homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Rise of Flight - The First Great Air War WWI sim, based on the IL-2 engine announced

I'm in.

All the fun of WWI with the FM fidelity of the IL-2 series? Yeah, baby!

Not being a serious FM sort of fellow, so long as the Camel has wicked torque, a blipping engine, the Snipe good maneuverability (but not a lot of power) and the DH-2 lives up to it's name as the "whirling incenerator" I'm happy.

Red Baron was the first sim that really, really interested me, and Red Bareon 3D (RB3D) completely captured me for a couple of years, especially since online play became reasonable right about the time it hit it's prime.

The upsides of RB3D were the online play, the fun of WWI, and - above all else - the online community that came with it. Indeed, I flew the sim for the last six months not because it was fun so much as I didn't want to let go of the great friends I made there. Indeed, the BA in my nick here is from those days when I was an RFC 101 "Black Adder."

The downsides was the open FM/DM, and the technology getting away from Glide. I'm not disparaging the fine work done by the community one bit, but I suffered greatly from FM confusion towards the end, which sucked the joy out of flying for me. Am I flying NFM (Normal Flight Model), Flanders in Flames (FiF), or the Great War flight model? Add in that every tourney tended to have an improved FM/DM, and one could find oneself flying a new sim every six months or so (or flying multiple FM's simultaneously).

Add in the 'hit box' DM (which was very cool for the time the sim was made), and I found myself trying to "sim the sim." Indeed, more than one RB3D'er that tried IL-2 out was shocked to find that I, the worst virtual pilot in WWI (validated, as I was dead last in the individual rankings of a major tournament two years running), could shoot them down, while they shot at my wingtips where the hit boxes would "normally" be and got bupkiss.

I can't stress enough how the failings were mine, not the community's (or even the sim's), as it is still around and kicking.

I had a whale of a good time with RB3D, and would love to fly the WWI skies again in a more modern simulation.