The following note was posted on our USAF forum recently by Aviv of Pixel Multimedia...

First of all I would like to thank all of you who spent their time downloading and playing Jane's USAF demo. Special thanks are for those of you who took the time to comment or criticize the demo. We monitor your comments and take notes for future products / patches we will have in the future.

There is a very good debate on the news groups and forums about the "light" sim characteristics of the game and whether "hard core" flight sim fans should have this game or not. In this post I will specify why do we think USAF is a game with a lot of appeal to "hard core" flight sim fans and explain some of the design concepts we had to consider.

1. My job in Pixel is being the game's lead designer. That is the gameplay design not the art. I came into designing simulation games straight from the Air Force. I am still an active fighter pilot with thousands of flight hour on many jets (mainly F15).

2. I love flight simulator games and played them since I has a kid and played most of them over the years before going into the simulation game business so yes you may consider me as "hard core" simmer just like you.

3. The flight simulator games have two traditional categories, that Paul Grace used to call "Study" sim and "Survey" sim. A study sim is a one-plane sim where the developers try to simulate every possible switch and knob in the airplane just as a military trainer. (Jane's F 15, Longbow, Falcon 4.0 are great examples). The heart of this game is the airplane.

A survey sim is a sim where several planes are simulated, therefor compromises are made in order to unify the interface and cockpit between the planes so players will not face 8 different radar systems and HUD symbologies. Try playing 4 different study sims on the same day and you will understand why.

This does not mean that survey sims are easier to play; we have one-plane study sims that are very easy to master, and it is possible to create a very difficult and complex survey game. USAF belongs to this "Survey" flight sim category, letting the players taste and experience being part of the most powerful modern Air Force in the world.

Demo Opening

4. The idea behind the gameplay design of USAF was to make this game playable for a wide verity of players. Yes we wanted the game to be fun and playable for the casual player or the first timers. The flight simmers community is currently rather small since a lot of people think that the games are complicated and frustrating so we have created an arcade view where you can fly the plane and fight from an outside 3Rd party view.

The Opposition

We have created great interactive training missions and added all the help systems we could think of: tool tips, cockpit system help, a step by step informative manual, smart installation that customizes the game for the player skills and player's system etc. We know that the serious guys are the opinion leaders and that a successful game with a big strong community built around it is dependent on the serious flight sim fans. My job was to represent all serious flight sim fans in the USAF design group.

So here are the features that USAF holds for the serious flight sim fan :

*Real world terrain, as a pilot this is one thing that was always missing from flights sims... the terrain never looked real. Well USAF is real, you get to fly over Las Vegas, the grand canyon, Baghdad, Munich mountains look like mountains, rivers like rivers and there is no one repetitive tile to be found. All this is done on a hardware accelerated graphic engine that supports unlimited resolutions. I never saw such a high quality terrain on any military simulator (accept the ones we are now building).

*Mission Creator: one of the biggest evolutions from IAF was a change in the missions format and a new Developers mission editor. This editor was then warped with a friendly user interface and a help system to make it a full blown mission editor where the serious players can build complex mission using nearly 300 available objects in the USAF data base.

The Action

*Flight recorder: player can record all their flights in the game and exchange recorded flights with others. A mission event log helps players jump to the point of interest in the recorded flight, and even new camera positioning can be re-recorded during playback, making your flight into an action movie for your friends.

*Flight model: USAF has a 6 DOF new flight model that simulates every force and acceleration from basic controls to springs and dampers during taxi, to explosions effect and malfunctions. New players can turn features off to make the FM easier to handle.

MiG Action

The Damage

*Advanced Avionics and weapons suite. The design was to make the avionics and weapon suite playable in two modes. First, the easy one click operation way, for example: press enter to toggle radar targets. Second, the full control hard way: we still let you use the full cockpit and lock on the target you want using the radar cursor. I use this a lot during my intercepts to lock on the element I want to engage quickly and efficiently.

*Another example is that you can slave your Laser designator to the radar by selecting the easy targeting option or visually scan the area using the LANTIRN display and designate the target visually. USAF is the only game I know of that allows players to perform Laser CO-Op between planes.

Details

For example one player may fly the F117 and after finishing his own limited (2 LGB's) armament keep circling over the SAM protected area and designate targets for another player flying the A10 with tons of weapons doing a loft delivery out of the SAM range. In addition players can experience new TV guided weapons delivery such as the AGM 130 and 142.

*Multiplayer games: USAF will make a great multiplayer platform where players can fly different Jets on Co-OP and head to head situations. I cannot describe to you how great it is to have a 2 Vs 2 guns only dogfight inside the grand canyon, I wish I could do this one day with a real jet.

*Then there is Jane's World War, that in my opinion is the dream multiplayer platform for simulation games and the future of simulation games.

*Open Architecture: we have kept most of the USAF data base and art in conventional formats: texts, bmp files etc. we plan to release additional tools like a converter from 3Dmax so players can create and edit new models, a FM parameters tool and detailed explanations about the way the USAF data base is build to help players prepare new stuff for USAF as commercial add-ons and free stuff to download from the net.

The Views

6. A word about the demo design: making the demo design was not an easy task. There are enormous limitations to such a demo, main one of course is the download size, the 50 MB limit we have set has left us with a tiny piece of high resolution terrain and very limited art resources. In addition the demo mission had to be specially created for the demo since we could only show a fraction of the game. The key guide lines were:

*Showing the terrain engine we have picked one of the best places in the USA data base , (the canyon terrain is the most heavy one to render, those of you who are having frame rate problems should know that this is the slowest place to fly, fly past the base to the east to find a great increase of frame rate).

The HUD

*Showing several nice 3d models.

*Giving a very general look and feel of the game that player can have fun with it without going through the training missions and without a user manual. You guys should know that this demo gives a real tiny fraction of USAF features. Keep monitoring the online sim sites and the Jane's insiders since we are going to reveal more of the game features and additional screen shots from time to time.

The Results

I hope this was not too long, have fun and thanks again for your interest in Jane's USAF."

Aviv
Lead game Designer
Pixel Israel