Oleg Maddox has decided to play Santa and released a new patch for Pacific Fighters today. It contains mostly bugfixes, but also new smoke and fire objects, in addition to making the Buffalo flyable. Some more undocumented features have already been discovered by the community, though discussion of these is a little slow as there seems to be some sort of family holiday this weekend.
The patch is available for both the standalone Pacific Fighters (pf_303.exe) and the merged install with Forgotten Battles (pf_303m.exe) Download from the retail version weighs in at 100MB and 60MB when upgrading from PF 3.01.
Greg McEwan-Marriott, aka Mad Dog of Combat360.com, has just announced the release of the ‘Vlamgat 2005’ multimedia CD-ROM.
This CD-ROM includes the e-book of Vlamgat, which deals with the Mirage F1 in South African service, additional colour photographs and videos of the Mirage F1AZ, a flight manual for the Mirage F1AZ with SAAF updates and 90 pages written by General Rafael de Pino, commander of the Cuban air force in Angola during the conflict there and much more. Additionally, there is also a preview of the upcoming Angola theatre of operations for Falcon 4, which Mad Dog and his team have been working on for quite some time already.
This nice package costs $35 US for buyers outside South Africa, but this price includes worldwide postage. More information, contact details and the possibility to order can be found at the
Combat360.com website
A review of Pacific Fighters by Thomas "WKLink" Cofield has been posted on the Sim HQ website. Here is a sample of the article:
Landing is a little bit harder. Hitting a moving target with your aircraft requires more than a little bit of practice. I have had some experience with Warbirds, CFS2 and Aces High but to me this feels like the most realistic of all the landing programs. Unlike CFS2 there is no LSO to guide you in but in all honesty I never used the LSO to begin with. The F4F and the Zeke have the ability to raise the seat, a very nice feature for those trying to see over the nose of their aircraft. You can’t do this in other planes, including the F4U. What would be nice is the ability to move yourself around in the cockpit, ala Aces High, especially when lining up a difficult trap.
Most of the active FF Team members have been busy with real life issues, so new work has been slow. We have most of the 3.1 files prepped for testing, but we have some more skin updates coming. We have done work in some areas like: tacref, LOD distances (will help FPS), some stock campaign tweaks, and cleaned up a few bugs from the living list that have popped up over the last few months. We are planning on expanding the skin groups for all 3 F-15 models. We are also working on skins for VVS and GAF Fulcrums. We now have MiG-29S and SM, which carry 4 HPs on each wing and have extended fuel range as well as greater weapons capabilities. There are also some other skin projects that are still WIP. We have also worked on campaigns for the Balkans, European and ODS theatres. The Balkans work is done, but the European may be the jewel. We were able to get everything to work, except the theat circles found in the mission planning map. They will not work on large theatres. We have 2 camps...Fulda Gap 1988, and 2005, which has all the latest jets going at it. We just added some items to the DB to accomodate the theatres. We are still working on a FF3 campaign for ODS-1991. Testing campaigns is hard as one really has to stay active with it for 5-6 days to see how it really turns out. But all of these will be functional and will feature the FF style of ATO and will take advantage of all the DB items in FF3. Campaigners may see some bugs with these newer campaigns. Some of the theatres are not really finished so there may be issues that we can't fix or are unaware of. As always, we will try to fix what is broke. All of this will be for use with BMS 2.X that comes with your FF3 install. We have done some testing with a 1.03 version, but there are lots of features in 2.X that will be lost by using a 1.03 version so we plan on releasing a regular install first before we move on to this. Be patient on all of this, as we are a small team and can only do one version at a time. Basically just trying to round out the patch for now. There will be a FF4 at some time. We have some more items that will be added, but they aren't ready. But FF4 will be another OCI and not a add-on to FF3.
