A-10 Attack!
Encyclopedia
A-10 Attack! is a combat flight simulator
for the Apple Macintosh computer released by Parsoft Interactive
in 1995. The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II
aircraft that takes part in a variety of missions in West Germany
during a hypothetical limited conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact
. A-10 boasted one of the most detailed flight models of any game of its era, a physics model that extended to solid-body interactions with the ground and complete aerodynamics for every object in the game, including ordinance.
The game was followed by a sequel
named A-10 Cuba!
, originally as a stand-alone game on the Mac and Windows
-based PC's, but later re-released on the Mac as a plug-in module for the original game. The Mac OS
versions were produced by Parsoft, while the PC version of Cuba was a joint production with Activision
.
that was released in 1992. Although Hellcats managed to do a lot with limited capabilities of the hardware, the game had a number of obvious drawbacks. For one, the missions were written in computer code as part of the game engine
, which meant the user could not add new missions or modify the existing ones. Another problem was that the vehicles and other objects in the game were hard-coded with various behaviors, which likewise made them difficult to customize. Even the game map itself existed only in the code.
Parsoft started experimenting with a plug-in system to replace the hard-coded objects in Hellcats. Known as the Virtual Battlefield Environment (VBE), the system still required programming tools to build out the objects, but once they were completed they could be loaded into the game engine from individual files. Adding these into a game simply required the files were placed in the appropriate directories in the user's file system
. VBE allowed anything to be added in this fashion; aircraft, vehicles, missions, and maps.
Another problem with Hellcats was its very basic physics, which simulated only the most basic flight dynamics and resulted in flight that was unrealistic in a number of ways. There were no structural limits either, allowing a number of unrealistic high-g maneuvers. A completely new flight engine was created for the VBE system that simulated subsonic aerodynamics with a fair degree of realism, with effects like dutch roll
and adverse yaw
"falling out" of the engine without being deliberately coded in. Additionally the system included a new physics engine
that featured simple finite element analysis that allowed damage to be realistically simulated, including its effects on the flight dynamics of the aircraft. The resulting simulation was arguably the most advanced of its era.
All of this was combined with an improved version of the graphics engine developed for Hellcats, allowing players to use multiple monitors and any resolution their machine could support. Hellcats used a polygon-based flat-shaded
system that used differential updating to avoid bottlenecks in the computer bus
and thereby improve frame rates. The new engine also allowed for small areas of texture mapping
, which was used on the vehicles to add roundels and squadron markings. A combination of improved code in the engine and the rapid improvement in computer performance since the release of Hellcats allowed the new engine to feature greatly increased scene complexity.
Early versions of the game were shown at MacWorld Boston in the summer of 1993. At the time the physics and graphics engines were operational, although there was no "game" per-se. The world consisted of a single-runway airbase and a nearby target range with several "bullseye" targets. The game that emerged looked like the original demos in-flight, but added a planning system that allowed for multi-part missions over a section of northeast Germany. The missions system remained "hard coded" however; the user could not create their own maps or missions. During development Apple introduced the new PowerMac systems, and performance on these systems was sub-par. A delay followed while they wrote a PowerPC "native" version, and the game was finally delivered in 1995.
Although it was claimed the VBE could allow any sort of customization of the engine, the power of this system was never fully explored. A-10 Cuba!
followed, although at first it did not use VBE and was shipped in the form of a stand-alone application. It was only later that Cuba was re-released to run as a "real" VBE module in the original shell. The specifications were never released to 3rd parties, and the few public comments on the topic from Parsoft claimed it was simply not ready and required work to clean it up and document it. By 1997 Parsoft had already moved onto a new project, and it was clear that VBE had been abandoned.
Flight mode was relatively similar to most flight simulators, although control was normally via mouse or a joystick mapped onto the mouse. The "2" view looked down into the cockpit, showing all the instruments in a layout fairly faithful to the actual layout in the A-10. The mechanical cockpit controls and various displays, including the HUD, were all likewise fairly good simulations of the original.
The game included a unique "active hand" system that allowed the player to manipulate the switches and controls without having to remember keyboard commands. Holding down the option key turned off mouse control of the aircraft, and made a hand-cursor appear that could operate the controls by clicking on them. The cursor changed as it moved over the controls to indicate what could be done, clicking, rotating or "rolling" the mechanical controls. Even complex weapons release modes could be controlled in this way, although doing so often required a series of clicks on different controls.
Weapons included a variety of conventional bombs and their laser-guided counterparts, as well as the AIM-9 Sidewinder
and HARM
missiles, cluster bombs and rockets. However the cannon remained one of the most important weapons in the game (because the A-10 was built around the GAU-8A gatling gun). Even without completing the missions, the game engine itself was detailed enough to create a sub-game in which users attempted to place their Hogs in odd positions on the map, or use the engine for various other tricks.
In the map mode any object in the game that was close enough to have become visible to an allied object appeared as a "chit" on the display. Using controls on the chits the user could move their point of view to those objects, and see what they were doing. At the start of a mission only friendly or nearby neutral chits would be seen, but as the player flew into the mission, more would become visible as they (or other allied forces) approached them. Additionally, the user could display and control the waypoints for the aircraft in the mission through a dialog-box based editor, customizing their flight plans. Games would typically have the player switch back and forth between flight and the mission map, looking at their progress and perhaps newly spotted targets that were not immediately obvious from the cockpit.
The selection of missions included with the game generally increased in difficulty with an increasing number of targets and friendly vehicles. They covered a series of events after a fictional invasion of West Germany by limited Warsaw Pact
forces, with the map covering the western Baltic area with Denmark in the upper left. Like Hellcats, the A-10 mission system in VBE allowed the missions to be custom programed, and some of them included such events as an attempted bombing of a dam. However, as in Hellcats, A-10 did not allow the user to create their own missions.
Combat flight simulator
Combat flight simulators are video games used to simulate military aircraft and their operations...
for the Apple Macintosh computer released by Parsoft Interactive
Parsoft Interactive
Parsoft Interactive, or simply Parsoft, is a former computer game company known for their series of technically advanced flight simulators. Their first release was Hellcats Over the Pacific on the Apple Macintosh in 1991, which they followed in 1992 with Missions at Leyte Gulf, an expansion pack...
in 1995. The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II
A-10 Thunderbolt II
The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II is an American single-seat, twin-engine, straight-wing jet aircraft developed by Fairchild-Republic in the early 1970s. The A-10 was designed for a United States Air Force requirement to provide close air support for ground forces by attacking tanks,...
aircraft that takes part in a variety of missions in West Germany
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
during a hypothetical limited conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
. A-10 boasted one of the most detailed flight models of any game of its era, a physics model that extended to solid-body interactions with the ground and complete aerodynamics for every object in the game, including ordinance.
The game was followed by a sequel
Sequel
A sequel is a narrative, documental, or other work of literature, film, theatre, or music that continues the story of or expands upon issues presented in some previous work...
named A-10 Cuba!
A-10 Cuba!
A-10 Cuba! is a flight simulator computer game released by Parsoft Interactive in 1996.-Gameplay:It features an A-10 Thunderbolt II on a mission to defeat guerrilla forces at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...
, originally as a stand-alone game on the Mac and Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
-based PC's, but later re-released on the Mac as a plug-in module for the original game. The Mac OS
Mac OS
Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface...
versions were produced by Parsoft, while the PC version of Cuba was a joint production with Activision
Activision
Activision is an American publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. Its current CEO is Robert Kotick. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles...
.
History
Development of what would evolve into A-10 Attack! started after the release of Hellcats: Missions at Leyte Gulf, an expansion pack for Hellcats Over the PacificHellcats Over the Pacific
Hellcats Over the Pacific is a flight simulator computer game for the Apple Macintosh computer written by Parsoft Interactive and released by Graphic Simulations in 1991. Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games to be able to drive a 640 x 480 x 8-bit display at...
that was released in 1992. Although Hellcats managed to do a lot with limited capabilities of the hardware, the game had a number of obvious drawbacks. For one, the missions were written in computer code as part of the game engine
Game engine
A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...
, which meant the user could not add new missions or modify the existing ones. Another problem was that the vehicles and other objects in the game were hard-coded with various behaviors, which likewise made them difficult to customize. Even the game map itself existed only in the code.
Parsoft started experimenting with a plug-in system to replace the hard-coded objects in Hellcats. Known as the Virtual Battlefield Environment (VBE), the system still required programming tools to build out the objects, but once they were completed they could be loaded into the game engine from individual files. Adding these into a game simply required the files were placed in the appropriate directories in the user's file system
File system
A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...
. VBE allowed anything to be added in this fashion; aircraft, vehicles, missions, and maps.
Another problem with Hellcats was its very basic physics, which simulated only the most basic flight dynamics and resulted in flight that was unrealistic in a number of ways. There were no structural limits either, allowing a number of unrealistic high-g maneuvers. A completely new flight engine was created for the VBE system that simulated subsonic aerodynamics with a fair degree of realism, with effects like dutch roll
Dutch roll
Dutch roll is a type of aircraft motion, consisting of an out-of-phase combination of "tail-wagging" and rocking from side to side. This yaw-roll coupling is one of the basic flight dynamic modes...
and adverse yaw
Adverse yaw
Adverse yaw is a yaw moment on an aircraft which results from an aileron deflection and a roll rate, such as when entering or exiting a turn. It is called "adverse" because it acts opposite to the yaw moment needed to execute the desired turn. Adverse yaw has three mechanisms, listed below in...
"falling out" of the engine without being deliberately coded in. Additionally the system included a new physics engine
Physics engine
A physics engine is computer software that provides an approximate simulation of certain physical systems, such as rigid body dynamics , soft body dynamics, and fluid dynamics, of use in the domains of computer graphics, video games and film. Their main uses are in video games , in which case the...
that featured simple finite element analysis that allowed damage to be realistically simulated, including its effects on the flight dynamics of the aircraft. The resulting simulation was arguably the most advanced of its era.
All of this was combined with an improved version of the graphics engine developed for Hellcats, allowing players to use multiple monitors and any resolution their machine could support. Hellcats used a polygon-based flat-shaded
Gouraud shading
Gouraud shading, named after Henri Gouraud, is an interpolation method used in computer graphics to produce continuous shading of surfaces represented by polygon meshes...
system that used differential updating to avoid bottlenecks in the computer bus
Computer bus
In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers.Early computer buses were literally parallel electrical wires with multiple connections, but the term is now used for any physical arrangement that provides the same...
and thereby improve frame rates. The new engine also allowed for small areas of texture mapping
Texture mapping
Texture mapping is a method for adding detail, surface texture , or color to a computer-generated graphic or 3D model. Its application to 3D graphics was pioneered by Dr Edwin Catmull in his Ph.D. thesis of 1974.-Texture mapping:...
, which was used on the vehicles to add roundels and squadron markings. A combination of improved code in the engine and the rapid improvement in computer performance since the release of Hellcats allowed the new engine to feature greatly increased scene complexity.
Early versions of the game were shown at MacWorld Boston in the summer of 1993. At the time the physics and graphics engines were operational, although there was no "game" per-se. The world consisted of a single-runway airbase and a nearby target range with several "bullseye" targets. The game that emerged looked like the original demos in-flight, but added a planning system that allowed for multi-part missions over a section of northeast Germany. The missions system remained "hard coded" however; the user could not create their own maps or missions. During development Apple introduced the new PowerMac systems, and performance on these systems was sub-par. A delay followed while they wrote a PowerPC "native" version, and the game was finally delivered in 1995.
Although it was claimed the VBE could allow any sort of customization of the engine, the power of this system was never fully explored. A-10 Cuba!
A-10 Cuba!
A-10 Cuba! is a flight simulator computer game released by Parsoft Interactive in 1996.-Gameplay:It features an A-10 Thunderbolt II on a mission to defeat guerrilla forces at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...
followed, although at first it did not use VBE and was shipped in the form of a stand-alone application. It was only later that Cuba was re-released to run as a "real" VBE module in the original shell. The specifications were never released to 3rd parties, and the few public comments on the topic from Parsoft claimed it was simply not ready and required work to clean it up and document it. By 1997 Parsoft had already moved onto a new project, and it was clear that VBE had been abandoned.
Description
Gameplay in A-10 Attack! switched between a mission map and planning system displayed on a 2D map, and the in-game flying. The switch between the two modes could be made at any time during a game, with the plane turning on the autopilot and following the mission outline when the user was in the map mode.Flight mode was relatively similar to most flight simulators, although control was normally via mouse or a joystick mapped onto the mouse. The "2" view looked down into the cockpit, showing all the instruments in a layout fairly faithful to the actual layout in the A-10. The mechanical cockpit controls and various displays, including the HUD, were all likewise fairly good simulations of the original.
The game included a unique "active hand" system that allowed the player to manipulate the switches and controls without having to remember keyboard commands. Holding down the option key turned off mouse control of the aircraft, and made a hand-cursor appear that could operate the controls by clicking on them. The cursor changed as it moved over the controls to indicate what could be done, clicking, rotating or "rolling" the mechanical controls. Even complex weapons release modes could be controlled in this way, although doing so often required a series of clicks on different controls.
Weapons included a variety of conventional bombs and their laser-guided counterparts, as well as the AIM-9 Sidewinder
AIM-9 Sidewinder
The AIM-9 Sidewinder is a heat-seeking, short-range, air-to-air missile carried mostly by fighter aircraft and recently, certain gunship helicopters. The missile entered service with United States Air Force in the early 1950s, and variants and upgrades remain in active service with many air forces...
and HARM
AGM-88 HARM
The AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile is a tactical, air-to-surface missile designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar systems. It was originally developed by Texas Instruments as a replacement for the AGM-45 Shrike and AGM-78 Standard ARM system...
missiles, cluster bombs and rockets. However the cannon remained one of the most important weapons in the game (because the A-10 was built around the GAU-8A gatling gun). Even without completing the missions, the game engine itself was detailed enough to create a sub-game in which users attempted to place their Hogs in odd positions on the map, or use the engine for various other tricks.
In the map mode any object in the game that was close enough to have become visible to an allied object appeared as a "chit" on the display. Using controls on the chits the user could move their point of view to those objects, and see what they were doing. At the start of a mission only friendly or nearby neutral chits would be seen, but as the player flew into the mission, more would become visible as they (or other allied forces) approached them. Additionally, the user could display and control the waypoints for the aircraft in the mission through a dialog-box based editor, customizing their flight plans. Games would typically have the player switch back and forth between flight and the mission map, looking at their progress and perhaps newly spotted targets that were not immediately obvious from the cockpit.
The selection of missions included with the game generally increased in difficulty with an increasing number of targets and friendly vehicles. They covered a series of events after a fictional invasion of West Germany by limited Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
forces, with the map covering the western Baltic area with Denmark in the upper left. Like Hellcats, the A-10 mission system in VBE allowed the missions to be custom programed, and some of them included such events as an attempted bombing of a dam. However, as in Hellcats, A-10 did not allow the user to create their own missions.
See also
- A-10 Tank KillerA-10 Tank KillerA-10 Tank Killer is a flight simulation computer game for Amiga and MS-DOS platforms. The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II attack aircraft. There was a 1.0 release and a 1.5 release in 1991. A mission pack called Extra Mission was released in 1995...
(1989/90) - A-10 Cuba!A-10 Cuba!A-10 Cuba! is a flight simulator computer game released by Parsoft Interactive in 1996.-Gameplay:It features an A-10 Thunderbolt II on a mission to defeat guerrilla forces at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...
(1996) - Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer IISilent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer IISilent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer II is a flight simulation computer game and the sequel to A-10 Tank Killer, which was directed by Frank Evers . Both games were made by Dynamix and Sierra produced Silent Thunder. It was made for Amiga and DOS platforms...
(1996)