Jane's Combat Simulations: WWII Fighters • Electronic Arts 1998

Описание: Today I present you one of the last survey flight sims produced by Paul Grace under EA/Jane's logo. He was a veteran in this genre known for producing such titles as F/A-18 Interceptor, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator / Trainer 2.0, LHX Attack Chopper, Su-25 Sturmovik, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, 688 Attack Sub, SEAL Team, Fighters series of games (USNF, ATF, Fighters Anthology) and even Wing Commander III. Quite a resume...

This WW2 themed flight sim game focused mainly on battles fought during last phase of the war in the Low Countries. Flyable planes include 4 Allied warplanes: Spitfire MkIX, P-51D Mustang, P-47D Thunderbolt and P-38J Lighting, and 3 on the Axis side: Bf-109 G-6, FW-190 A-8 and first jet that entered service - Me-262 A. There is tons of stuff to watch and read about those planes and the ace pilots flying them.

The sim let you fly in several modes - Fly Now, Quick Mission, Single Mission, Campaing and also featured Mission Builder and Multiplayer mode.

You may notice some similarities in WWII Fighters with eariler Fighters titles - familiar windows which you can populate your screen with, this time analog gauges and familiar target view. Interestingly the cockpits were painstakingly modelled in fully 3d with all the instruments working as they should, for comparison European Air War released also in 1998 had 2d and 3d pits, though the 3d ones were less detailed than those found here.

Speaking of detail, the 3d engine was completely new this time, after reusing the older one for 4 years (USNF 1994 - FA 1998) which supported only software renderer, this time 3d accelerated graphics card was a requirement - it supported Direct 3D, Glide and OpenGL APIs. It featured nice lighting effects, proper 3d clouds and lots of detail. Just switch to outside view, squeeze the trigger and admire the stream of bullet casings ejected from the gun ports.

Along with graphics engine also flight model was greatly updated, flying felt more realistic with greatly enhanced damage model. Even interior of your plane can sustain damage, with individual instruments becoming inoperative after taking hits to the cockpit.

As a tradition in those sims I guess started with the camels in LHX and later continued in USNF with cows and other ox like animals, here we may be greated with a rare sight of a deer crossing the runway during our take off or landing. Who knows what else lurks in Ardennes forest?

Some cool links:
Making of video:    • Retro Archive • Jane's World War II Fighte...  

This runs fine on Windows 10, just use dgVoodoo as a Direct3D wrapper.

0:00 Intro - it mixed pre-rendered cutscenes with in-engine footage
1:29 Main Menu - stulized as a museum
2:04 P-51D Mustang showcase - Cockpit
2:54 P-51D Mustang showcase - Basic Armament
3:49 P-51D Mustang showcase - Powerplant
4:42 P-51D Mustang showcase - Video
6:50 P-51D Mustang showcase - Jane's Information
8:10 P-51 Ace Anderson
10:30 Allied Campaign (5th mission)
12:00 Mission Start
14:28 First Waypoint - we have a mid-air collision
15:42 Bandits sighted!
17:20 First kill (stolen)
21:25 Second kill
24:05 Last kill, gone Winchester
25:03 Playing as bait
25:52 Head on mid-air collision
26:22 Heading home
29:28 Bf-109 disintegrates mid air
30:50 Bombers diverting to England
32:10 Home base in sight
34:50 Bambi on the runway!
36:46 Debriefing

#RetroFlightSims