Developer’s insight
Posted: 2022-Oct-07, 20:31
I’m catching up on a few Discord servers, some with ex DID staff. Found some useful quotes; gonna save them here because they’re too valuable to be lost in Discord’s message stream.
Roger Godfrey explaining Wargen to the Tiny Combat developer:
Anecdote from someone else:
Roger Godfrey explaining Wargen to the Tiny Combat developer:
https://discord.com/channels/715120294918094858/715128081785946152/720722725609668691 wrote:"is there anything you can speak on with the war engine?"
Sure. Though its is a while ago so my memory is a little hazy.
DID sims had a concept of 'active' and 'inactive' units. Active units had actual world space positions and simulation and existed in a 30 mile bubble around the player (not actually a bubble, essentially a 2D square around the player from a plan view). Inactive units were outside of the bubble and were moved around the world like pushing units around on a game board with no simulation. When they entered the player bubble they would suddenly exist properly and be brought under AI control.
Planes were never spawned in to make the players life hard. Every plane in the game starts off at an airbase and has a mission. Bomb, CAP, Wild Weasil and Escort (there may have been some others). The war engine (I think it was called Wargen) would create a mission for them with waypoints, target ingress points, egress points. This would be done for both sides of the conflict. Planes would then come across each other and interact. So the war happened around the player, regardless of player decisions.
In EF2000 the player could choose a selection of missions that the Wargen made. The missions that the player did not select would still be flown (assuming planes were available).
Combat in the player bubble would be resolved using simulation (missiles, bombes, gun rounds and the like). Combat outside of the player bubble was resolved with dice rolls with weighting towards the more advanced units (so a Mig-19 was unlikely to shoot down a F-22).
The inactive combat was kinda shonky though. I wrote that bit I always intended to go back and fix it. The dice rolls were weighted too far towards planes being destroyed so the campaign ran out of planes too quickly. We were so close to the deadline that the problem was fixed with massive resupply of planes into the campaign. Which was a massive hack, but it worked. 🙂
Then there was some terrain stuff, but nothing that’s not already documented."How were ground units and ground targets handled? Were they abstracted into groups (e.g. Falcon does battalions), or was there something else?"
I don't think EF2000 had active ground units (though I think some were on the ground you could shoot/bomb).
F-22 ADF did introduce them. But that did not have a campaign system so did not need to account for how units were laid out.
It later got an expansion with a campaign called Total Air War, but I was not involved with that apart from the installation system.
Anecdote from someone else:
Funny story: I worked for nearly 15 years at the real Eurofighter Simulator. In the manual there were pictures taken from DID EF2000.
Both were cockpit views and one of these was the air2air refueling.