(This article may be found at http://www.combatsim.com/htm/2000/07/cfs2part2)

| Previous | | Next |

Page 2

Combat Flight Simulator 2 - Part II
By Jim Tittle

CSIM: We assume in gunnery that the target hit boxes are scalable. Is there a gun convergence harmony at a preset distance as on real fighters? Is it adjustable?

Tucker: Our harmonization range is preset in the game. They are currently out at about 300 meters, but that could change depending on what our play-testing shows.



Hitting the Silk



CSIM: Will the graphics involve detailed damage effects, such as pieces flying off, visible incendiary round hits, oil stains and such? Discuss briefly the features of both damage and graphics.

Tucker: One of the areas where we've done significant improvement is in the visual representation of damage. We've added new break points for aircraft so that they can come apart in a wider variety of ways. Wings, for example, now can take wingtip damage, which you might survive -- or can break off at the wing root, which you can't survive.

Damaged parts now show infrastructure, so that a damaged wingtip shows spars and shredded metal. Instead of fire or smoke always coming from the center of your aircraft, smoke and fire is now tied to damage areas.

Logically, we are using pretty much the same system we used in CFS1. To be honest, that system modeled damage extremely well. The only area where the logical part of damage needed a bit of work is in balancing the actual damage numbers a bit, to make sure that we don't have too much likelihood of one sort of damage and not enough of the other, and to make sure aircraft aren't too easy or too hard to kill.

| Previous | | Next |

(This article may be found at http://www.combatsim.com/htm/2000/07/cfs2part2)