homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation Air Combat - General Modern Era Retro Flight Simulator: F-19 Game Design Document

No, no I'm not expecting a DCS/Falcon 4 kind of fidelity here which is actually one of the reasons why your project got my interest

And that's also why I asked/suggested the F-35 since afterall this isn't a Falcon 4 or DCS kind of fidelity (and as such with the hope that implementing a F-35 would be somehow easier) but yes, I get your point point: It's definitely easier to model the F-117 compared to the F-35 (or even compared to the F-22) and to me the F-117 is just as fine

Oh, and of course very nice screenshots here!

Oh I'm not ruling out the F35, and with that detailed cockpit demonstrator video floating around on the interwebs there's even a good source for how the menus and MFDs work, but... for now I'll stick to the Nighthawk

Update: Playing around with automated building placement. Still far from actually generating towns and roads and such, but I have an idea for that.



A video of the RCS meter in action:

Tactical map is functional! The symbology is not quite there yet of course:

Cool, I can't wait for a F-35

In the meanwhile I'll be following your project and eagerly waiting its release.
Your project is really looking great indeed!

Looks like you're making faster progress than ED's Hornet!

Indeed!

I fully agree

Instead of F-35 I would rather have the actual classic F-19 in the cold war era. It would be a great homeage to the original F-19 Stealth Fighter game.

Since the F-19 was a fictional creation (still plausible though) it was more capable stealth fighter than real F-117 (A/A missions, carrier capable etc.).



Just imagine the possibilities with that plane. Anyone remembers Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising and its Frisbees of Dreamland Chapter?

Update time!
Proper MFD symbology this time, currently supporting static ground targets, SAM, and ships. I've also implemented a targeting cursor that gives the pilot a way to correlate the FLIR target point on the ground with the data on the HSD. I'll have to add a "NOT SOI" text to the MFD to make clear you're not steering the cursor but the laser, but I don't know if the F117A had that text...

And a small update: Taking hits now has a chance of destroying parts of your wings or control surfaces, or cause an engine failure.The cool thing is that I simulate this by essentially removing the lift factor on various points of the wing and control surfaces, which results in very cool failure behavior. You can end up limping home if you're lucky.
Having flown many RC planes that had bits breaking off in-flight, I can attest to the startling realism of this approach
Remind me to add a brake chute lateron, because right now it's almost impossible to get the plane to stop after landing.

Oh and I had a cool bug related to guided missiles: Sometimes SAMs would launch one, but it would just fall to the ground. Turns out that if the target plane was flying away from the launcher, the fact that the distance to target increases briefly caused the proximity fuze logic to trigger, and act as if the missile had gone ballistic after a miss.

I guess you have to implement delayed fuse mechanic then

Are you planning to add trim function in case of damage and assymetric lift?

Good job so far btw.

Trim is already in. The chances of it helping are slim however
It sucks that the F had no flaps or airbrakes.

And yeah, i added a configurable time before the fuze wakes up after launch.

Update for today:

x) Pulse/Doppler radar gameplay implemented
x) Improved FLIR rendering

Watch me sneaking past that pulse radar SAM by flying straight towards it, while flying perpendicular lights me up like a christmas tree.

Another update:

Multiplayer! I was getting to the point where there are so many moving parts that I need to start adding multiplayer, so I don't risk making this too complex in the future. I haven't done much testing yet but so far things seem to be working reasonably well. I'm sure there's plenty of things that are still broken but the basics are there.

Why multiplayer? Well I'd like players to be able to cooperate and, for example, provide scenarios that require one or more players to soften up the air defences so that the others can get through and deliver their payload on the high value targets. A full mission would involve coordinating your takeoff and attack runs, and making sure that all your fellow pilots make it back to base.

I already have a solid solution for NAT traversal and a multiplayer lobby system that I'll bring over from another project, so you don't have to deal with manual port forwarding and such terrible things. I'll have to do a main menu at some point too...

Update for today:

x) fixed multiplayer radar processing
x) fixed multiplayer RWR sound handling
x) fixed player aircraft bouncing around on spawn
x) fixed missile launches activating weapon cam MFDs on all clients
x) fixed SAM launcher rotation not being synchronized

Known issues:
Explosion VFX not synced to clients
Explosion SFX not synced to clients
Terrain collision does not result in damage/destruction yet
Player aircraft is just deleted on destruction, should implement proper death handling (possibly observer mode?)
Tactical map does not display fellow coop players
SAM launchers still rotate their turret towards a target even though they no longer have tracking lock

Still to implement:
AAA (guns, ZSU, with tracer projectiles)
AAA (heavy flak with airburst)
SAM C3 information network (one SAM discovering you should inform nearby air defenses)
AAA barrage (untargeted fire near your approx trajectory if you were detected or destroyed something nearby)
Main menu
NAT Traversal
Server List
Ground Features generation
Proper exterior model (with landing gear and movable control surfaces)
Proper cockpit model

This looks very good so far - great work.

Which theaters are you planning to implement?

I loved flying flying in pitch black at night over central Europe in the F-19 on one of those cold war missions, avoiding all detection and mountains! I loved looking around with the trackcam pressing "n" to pick new things up on the screen and then looking up those towns, radars etc on a real map of West and East Germany and Poland!

It would be good if you could have the F-117 as the more realistic aircraft, and add the F-19 as a sort of Easter egg, based mostly on the F-117, just with a different 3d model, some speed/flight tweaks, extra weapons/bays tweaks etc... Either way, what you're doing looks very interesting.

I admit i do not know if i can offer you real geography. Reason being that right now, all terrain is procedurally generated. How important is this for you?

Personally I would opt for real geography. Without it a lot of immersion would be lost. Maybe you could combine the procedurally generated terrain "tile" types (like city, rural area, coast, forest etc) and use those tiles to build actual geography?

I love the retro sky! Perfectly captures the oldschool feel!

Are you planning on including Track IR support?

I can't promise real geography, sorry. The terrain is completely procedural and there are no tiles that "fit together other than the one next to it.
TrackIR is a definite possibility lateron.

Update for today: I've started work on AAA guns. No MFD symbology yet, explosion and damage radius still missing, but you can see that the aiming works pretty well. I've also added some visual spice to make those tracer rounds really pop.