I have recently been learning how to fly a Microsoft Excel-based flight simulator that an air combat gamer by the name of Dean Essig wrote to facilitate the playing of air-to-air engagements in the World War I and II eras, with a few extensions to the Korean War. I was initially excited to hear about such a creature because I thought it might provide some accessibility in an otherwise grim part of the gaming world.
After two weeks of evaluation I can report that if one is willing to invest a little time, and one is at least a moderately good Excel user, this simulator is completely accessible. The other requirement is a well-developed sense of spacial relations as you need to translate heading, pitch and roll expressed in degrees to a representation of the aircraft's attitude. The simulation consists of a core flight engine, the worksheet that does all the calculations for the control inputs you provide and several files that contain specific flight characteristic and armament data for over 200 aircraft ranging from the biplane fighters of WWI to most of the active service fighters and several bombers of WWII, plus a few early jets. You provide four control inputs, two for stick position in an x-y plane which in turn translates to roll and pitch controls, throttle setting and rudder position. You have limits on where these can be set, based on the aircraft's speed and the G-loading you have put on the wings and the pilot. To date, I have flown a duel between a Spitfire and a BF-109, a bounce of three A6M type 21 Zeros by two Brewster Buffaloes as might have been part of the morning of June 4, 1942 over Midway Island, a four-on-four melee of Wildcats vs zeros that took place in the China Theater in late 1941, an attack by 2 FW-190A4s against a wounded B17-f escorted by two p-47s and a 2v2 f-86 sabers against 2 MiG--15s. In each case, the simulation correctly showed up the differences in aircraft performance, firepower and toughness, the 109 couldn't turn with the spit, the zeros can outturn anything in the early war American arsenal, the thunderbolt is deadly if it gets a clean shot in, and I have ripped the wings off a saber by pulling an 11-G maneuver. Now, before one gets excited, the simulation provides good information about each individual plane's flight path. Using it to play an actual engagement without using some sort of map board is a far more difficult exercise that requires the ability to construct a moderately complex simulation in Excel or some other such tool. I have cobbled together things that work for me but aren't ready for prime time yet. My next project is to fly a squadron of 12 lightnings in a free-for-all with 12 FW-190s, and to create for it an engine to handle the mechanics of actually tracking 24 aircraft, computing the shot possibilities and giving info about relative pitch and bearings for one aircraft to another to allow for intelligent flying. This is no small project, but should end up with a game of high complexity but manageable data loading that others might be interested in playing. If I do it correctly, it should be scalable to combats of an arbitrary size, though the sheer weight of data will become overwhelming long before the theoretical limit of several thousand aircraft would be reached. I don't envision flying more than squadron vs squadron engagements myself. Sadly, the files aren't available on the web, or at least the web site that I was originally directed to didn't have them available. I am willing to email them to other interested parties who may have other ideas on how to turn the excellent modeling of aircraft flight into a usable game engine. Dean flew his aircraft on a hex grid, but provided the facility to track aircraft in Cartesian coordinates. I have fixed a few small bugs in these calculations and they now function correctly. I have asked Dean, and he enthusiastically gave me his permission to spread this simulator among my fellow blind gamers. He was extremely helpful in my learning how to fly the thing. As a pay-it-forward, and since I may now actually know it better than he does (it's an old project for him) I will provide support on an as-I-can basis for anyone who is interested. It is my hope that if I or someone else develops a useful way of taking the output data of the simulator into a tracking worksheet, we will be able to play engagements over email, and possibly even run actual missions with several players each controlling one or a small group of aircraft. As I said, the learning curve is fairly steep and a good knowledge of trigonometry would be a useful asset for any fellow designers, but once the combat simulation portion is done, I think it would highly reward many people who would like to take the role of Ken Taylor and George Welch, or the other four Wildcat pilots who managed to take off on the morning of December 7, 1941, or that of the German pilots engaging the massed bomber formations in 1943. So, who's with me? Christopher Bartlett _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. Gamers@audyssey.org To unsubscribe send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can visit http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org to make any subscription changes via the web.