in them. The question for our purposes then becomes: how to make the most attractive and believable world? What are the key elements that push toward the "willing suspension of disbelief" in military flight simulations? (Incidentally, that phrase itself comes from another writer: Coleridge.)

I've already given my implied answer that the heart of such a simulated world is the dynamic campaign engine. But now we have to go further, because there are a variety of approaches to dynamic engines. Which of these approaches is most effective in enabling "the willing suspension of disbelief?"

Let's go back to the best examples we have: Longbow 2, if22, and EF2000. What limits the ability of these sims to really draw me in?

Answer: many factors contribute to the limits of these sims to draw me in. But is it possible to indentify a determining element? The entire direction of this article implies that it is!

Let's use the analogy of a wagon wheel. At the center of the wheel is the hub; the hub supports every spoke. The hub is THE most critical part of the wheel. Lose a spoke and the wheel is weakened; lose the hub and the whole wheel collapses. The hub is the center and on it the entire structure depends.

What is really at the center of "suspension of disbelief?" For a time I thought it was a brew composed of graphics, control, comms and dynamics. Nope! Its not a brew at all. All the components "are NOT created equal." The hub is dynamics. Dynamics is the center, and everything else depends on that center.

But it gets even more complicated than that: there are soft and mushy hubs like those in EF2 and iF22, and then there are HE MAN HUBS... real time dynamics, integration of the ground war and tactical control, and the ultimate gold plating, real time multiplayer DACT.

You see, in EF2000 and in iF22 and in Longbow 2, the war ends between missions. Then a new mission set takes shape. I can choose, and there is no urgency. Even the need to generate a mission set destroys the suspension of disbelief. I am playing on a computer. The veil between the world of fantasy and reality is torn in two, and it's only with a mental effort that I re-enter that alternate world.

But all this is about to change! This doesn't mean that the first incarnations will be perfect. Maybe some of the spokes will be mis-aligned, or a bit thinner than they could be. But DiDs decision to separate TAW from F22 ADF is a ray of light in the darkness, reason to hope, because it gives them more time to develop their vision of a real time campaign where the player has tactical and strategic control over an integrated air and ground war in real time.

And TAW isn't the only game in town this summer: Microprose has their own answer to the total air war in Falcon 4.0 which will be the first entry to real time dynamics in a military flight simulation. And not long afterward Microprose will add multiplayer dissimilar air-to-air combat with a MiG 29 add on!

Click for larger image..

And now you know where I have been going with all this. Maybe the idea itself isn't so revolutionary: its Command and Conquer with a simulation overlay. But it is the wave of the future, and its going to be HOT!

Those of us who have enjoyed the AWACS interface in F22: ADF have already had a taste of what is coming. It doesn't take that much imagination to go the extra distance. Imagine this interface integrated seamlessly with ADF in a real time campaign. The clock is always ticking. No longer are you limited to what you see in the AWACS screen; now you can call up new flights at will, so long as the base has the resources.

At any time you may choose from a number of scheduled missions that are based on the current requirements to successfully prosecute the war. Or, you can jump in to fly any current mission that is being flown by any allied F22. You still have the tactical control that ADF AWACS interface gave you, though TAW may extend this control to allow more flexibility.

Furthermore, you can redirect traffic, call up Intercepts, Scrambles, CAPs, Escorts, Vis Idents, Strike missions, schedule refueling, redirect your AWACS or JSTARS. You can also decide the loadout and edit waypoints when you fly (unless you jump into a mission in progress).

But this is only the basics. What is occurring behind the scenes is much more complex. There are levels of strategy: alliances may be made or broken during the course of a campaign that will in turn influence difficulty and complexity. You may start out in a position of advantage, but the wrong move may turn your allies into enemies. (Note: for discussion of the theoretical basis of these new simulations see our reprint of Air Theory for the 21st Century).

And you are required to manage the communications intelligence as it becomes available. You are presented with regular updates on the tactical and strategic situation and this informs your decision making process. The enemy is after army targets: defend them. You know that your priority must be air control, so you manage your resources and plan your strategy accordingly.

Resource management is tactical and critical. If you are low on AIM9xs you will have to wait, and when they come in you must ensure that they arrive safely. But this means committing key assets to an escort mission. If your base comes under serious threat while they are gone... Or if the enemy takes our your roads and bridges..

There is a high degree of interaction between assets. The information war is a key component, and you must win it. Be careful to defend your AWACS and JSTARS and take care of your FACs. Your EWR and GCI network is critical. The same goes for the enemies systems: disable his comm links and you are on the way to air dominance.

And all this occurs in real time. There is no stopping to generate a set of missions based on the last eight hours of simulated time. The clock is always ticking and you have a sense of participating in a real though alternate reality. Is this psychosis, or is it .... Total Air War... or Falcon 4.0?

Von Clausewitz, the renowned theorist of war, stated that "a certain grasp of military affairs is vital for those in charge of general policy." Its interesting that the evolution of the dynamic campaign system has come about partly in response to the demands of the modern battlefield. So art imitates life! While Total Air War and Falcon 4.0 purposefully reflect the theories of John Warden III, the dynamic campaign itself is a necessity for bringing those theories to life. John Warden:

"To summarize: understand the political and technological environment; identify political objectives; determine how you want to induce the enemy to do your will (imposed cost, paralysis, or destruction); use the five-ring systems analysis to get sufficient information on the enemy to make possible identification of appropriate centers of gravity; and attack the right targets in parallel as quickly as possible. To make all this a little more understandable, it is useful to finish by mentioning the Gulf War's key strategic and operational lessons, which look as though they will be useful for the next quarter-century or more.

We can identify 10 concepts that summarize the revolution of the Gulf War and that must be taken into account as we develop new force levels and strategy:

• The importance of strategic attack and the fragility of states at the strategic level of war
• Fatal consequences of losing strategic air superiority
• The overwhelming effects of parallel warfare
• The value of precision weapons
• The fragility of surface forces at the operational level of war
• Fatal consequence of losing operational air superiority
• The redefinition of mass and surprise by stealth and precision
• The viability of "air occupation"
• The dominance of airpower
• The importance of information at the strategic and operational levels

Does this mean all campaigns must be fully dynamic or "real time" to be fun? Not at all. It means that I wish that they could be, it means that the dynamic campaign system has the ability to most closely replicate a modern military conflict, and it means that for me this type of campaign has the most potential for the willing suspension of disbelief. Your mileage may vary! But either way, it's going to be a great year! Watch for several responses to this piece in the next few days.

Part II

Ten years later we are spoilt with products that sport accelerated 3D graphics and accurate flight models, created by specialized aeronautical and software engineers. The aircraft simulations themselves are now so realistic that they are being used by the military to train personnel.

However, I personally suspect that the biggest change over the last ten years is that now, when we hand over our money at the local games store for the latest flight simulator opus, we are expecting to receive an accurate representation of the whole theatre of war. Certainly the emphasis over the last few years in combat simulation seems to be shifting to war simulators where the player interacts with the environment using his (accurately modeled) aircraft. At the heart of this change of emphasis is the Dynamic Campaign.

Often when picking up combat simulator products in your favorite software emporium the list of features will include "Dynamic Campaign". But what does that actually mean? One company recently promoted a product with "Dynamic campaign" listed on the box which turned out to be nothing more than a rather poor random mission generator. Should we consider this a "Dynamic Campaign"?

So What is a Dynamic Campaign Anyway

The definition of what Dynamic Campaign means certainly varies from simulation company to simulation company. For some companies it has become nothing more than a buzz word to stick on the side of the box to describe a linear or tree structure of missions; a shame, as a well crafted Dynamic Campaign can greatly enhance a simulation product.

For DID the term Dynamic Campaign means something else. Early in the development of Total Air War’s campaign system the designers chose to extend the concept of the Dynamic Campaign far further than the work performed on EF2000. Before work began on the development process the terms to describe the Campaign were defined. TAW is a Real Time Dynamic non-Linear Campaign. That’s quite a mouth full, lets define this a little more strictly:

Real Time:

Time constantly runs at one second per second while the campaign system is active regardless of whether the player is flying a mission or not. The campaign is not turn based and does not run in eight hour periods. There is no rerunning of missions or rewinding of the campaign system.

Dynamic:

The system reacts to the simulated environment. For example a damaged runway will get repaired over time. However things that are dead stay dead. Office blocks will not magically be repaired nor shall craters be erased from the landscape.

Non-linear:

The campaign is stochastic in that it is the opposite of deterministic. What this means in plain English is that the events are not predictable. The practical upshot is that even if the initial campaign settings of two games are the same then the events within the war will always be vastly different (you will never fly the same mission twice). A practical effect of chaos theory.

Why do Campaigns ‘Work’

Lets consider TAW a little further. The participants in the war will fight regardless of whether the player flies a mission or not. However when the player flies a mission he will encounter allies, neutrals and enemies that have their own missions within the simulated environment. Using SMART VIEWS the player can, if he wishes, view the progress of these missions. The events in the world happen around the player but do not revolve around him. When working on the EF2000 product we found this was essential to maintain ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’.

To make the simulation immersive the player has to believe, for the duration of the play session, that he is a fighter pilot. With computers as powerful as they are today producing convincing graphics is not the great problem it once was. However if the simulation of the aircraft and the combat environment is unrealistic it shatters the illusion and frustrates the player. Does this mean that the more realistic we make our games the more immersive they are? To a certain extent this is true but in accepting this we face a fundamental problem when designing campaign based games:

Realism does not always make for an enjoyable combat flight simulator.

For example who would want to fly a refueler around in circles for eight hours on patrol? Or who wants to fly CAP for six hours over an airbase without a single air to air engagement while all hell is breaking loose two hundred miles away? These are just two examples but the dynamic campaign designer faces more problems than could be listed here.

Of course you could argue that this is not important as a real fighter pilot experiences boredom on a regular basis and thus it is realistic. However we find it interesting that when we have fighter pilots visit the F-22 office at DID Towers they want to jump into the heart of the action; after all on the computer they don’t have to experience the boredom!

Another problem faced by the campaign designer is that in a true campaign environment a single pilot has little effect on the outcome of the war. In the real world a pilot could spend the entire conflict flying his missions perfectly but his side could still lose. In a video game environment losing a game through no fault of your own is an immensely frustrating experience and the campaign designer wants to prevent this from happening.

So how do we solve these problems? The Campaign and Simulation designers work very carefully to ensure that the product is realistic to maintain the suspension of disbelief and yet fun enough to keep the player interested so he comes back for more. Walking this tightrope is always a challenge.

Creating Flight Simulators and Developing Campaigns

As a games developer combat flight simulation is just about the most complex genre of video game that you could ever choose. From a programming perspective these simulations are extremely complex, require specialist personnel to create them and take an inordinately long time to develop. Specialized programmers are required for flight modeling, dog fight AI, avionics, world logic and graphics engine. This is not a comprehensive list as each project has it’s own unique requirements. Developing combat flight simulators is certainly not for the faint of heart.

Lets consider some of the issues that have to be addressed when creating a dynamic campaign system. On top of the development overhead for creating the flight simulation itself you have to consider the campaign system as well. In many products today this is the core component of the product; it is also the most complex, most difficult and usually one of the most costly modules to develop. To create a well crafted campaign system you require highly skilled programming staff who have good Artificial Intelligence skills and have an excellent understanding of the way wars are fought.

After they have been developed campaign systems take a lot of time to test. This is because of the nature of developing complex computer programs. As computer programs grow in complexity so does the likelihood of failure of the components within the program. To prevent this happening on the players home PC all bugs have to be tracked, logged and corrected during the development process. As you can appreciate this is not easy with a true dynamic campaign as their non-deterministic nature makes finding and repeating bugs very difficult.

Eventually after much debugging and eighteen hour days the product arrives in the shops. The consumers then buy and enjoy the product while the staff members responsible for creating it take a well earned vacation.

The Shameless Total Air War Plug

One of the most advanced (if not the most advanced) campaign systems currently under development is F-22 Total Air War from the F-22 Team here at DID. As previously mentioned the system is a Real Time Dynamic non-Linear Campaign. The system acts and behaves like a real conflict; the war is not put on hold while you are not sat in the cockpit of your F-22. It lives and reacts much like the real thing.

The product features 10 different campaign scenarios. Each one poses a unique challenge to the TAW player. The strategies used within the TAW campaign scenarios are based around real military doctrine on how the real F-22 will be deployed. However the enemy is not predictable and he is following his own strategies to achieve his own objectives. Only the most tenacious commanders and pilots will prevail through all the ten scenarios. F-22 TAW allows you to interact with the environment and control the outcome of the campaign using features never before seen in a campaign based flight simulator:

• Fly the massive variety of missions created by the campaign system in your F-22. Create and fly new missions to achieve your objectives using the advanced mission planner system.
• Control the AWACS to defend your assets from enemy air attack.
• Fly Scramble missions in a last ditch attempt to prevent your assets being destroyed.
• Watch the war being played out blow by blow from the war room.
• This is just to give you a taste of what is possible with the Total Air War campaign system. Total Air War will be available Q3 of 1998.

The Future of Campaign Systems

In the immediate future it is likely that more companies will produce combat simulation products that have Real Time Dynamic non-Linear Campaigns. Over time these systems will probably improve so that they encompass more facets of warfare on the contemporary battlefield such as accurately modeled tank battles or accurately modeled resource distribution in the Theatre of war.

Casting our crystal balls further in to the future things become far more interesting. Several companies over the last ten years have talked about having multi-player campaign systems you can dial in to; unfortunately few have come close to making good on their promises.

However Anyone who has played multi-player campaign with 8 pilots in EF2000 knows how much potential this holds. In the far future it is possible that Real Time Dynamic non-Linear Campaigns will run 24 hours a day on specialized servers. Thousands of participants can dial in and involve themselves in the war for as long as they want.

Of course we are a long way from achieving this ideal; there are many technical and game design problems to overcome before these kind of systems become a reality. In the mean time there is a lot of fun to be had from the current generation of dynamic campaign systems that exist in products available at your local games store.

In Conclusion

The industry and the consumers now regard Dynamic Campaign systems as one of the most important components of a combat flight simulation product. Over the course of the last ten years flight simulations have been evolving in to war simulation products with the player taking the role of a single pilot within the battlefield environment.

Dynamic Campaign systems are very difficult and costly to develop which could mean that smaller simulator developers might not be able to compete with the larger more established brands. This coupled with the limited market for flight simulators and their development costs might lead to less combat flight simulator products on the shelf of local computer stores in the near future.

The technology of dynamic campaign systems is now well established and we should see them evolve over the course of the next few years. Hopefully future technology will allow us to create massive on-line multi-player environments for our campaigns; and hopefully there will be a market out there to allow us to do it.

In conclusions Dynamic Campaigns are very cool and they are here to stay. Many thanks to the Total Air War Team (especially Steve Hunt and Tim Preece) for their input on this article.

Part III

How’s this for heresy? It really doesn’t matter whether a brand new flight simulation includes a fully dynamic real time campaign engine or not: these games hit or miss based on whether they’re actually fun to play over a period of time.

A balanced mix of the essential ingredients is far more important than any particular implementation choice for making those elements. Unless the game makes the player feel a compelling urge to keep playing, the most dynamic campaign engine in the world won’t salvage the day. There’s at least one essential element that feeds this urge, and many developers are paying less attention than they might. This can and does spoil the balance, but dynamics isn’t it.

Conventional wisdom seems to be leaning toward the view that the more real-time and dynamic the implementation of a campaign engine is the better. But that is simply focusing on the implementation choice and not what really matters. There are both good and bad implementations of sims with fully dynamic campaign engines: consider DiD’s EF2000 against Interactive Magic’s much-maligned iF22 for example. Dynamic campaigns don’t guarantee great sims.

To underscore that point from the flip side of the coin, there have been compelling simulations without dynamic campaign engines. Most people would have a hard time labelling the campaign engine implementation in Falcon 3 as dynamic. And yet, who wouldn’t agree that Falcon 3 is one the best flight sims of all time? Its campaign engine, in its time, did a pretty good job of implementing a compelling gaming experience.

The May editorial on CombatSim takes the view that Janes’ F-15 will ultimately fail the "fun over time" test and layes the blame for this on a campaign implementation that is less dynamic. While I support the view that the campaign engine in Janes’ F-15 may not have as much staying power as we might have hoped in its current form, I disagree that the lack of a totally dynamic implementation is the key to this irony.

I say irony because it is after all Andy Hollis that guided creation of both Longbow2 and F-15 and who so eloquently argued the elements essential to a good campaign engine (also quoted in the CombatSim May editorial) and that a dynamic, real time campaign engine is not required to implement these elements. Longbow2 is perfect testimony to that reasoning and proves that Hollis is, fundamentally, quite right. The trick though is combining these elements in the right proportions to get a balanced and satisfying gameplay experience from the result.

Let me also say before we go any further that Janes’ F-15 is a remarkable product in many ways and I’m having great fun learning the ins and outs of the Strike Eagle. It almost feels like treason to criticize this otherwise great work. But the campaign engine implementation is the weakest part of the whole, yet not because it lacks full dynamics.

Janes F-15 accomplishes all five of the essential elements from Hollis’ definition of a good campaign engine and it does it without a real time, dynamic implementation:

1. A sense of purpose
2. Progression with player cause and effect
3. A feeling of being part of a bigger virtual world around you
4. Continuity and integrity in the virtual world
5. Variety and the unexpected

Arguably, you may be hard pressed to state more succinctly than this what it takes to make a good campaign engine. So if F-15 does all these, what’s missing?

F-15 falls short in terms of the feedback provided to virtual pilots in between missions on their performance and the state of the wider war. And to be fair, F-15 is by no means the first sim to fall short in this area. In fact this is perhaps generally one of the weaker areas in the many sims. In F-15 the weakness just seems a little more detrimental than in some other cases, perhaps because it raises the bar so high in other dimensions. What I mean by this is that while the F-15 missions themselves have interesting structure and unpredictability that neatly cover for the lack of a dynamic campaign, the debriefing and war status update information make it glaringly obvious that the missions themselves are largely self contained and that the whole lacks fluidity, the essential elements of connection and flow.

The debrief text is so obviously just a collection of disjointed elements that appear or not depending on what events are triggered during the mission. Not only are these elements disjointed but they can be repetitious and in some cases even contradictory. Consider the case of the debrief that shows your crew perishing in one sentence only to go on in the next to soundly congratulate you on a resoundingly successful mission. Something not quite right there, methinks.

What’s more, F-15 falls into the trap of providing statistics in lieu of explicit bomb damage assessment (BDA) for the mission. To me it seems that knowing what percentage of my bombs caused hits and hence how efficient on a scale of 1 to 100 I am with said bombs is academically interesting but much less visceral and satisfying than it could be. The ratio of hits to kills just leave me puzzled as to what I hit but didn’t quite nail.

In this regard, Falcon 3 still rates surprisingly high. Its devices were perhaps crude by today’s standards but they were effective in their context. Mission debriefs provided a blow by blow account of who hit what and with what. You’ll notice that from this you can construct your own efficiency stats should you so choose. But more to the point the reverse is not true: if you start from the stats alone, you can’t construct the BDA target list for each flight member.

To me there’s quite a difference between loosing off four BVR missiles only to net two class A fighters when compared to a haul of say two cargo planes for the same missile expenditure. Both however represent 50% BVR missile effectiveness. Which version of the reckoning would you prefer to have in green ink on your logbook, the statistic or those juicy Mig-29’s?

Also, the scrolling list of cities gained and lost between missions gave a quick feel for the tide of the war without the need to carefully examine the theatre wide map (although there were excellent add-on tools to do this in the shape of the StratFalc family of course). Fly two or three good missions in a row and the gains would start adding up. Fly two or three bad missions in a row and, well, not such good news: again a simple device but quite effective.

For a modern sim then, I would expect at least the same visceral sense of what occurred during a mission but presented perhaps more in keeping with the sophistication of other areas of current offerings. I’ve picked on F-15 here as falling short of the mark from among the current generation but as I say, it’s far from alone in this regard.

This feedback element then is the crux of the matter for me. The imbalance in this area is what detracts from the otherwise strong elements of the F-15 campaign engine. But without the balance the whole is somewhat devalued and in F-15’s case unfortunately disproportionately so.

For this reason I suggest a sixth essential element be added to the definition of good and compelling campaigns. Namely, a campaign implementation must provide enough information to the virtual pilot before, during and after missions so as to ensure that players feel personal investment in the gaming experience.

In other words, a successful campaign engine presents a situation and tools for the player so as to create a sense of urgent and anxious desire to hit that time on target, nail the DMPI on the first pass or down the marauding bombers before they level the home airbase. The sheer exhilaration that comes from meeting these challenging goals and keeping up your end of the virtual team effort is the hook that will keep gamers involved and coming back for more.

Consider this as a possible acid test. If you feel a wrench in the gut when you hear your threat warning system announce an incoming missile, not because you might have to start the mission over again, but because getting shot down and failing the mission objectives could jeopardize other elements of the war effort…well then you know you’ve found a good campaign engine.

And a parting thought. Debriefs in general are an area of sims that are typically under exploited. I am amazed that no one has thought to incorporate BDA "photographs" as part of routine mission debriefs. Mission planners now often show target imagery in the briefing; how hard would it be to add the post strike imagery to the debrief for the same target?

The Smartview system implemented in DiD’s EF2000 v2 and now F22 ADF does a great job following action all over the theatre of operations during missions. I wonder how hard it might be to extend this sort of capability to look at ground target areas on request to give players a chance to do their own post strike BDA assessment? I imagine this might give an excellent way to provide a more satisfying debrief than simple congratulations on 75% of your bombs striking a target of some unknown sort.

For that matter, what about gun and weapon camera "footage"? This is an element that might add a highly realistic twist on the problem. Who among us would deny that watching the weapon and FLIR tapes of action in Desert Storm on CNN made the virtual pilots among us feel one step closer to the action?

This last one might be a bit harder of course but such devices as these might go a long way to adding to a sense of your virtual peers acknowledging your accomplishments in the mission. Positive reinforcement: I want my BDA and of course the bragging rites to go with it!

Editor: In real life Mark manages a team focused on application software performance optimization for 3rd party server and workstation applications that run on Intel Architecture. You can send him comments at Mark Doran