T-Bone

http://www.linkedin.com/in/carlcnorman I just google stalked him, looks like he's doing some DoD stuff now. @Manlyman: I played F4 for a long time and made a skyfix, edited the explosion graphics, and helped do the ODS terrain so I think I remember you from combatsim.com, Frugalsworld, or Simhq? I got sidetracked by IL-2 for a while and then got back into F4AF, and then into LOMAC FC. I'm looking forward to FC 2.0!

He was the executive producer of LOMAC 1.0 when it came out in 2003. Where is he nowadays? I remember he was working on DCS for a while before dropping off the radar completely. Maybe he just moved on with life after UBISoft decided to drop LOMAC? T-Bone

It makes me nostalgic for the late 90s. Back then the flight sim community was bigger and there was much more buzz surrounding every release. Despite the fact that DCS is really achieving our dreams of a complex multiaircraft sim, I can't help but notice that a lot of people who used to play flight sims have moved onto other things in life.

Janes was a great series. Too bad the western markets decided sims were not a viable investment. This however gives ED the entire market. I wonder how many people here grew up with Falcon 4.0. I remember playing Falcon 4 and Janes F-15 when I was a teenager. I grew up with these games, and it was a real pity to see the market die so fast. With DCS and FC 2.0 we're getting reasonably realistic and linked sims of several combat aircraft. I think in that regard we've come along farther than we ever have.

Apparently he's working for some DoD projects now. Still sad to see how pessimistic he is nowadays :( From the forum thread this came out of, Wags and ED had approached him for DCS related projects but he would never be able to work for a Russian company with his DoD projects.

The Jane's Combat Simulation label was something Paul Grace (CYAC/USNF/etc) cooked up between EA and Jane's Information group. Around that time Andy Hollis started up the Origin Skunkworks at OSI Austin. Paul's team in Redwood Shores worked on the so-called survey sims - lot's of flyable aircraft, medium level of fidelity when it came to aircraft systems. Andy's team created study sims - single subject, highly detailed flight models/systems. Andy recruited a bunch of MPS folks to join him, but they didn't want to move to Austin, so the Baltimore studio was born. In Baltimore, we created the study sims F-15 and F/A-18. As an aside, F4 came out right around when F-15 came out - if F4 killed all sims, how do you explain F/A-18? The dev pace was grueling, the Skunkworks team cranked out a whole lot of SKU's in a very short time frame. In Baltimore, we started F-15 2.0 right after F-15 shipped. Marketing had already determined expansion packs were not worth the dev time, and several months into F-15 2.0 it was decided we needed to change subjects. It was felt that not enough time would have passed between the ship of 1.0 and 2.0 - and the Longbow numbers backed that claim up. So F/A-18 was born, a slightly troubled birth as Marketing pushed hard to based the campaign in the US (Jane's F/A-18, Defender of Freedom). Looking back at 9/11 maybe they weren't as crazy as we thought at the time (1998). Jane's Information group strongly veto'd that concept and we went with what we shipped with. When F/A-18 went gold, our team was exhuasted / burnt out. I was very active in the old usenet group and various other combat flight sim forums, and years of dealing with the nay-sayers had worn me down. Worse, most of our team lurked in these same groups, saw the flamewars, and wondered why they botherered. It was time for us to move on to something else. The market was changed as well, and again it had nothing to do with F4. RTS/FPS games took off as graphics improved. Those genres had much shorter learning curves. We did ourselves no favors with our study sims - Paul Grace tried to warn us in Baltimore we were going to far, raising the bar too high...creating games he personally was not that interested in playing. Even so, he kept the brand going. Flight sims didn't rack up the big sexy opening month numbers, but catalog sales over an entire year were actually pretty strong. When he left EA, we lost our champion at Redwood Shores. So we were burned out, there was no one pushing the brand (and in fact the license was allowed to lapse, F/A-18 was the last EA Jane's title), and the console market was exploding. At least that is how we saw things from Baltimore. If any of Paul's or Andy's Austin group are here, they can add their perspective. Haha, not so short after all. Bottom line, F4 didn't kill the market, not directly. Raising the bar turned out not to be a good idea - it shrank the market and increased dev costs while other genres were exploding. We all were guilty of raising the bar too high - EA / MPS / SSI. No one product did it. And we did that right as the market was taking off in new directions. That is why there are no AAA sims in development. Sure, there is money to be made...but for the same effort, you can make a lot more money doing something else. -CJ

This map would be sweet for a Soviet-Afghan campaign featuring the Su-25.

Have you guys seen this? It would be nice if the next iteration of DCS included the cool white caps effects!

With games these days growing ever more prevalent on consoles, do you think the glory days of study flight sims ala the 90s will ever return? What will happen to the future of our genre?

Hey guys, I have been away from the LOMAC community for a while. I've just heard the news that BS will not be integrated into LOMAC:FC, which means that all the work done by the team can definitely still be implemented. Superkungfu, shoot me a PM if you want to offer a helping hand in finishing the user interface for BSO.. we can get the project finished and out finally. T-Bone

Here are some screenshots of the latest version. Does anyone know where I can get the fuel tank skins?

strange...

I don't see the logic in what ED is doing. They are spending too much time on useless stuff such adding more flyables (we have enough) and new 3d models when there are serious issues that need to be worked out regarded the gameplay. I totally agree.

Damn...

Simulate this one:

Hey guys, I was wondering if there was any way to make an AI aircraft invincible in a mission. Is this possible in LOMAC? T-Bone

I am getting single digit fps around airbases now and LOMAN will not uninstall this mod. What do I do?

Actually I can't get this movie to play on my PC for some reason.. strange.

Wow. Satan is an angry little man. He has to put down others to feel better about himself, but only in a cowardly way over the internet, because we all know that in real life Satan is a coward who has to talk tough on the Internet and be a lawyer to make up for his inadequacies in real life. He ridicules other people's movies but does not even attempt to make one on his own. He's also a pretentious twit, who uses the little learning he's acquired to disparage others while boasting in the most childish way about himself. Can anyone say, "small"? Everything he writes indicates years of pent-up anger and frustration and self-hatred. Satan, an angry little man. "Tiny" with a huge inferiority complex.

Hey, why don't you guys just break the file up into small chunks and host it on youtube? That way Satan can watch it on his macintosh and stop whining like a big baby. T-Bone

Backspace makes the plane disappear :(

It makes my FPS crap tho :(

Where can I get an Nvidia 7800 GS for cheap? How much of an improvement over the Radeon 9800 Pro 128 is it? T-Bone

I have a AMD 3000+ and I still get 20-40 fps. T-Bone