What is the most well-known Amiga flight sim?

[ikaruga]

Hi all,

As I'm studying game development in 2010, I plan to program a (free) remake of some popular Amiga flight sim. In my experience as Amiga user, I think the most popular one was F-18 Interceptor, also helped by the fact it came in the bundle with many A500s sold. Am I right?

And I wish a great 2010 for all!
--ika

[ikaruga]

Thanks for all the replies, people!

As a flight sim buff I've bought and played many flight sims in the Amiga during the early 90s.

F18 Interceptor was very playable and had a good 'feeling', I think it's very well remembered. Had also only 5 simple missions which should be not that hard to develop... The biggest challenge will be to model the terrain of the San Francisco Bay Area.

By the way, in 1997 through 1999 I've worked in an Amiga Space Sim project as graphic artist, it had the working title "Lambda Sector" and at one point we almost got a deal with a famous (at the time) Amiga games publisher. It was looking mightly impressive, a Wing Commander clone but with full 3D graphics and effects that looked like Playstation's Colony Wars or PC's Independence War Edge of Chaos titles. I got some alpha 060/AGA versions in my Amiga but a PPC/gfx card version was also programmed. The project died when the lead programmer departed, to work in Futuremark, makers of the 3D Mark benchmark software (and now a space-themed game called Shattered Horizon). Lambda's website is still online after 10 years: http://www.illuvatar.demon.co.uk/lambda/vision/LScan.html

[ikaruga]

Man. 12 years back. That was only 3 years after I sold off my Amiga but I recall seeing Lambda Sector and thinking "If they get this together it'd be worth buying an Amiga to run!"

Any chance it'd see the light of day?

Hi B00tDisk!

I'm still actively engaged in indie game development, and so this is not impossible, if there's a demand...although space sims are rare nowadays... except for massively multiplayer ones (Eve Online, and upcoming Star Trek Online). This reminds me that I started making a couple of spaceship models for  Explorer 2260, anyone know what happened with that project?  There's a site frozen in time one decade ago here: http://dnausers.d-n-a.net/dnetEFoE/explorer/main.html

[ikaruga]

It is not clear to me whether you intent to program a remake for the Amiga or another platform. Could you elaborate.

Portability will be possible and desired, but initially x86/Mac/iPhone using a cool free development kit called Unity3D.  It would be great if something like that existed for Amiga (a game engine with usability comparable to a good authoring software).

 As a side note, "most well-know" doesn't mean best at any case!
 The most realistic flight simulator (since flight simulation is all about... simulating the flight dynamics of a plane) that you can get on Amiga is Birds of prey amd it is my favourite. JetPilot looks technically advanced too. Air warrior is also realistic but iirc, there are no missions etc, in single player mode.

That was deep, indeed Birds of Prey was good and comprehensive, 40 planes, neat campaign and missions. And Jet Pilot is extremely hardcore, with interesting airplanes from the 60's.

[ikaruga]

Unfortunately porting Unity3D to the next-gen Amigas would require a source-code license for Unity which would probably cost more than the professional license at $1499 USD not to mention it would need better graphics drivers than any non-next-gen system has.

Yup, but maybe a simpler way would be just to generate exes that are Amiga-compatible (not needing to port the Unity3D editors and all that). Also, things change, for example, some time ago the Unreal engine costed hundreds of thousands, now its free (for non-commercial development, but my one is non-commercial anyway).