One of the complexities of a game like Aces High is knowing what plane to use. Spitfire, Me109, Mustang, Corsair, Zero, or Yak? There is all kinds of data floating around the ‘Net to help, but it was never brought together into one place.
I recently happened across a neat PHP/XML-driven Flash charting package which looked like it could display all this information in a concise manner. So I whipped up a site to allow players to compare up to 4 prop-driven fighters in Aces High.
Some of the information is pretty interesting – some planes don’t compare as well as you’d expect, and some are quite a bit better than people assume. Part of this coding exercise was to come up with a standard way to describe the plane-set, and provide a semi-modular way to add new data sets. This allows more information to be easily added to the system as it becomes available.
DiKta GonZo
Rules for Success and Survival in Online Flight Sims
I wrote these rules up back in the mid-1990′s. Inspired by the “Dicta Bolke” from the World War I fighter ace, these are meant to be very simple rules which still capture the complexity and subtlety of virtual air combat. Suprisingly, even though the technology of these games has come a long way in ten years, the rules still apply. I am reposting these rules on my blog, but for the first time with a paragraph of explanation attached to each.
