(IL2) Pacific Fighters is Gold!

[Beirut]

For the fellow flight sim jockeys here, there are reports that Pacific Fighters has gone GOLD!

For those not in the loop, PF has full Pacific carrier action, carrier takeoffs and landings, naval battles, kamikaze attacks, and state of the art graphics.

You'll need decent harware to run it, but it's looking to be a five star flight sim.

And I just upgraded my machine for this sim. Can't wait!

[Shahed]

Kyo sakite, asu chiru
Hana no wagami ka na
Ikade sono ka wo kiyoku todomen.

Onishi, Kamikaze Tokotai Ei

Today blossoming, tomorrow scattered
Life is like a delicate flower
Could one expect it's fragrance to last forever.

Admiral Onishi, Member, Divine Wind Special Attack Squadron.

Written in a scroll, presented to the first Kamikaze pilots on the formation of the unit.

BAAAAANZZAAAAAIII !!!

*ahem* yes looking very much forward to it too !

[Kraellin]

is this the IL2 sequel?

K.

[Shahed]

Yeop. IL-2 engine upgraded, moved the battle to the Pacific. The coolest thing I'm looking forward to is carrier ops. I love that in LOMAC, had a lot of AWESOME moments returning to carrier after a mission with my wingie following me in (Multiplayer), and buzzing the deck, breaking off to rejoin the glidescope, great feeling and the graphics in Lock On just make it lie real. I posted some more (unrelated) screenshots carefully chosen from many, in the Arena screenshot sticky, check it out if you are interested.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...t=30751&page=3

Carrier Ops in Pacific Fighters should be equally amazing. I hope that it's well done i.e you have AI aircraft or even stationary aircraft on deck, to full recreate the humm a live deck.

Hmm let's see I also have a nice video (hosted by my squadron) here of modern carrier ops. This video is taken by a naval aviator, showing aircraft departing carrier in the Arabian Sea, flying over Pakistan, refuelling near the Afghan border and then strike in Afghanistan.... It's really worth watching if you are an aviantion fan, it's a keeper .. ohh and you get to see a high female-male ratio on this particular carrier ENJOY !

Sun & Sand over Afghanistan

While we are at it, let me share a nice video with you which I received from a airman working in the USAF, this was filmed during a live fire excercise. It's VERY real, very unique and has some absolutely amazing footage of aerial engagement training, almost entirely filmed from the cockpit:

Eagles @ Archer

Enjoy !

[Kraellin]

sinan,

did you ever play air warrior or air warrior III? we had this stuff back in 1989 on the Genie network from Kesmai corp. great fun! you could play in the pacific theatre or the european. yes, multiplayer, real time, high res. at first it was limited to 40 people, but they eventually opened it up to even more. great fun dive bombing japanese carriers with f4's or whatever it was. massive furball dogfights and even historical events hosted by the devs. they also had a great player rating system which kept track of missions flown, kills, things destroyed and so on. bombers could hold multiple real players to fill all the seats and even some of the fighter/bombers could crew more than one person. they modeled everything off real plane specs and i'm telling you now that flying a b-17 off a runway with a full bomb load was no easy task. that sucker would lumber on forever and finally, just barely get its wheels off the ground. once you got up to altitude for a bombing run, it was just as realistic. the 'bombadier' took over control of the bomber and using his pinpoint bomb site would steer the plane over the bomb site and drop his load. control reverted back to the pilot and it was a race to get the heck out of there before the enemy fighters could reach altitude and knock you down.

i loved that game!

if il2 pacific comes anywhere close to this, i'm there :)

K.

[Beirut]

Sinan,

Great videos! The F-15 cockpit one was one of the best I've seen. It's a keeper.

If you have any more...

[Shahed]

K

Nice post. Actually no, I never did play that. From what you described I could have thought it's FB, or PF, because it's pretty much the same in those games. I can't recall if they did do multiple players from different positions in the bombers for FB, but I think not. In any case LOMAC is where most of my simming time in PC was spent in the past year. In FB I do recall the occasional sortie with a bomber formation of four of my squadron mates, who jumped into FB for kicks. We had a hard time staying straight on the runway for formation takeoff, as none of us knew how to lock the tail whell (at least I did'nt). SO here I was with my right wing touching number 4's left (i was in 3rd spot) wing, rumbling down the runway wiht a MASSIVE ROAR. As we approached the end of the runway lead aircraft finally got off the ground, we'd been running staright and level at wheel's altitude since about a third of the way down the runway.

I managed to hold formation during the somewhat perilous climb at stall speed. I also managed to hold formation, and then change to an inverted V (nice gun cover). We flew as high as we could which took at least 15 minutes, to get to cruise altitude and then we flew unevetfully above all the dogfights taking place below us en route to the target area. Some of the other players on the server, err no actually it was just one single lone Me-109 that joined us and gave us cover over the target area.

We were intercepted about 6 minutes before comencing the bombing run. Lead ordered us to stay on course and hit the target, anything else was secondary. We are not to abort unless very seriously threatened.

Our lone Me-109 pilot peeled off, increasing power to elegantly engage the first incoming fighter. The enemy fighter bored straight thru and avoided our escort's guns. He made one pass right through the formation. I held the course till the very last minute and then switched to different gunner's positions, everyone did the same. This was not easy at all as I had to be carefull not to shoot a friendly AND make sure the aircraft was not deviating off course ! The enemy interceptor was hit by the lead aircraft's guns, pieces flew off the main fuselage just behind the canopy as the pilot engaged his own guns, damaging the left wing and the left horizontal stabilizer. Right behind him came our escort zipping right between, it was amazing that no one shot him down by mistake. I guess that's because we were all on Teamspeak voice chat and everyone shouted "FRIENDLY ! FRIENDLY !!" at the same time and we stopped shooting and jumped back into the pilot's seat. Our escort pursued and downed the first interceptor behind us.

We made the bomb run and literally smacked the field dead center, our bombs made a neat and beautiful little inverted V on the ground. Unfortunately not everythign hit anything but hell, sh*t happens. We banked slowly left and headed back to base...ouch this getting long...so....

We were ok till about half way when we found out that our escort has been shot down, he typed MAYDAY ! in the chat box. Right after that everyone on the enemy team wanted out ass and they wanted it real bad. We got hit by at least 3 independant (no idea what teamwork is) fighters, which came in one by one at regular intervals, until we began our descent towards our base. One of the intercepts was absolutely spectacular to watch from my view, the no.2 aircraft up ahead on my right was hit in one of the engines right as I was shooting at the aircraft diving in from above us...I was following the tracers and decresing my lead to target as the aircraft came closer...as he began to fire I found the correct lead and my gun started to make impact...he continued to fire like a kamikaze and held course, I saw my freindlies engine start smoking out of the corner of my eye but kept my finger on the trigger...a microsecond later the enemy aircraft exploded into fragments and pieces of him dispersed in between out formation. I can't possibly express how COOL that was..absolutely amazing and the whole sequence lasted no more than 6-8 seconds...amazing stuff.

We landed back to base in one formation of 3, and the heavly damaged aircraft trailing behind. It was an absolutely amazing gaming experience. I bet I'll remember that forever. It would be great if PF gives you the option to command different sections of the bomber. To be honest, I can;t even remember all the aircraft that got added to FB since inception but I'm 100% sure the B-17 was added as a non flyable in one of the last 2 patches. I do vaguely recall that it will be a flyable sometime in the future.

Beirut, I had a lot of aviation vids on my PC which I meant to upload to our squadron server for public dissemination (all shareware of course), BUT I did not get round to it before my last (forced) reformat. Anyway we do have a couple more videos I can share with you, at this time (save target as):

Mig-29 aerobatics team video
Note: short but sweet !

The Russian Knights ! .. make NO mistake these boys are ELITE !
note: This is damm good display of some serious, by the seat of your pants, action. You'll also see something Total War related right at the start of the vid ;)

I will try to find some others for you guy/s, uploading might take time so if I find a good place where there are already soem uploaded I'll pop in a hyperlink.

Let's finish with something virtual here:

This is a preview of Pacific Fighters made long ago using the IL-2 engine, by a fellow flight sim fan, renowned for his movie making skills.
Pacific Fighters trailer

So ? you know how to fly formation ? Check this for pointers. This is made by a serving pilot (Mirage 2000) in the French Air Force. Brilliant. He makes it looks easy, but as anyone who tried formation flight in the virtual world will tell you. It's NOT easy !
Formation flying is what separates the boys from the men.

edit: sorry for typos

[Kraellin]

hehe, yup. fun stuff. i dont know half thsoe abbreviations you're using, but the spirit and descriptions come thru just fine :)

air warrior was an amazing game at the time, and if you can believe it, we played this thing over the Genie network at 1200 baud, sometimes 2400, if you paid extra for it. lol.

i was so hooked on that game that once when i had some free vacation time, i went and visited their offices. i'd known john and kelton, the owners/lead programmers from earlier games they'd done, and it was great fun meeting them and watching kelton program and test the new land based vehicles, jeeps and tanks. at the time, those jeeps were pretty rickety. he'd go about 50 feet and crash ;)

the graphics were fair. it was 1989 after all, so mostly low to medium res stuff. but, you could skin your own planes in high res if you wanted to. but, only you could see it. some managed to do a bit of creative skinning and removed parts of the plane to see better. lol. this got found out and some anti-cheats were put in soon after that :)

but the graphics werent important. the game play was incredible. you get 40 guys up in the air with an assortment of wwii fighters and bombers and the furballs were amazing. i tended to fly a spitfire because of the incredible maneuverability, but occaisionally i'd take a japanese zero or an american p-51 mustang....very fast! those furballs would be something like a massive tornado, guys going around in tight circles chasing other guys and slowly losing altitude all the while. many a dogfight was flown inches off the ground. it took a LOT of skill to get good in that game. i was never the top ace in that game, but i did manage to work up into the top 10% at my height.

oh, and another thing i just remembered; they had ratings for both your fighter skills and your bomber skills. and yes, getting those b-17's to 20,000 feet or more took a while, just like in your account. we'd circle in a slow spiral upward in our rear area and then head off to try to sneak in past the radar. or, we'd send dive bombers out first to take out the radar. great fun :)

this war never ended. the game was divided up into three countries, A, B, and C. and each had equal resources to start. you could conquer enemy bases, blow up airfields and fuel resources and maintenance sheds and these things would also affect how many planes and what types were available to the users. play would go on endlessly for days, with each side taking and losing bases, back and forth. eventually, they'd switch theatres and we'd start all over again.

sadly, when the internet took over, the independent networks all but died because they were all pay networks... by the hour. so, when this new cheap/free internet thing came along, games on those networks suddenly found themselves on a desert with no water. a few made the transition to the net, but not many. you might actually still find air warrior around. i'm not sure. i did play it for a while years later on the net, but it just never was the same. i'd lost my edge and the effort to get it back just wasnt worth it any more.

it will always be one of my all time favorites though. long live country C! :)

K.

[Thoros of Myr]

Looks great...too bad I'm horrible at flight sims though...

Me and a buddy used to play Falcon 4.0 frequently, I was competent I suppose.

Much better at racing sims :)

[Big King Sanctaphrax]

I'm really looking forward to this. I do wish that the torpedo bombers weren't AI only though...no avenger for me. Ah well, I'll have to make do with my beaufighter...

*unleashes horrific amounts of ordnance*