Keep it Going….!
Work continues apace. Simon, still in the ring swinging with the flight model, has been test-flying his Spitfire I, while Gerry has been shoring up the visuals. Over the last two weeks, I’ve seen reports of a Spit with such monster torque that you can’t keep it straight even with full rudder. But also, some reports that the Merlin actually did require more than a bit of care on takeoff, thus partially vindicating the burgeoning Target For Today modeling.
On the damage side, Simon’s now envisioning a 16-section wing (!!), with the possibility of non-rectangular hit boxes tied to the flight model.
Nice that he’s going through the trouble, but I can’t see the need for 8 sections on each side of the wing, especially for a fighter-sized aircraft. Something like a Lancaster or a B-29, sure. At any rate, I’m just hoping that his calculation method allows the author to make different decisions and can create 6-section wings (root, middle, outer per side). That’s how I see doing it.
The wild card at the moment is Paul Guhl. He’s checking in with little bits of progress, most notably that he thinks he’s solved the lighting limitation issues, so that we can plan on having flexible cockpit lights or luminescent gauges (as was or wasn’t available per type). But, he also has to make the damage modeling ideas work. If he comes through with the ability to use irregular damage hit boxes, and tie them to the damage model, with probability-based component damage… well, I think we should be happy with the end result. The other thing I want to be sure we get is variable materials, to allow for “toughness” or resistance to failure for different parts. The hard-coded one-material inflexibility problem was crippling at Targetware… it created a bunch of problems with weapon effectiveness.
Speaking of Targetware, the news came out on the separatist Target: Tobruk site that Vespa met with -sick- and got confirmation from the horse’s mouth that the project is dead in the water with no plans to move forward. I dutifully went to the TW site and penned the obituary… seeing as -sick- can’t be bothered to do it. Arrrrgh…. still seething about that….
But, we’re getting closer to the time when I can commit to scaling the mountain of work needed to get Hakko Ichiu up and flying. I need to be sure that Simon has “perfected” his FM method, and that it’s documented. Same with all the 3D and 2D production stuff Gerry’s working on.
So, here’s hoping we get some confirmation soon from Paul (outlaw) Guhl that we’ve got a new GUI, ballistics and weapons and some semblance of a server-based, MMOG system to put all these planes into. If all that comes together, that fires off a big Very pistol for me and signals a new push to finally get a serious, historically-based flight sim on the road to release.
