MrFlibble wrote on 2021-05-03, 12:06:

Recently an acquaintance of mine shared the Flight Sim Toolkit World War II copy they found (probably among some "abandonware" f […]
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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-04-13, 01:11:

It came with 2 sets of original 3.5" floppy disks, which I was not expecting.

Recently an acquaintance of mine shared the Flight Sim Toolkit World War II copy they found (probably among some "abandonware" files), which also turned out to be two floppy disks, not a CD. I'm not sure if it would be allowed to share these files here though.

A bit of searching shows that indeed the game came on both floppies and a CD: floppy release, CD-ROM Edition. I wonder if the latter also included any extras, because the floppy version seems to only have updates for FST tools and the two stand-alone WWII themed sims.

BTW, recently I found a zip at cd.textfiles.com (one of the few FST files from that source) which contained programme updates for FST, with the readme referring to these as the WWII thing, but I was not sure if this was just a copy from the physical release, or an official patch. I can't find this file ATM.

Blobbo warez CD 10 on archive.org contains a 3 part zipfile hosting WWII for FST - maybe that?

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-05-09, 17:10:

I actually replaced the original FLY.EXE from Jaguar with a copy of a v1.47 but the issue still persists: https://i.imgur.com/bV […]
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ragefury32 wrote on 2021-04-07, 16:21:

That viewport issue more of a bug with fly v1.46 as used on Jaguar. Fly 1.47 shouldn't have that issue.

I actually replaced the original FLY.EXE from Jaguar with a copy of a v1.47 but the issue still persists:

However, I discovered that I can switch between this "lowered" view and the default full-instrument cockpit view by pressing F4, so I'm not sure anymore if this is a bug and not a feature. It wouldn't even look wrong to me if this particular cockpit didn't appear incomplete (missing its upper part) in the lowered position.

I'm inclined to think that maybe the lowered view is for better targeting, or something along those lines.

Yeah, it was a "look-down" view for ground attack. The viewport background cut-off bug was supposed to be fixed in one of the later releases (maybe not 1.47), although 1.47 on my Thinkpad 240 (with the Neomagic 128XD) doesn't do the cutoff on Jaguar - I'll need to test it on my ATi Rage 128 Mobility (C600) or my ThinkPad T21 (S3 SavageIX) and see if it's GPU specific or something else.
Which video card are you using?

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-05-21, 17:05:

Which video card are you using?

I run it in DOSBox with the VESA BAT files. For some reason, the default S3 BAT files don't work in DOSBox for me, even though it emulates an S3 video card.

I'm poking around the latest version of the Spanish Civil War Sim, and it acts very strangely in DOSBox. For some reason, it does not recognise the Sound Blaster card, and any mission takes a lot of time to load, very dissimilar from any other sims I tried, including Ron Walker and Ray Purvis ones -- even though Spanish Civil War uses version 1.47 and Viper Software sims are on 1.52. The loading times are huge regardless of

I also realised that some planes just don't take off the ground -- even at max throttle they labour along the runway and even seem to slow down, or start frog-hopping without any altitude gain until they inevitably crash. This happens regardless of the CPU cycles I set in DOSBox. Any idea why this happens?

I just looked up at YouTube and found exactly two videos related to FST:

Mipuy for FST - this is a test of a map made with a QuickBasic editor by Jacob Kandlaker, whose preserved web pages seem to have nothing about FST.

Forgotten Flight sims: World War II : D-Day & Midway (dos game 1994) - showcases the sample sims that came with Flight Sim Toolkit: World War II.

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-05-23, 15:33:

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-05-21, 17:05:

Which video card are you using?

I run it in DOSBox with the VESA BAT files. For some reason, the default S3 BAT files don't work in DOSBox for me, even though it emulates an S3 video card.

Well, I am not sure how accurate is the S3 emulation for VESA, but I know that the original code targeted the 911/924 series and worked on the 801/805 VLB cards. I don’t remember whether the -s option ever worked on my Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (Virge 325 based) all those years ago…

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-04-12, 22:57:

Anyways, looks like Saruwatari Kaito has access to a later code release, since it came with the source code for the various GUI tools (except shape.exe, which is the most important one there).

I just realised that the same version, but with what looks like original date stamps and a sample project, can be found in Mic Healey's archives (the second part) as FST2.ZIP in the FST-ACC\FST-MISC folder. It could have been available from Kuju FTP at some point, but have been unable to verify that so far.

The A-10 has no cockpit.

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-06-01, 21:26:

I just realised that the same version, but with what looks like original date stamps and a sample project, can be found in Mic H […]
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ragefury32 wrote on 2021-04-12, 22:57:

Anyways, looks like Saruwatari Kaito has access to a later code release, since it came with the source code for the various GUI tools (except shape.exe, which is the most important one there).

I just realised that the same version, but with what looks like original date stamps and a sample project, can be found in Mic Healey's archives (the second part) as FST2.ZIP in the FST-ACC\FST-MISC folder. It could have been available from Kuju FTP at some point, but have been unable to verify that so far.

The A-10 has no cockpit.

Probably - Kuju/Simis' and their FTP server is so long gone that it's rather absurd. As for that A-10...eh, that's a fairly simplistic model and it's breaking at least a few of the "painter's algorithm" design rules that the later FSTers generally follow designing their in-game assets (i.e. no quads, no straddling of polygon boundaries, more subtle palette transisitons), heh..

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-06-02, 21:23:

Kuju/Simis' and their FTP server is so long gone that it's rather absurd.

I wonder if anyone made a backup/mirror of the FST section? It seems to have been the most complete collection of FST related stuff at some point.

Here's what looks like an official FST preview from October 1993 with full-sized screenshots: fstkpics.zip

This site mentioned a link to the Great Air Battles homepage, but the Wayback Machine does not have it, unfortunately:
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~claw/gab.htm

Wow! Never expected this sim to still be remembered some 25 years later. I’m the one behind Gripen and. Barrels in Congo. I also tried to do a collaborative project with the WWI sim. As far as I remember I was the only one finishing any objects for that one.

I just stumbled upon this thread by chance, so I got inspired and tried to find the dvd with all my source files. However it seems to have been lost in the last move. It probably is on the bottom of some box or something, so unfortunately I can’t help recovering any of the files. But I’m blown away by the fact that there is still an interest in this. Back in the days the mailing list was really active and there were some really creative guys doing stuff with FST.

Just as a fun fact, Gripen was heavily inspired by the Tornado sim by Digital Integration. This can be seen in the color scheme and the terrain layout as well as the types of vehicles I included. I wanted to make the front end a bit like the planning tool in Tornado, but in the end FST could not really stand up to the features I needed in the sim. As configurable as it was, FST lacked so much in many areas that wouldn’t have been that hard for Domark to fix to give it more game value

Phlerp wrote on 2021-09-02, 09:56:

Wow! Never expected this sim to still be remembered some 25 years later. I’m the one behind Gripen and. Barrels in Congo. I also tried to do a collaborative project with the WWI sim. As far as I remember I was the only one finishing any objects for that one.

I just stumbled upon this thread by chance, so I got inspired and tried to find the dvd with all my source files. However it seems to have been lost in the last move. It probably is on the bottom of some box or something, so unfortunately I can’t help recovering any of the files. But I’m blown away by the fact that there is still an interest in this. Back in the days the mailing list was really active and there were some really creative guys doing stuff with FST.

Just as a fun fact, Gripen was heavily inspired by the Tornado sim by Digital Integration. This can be seen in the color scheme and the terrain layout as well as the types of vehicles I included. I wanted to make the front end a bit like the planning tool in Tornado, but in the end FST could not really stand up to the features I needed in the sim. As configurable as it was, FST lacked so much in many areas that wouldn’t have been that hard for Domark to fix to give it more game value

Yeah, EIDOS totally screwed everyone over.
I wonder if Jonathan Newth still have a copy of the FST98/FT2 source code around? EIDOS and Simis are both long gone.

Phlerp wrote on 2021-09-02, 09:56:

I’m the one behind Gripen and. Barrels in Congo.

Welcome to the forums! Do you remember if the Gripen v0.96 plus the cockpit patch are the latest revision, or possibly you had something else which you did not get around to release?

It's a pity that you can't find your FST archive but here's hoping that it might be still there somewhere, yet to be found!

Oh, it’s such a long time ago, and I continued to work with so many other configurable sims after that. It’s all a big blur.

If my backups turn up I’ll definitely let you know.

Phlerp wrote on 2021-09-08, 10:21:

If my backups turn up I’ll definitely let you know.

Thanks!

I wonder if we could organise some kind of online FST veteran reunion here?

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-09-08, 12:33:

Phlerp wrote on 2021-09-08, 10:21:

If my backups turn up I’ll definitely let you know.

Thanks!

I wonder if we could organise some kind of online FST veteran reunion here?

Heh. Good luck hunting most of them down - pretty sure McNett, Greg O, Kosh, Pearson and others all pretty much all moved on from the community. Would be interesting if Jonathan Newth and/or Joe Marullo dropped by and give us a postmortem on FST/CK 2.0.

https://imgur.com/a/Znk7IS6

Enjoy.I kept this for all these years as it was one of the articles that opened my eyes to game development. Today I do this full time! Thanks Joe and flight sim toolkit.

Nice, thanks for sharing this!

MrFlibble wrote on 2021-04-07, 12:51:

Rwolf at MobyGames tipped me off to a couple more sims by a certain Fergal Monaghan: Gyroplane 2000 Cruz […]
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Rwolf at MobyGames tipped me off to a couple more sims by a certain Fergal Monaghan:
Gyroplane 2000
Cruz

Of course the download links provided for both don't work. I can't find these two listed in Adrian Brown's catalogue either.

I left comments in the blog and they came through, and Fergal updated the download links, so you can get both games from the pages above.