Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe

Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons over Europe (SDOE) is a World War II themed combat flight simulator released for Windows 95/98 in March 1999. The game was written by Parsoft Interactive and released by Activision, following their successful partnership on A-10 Cuba! of 1996. The game featured nine flyable aircraft and three theatres with multiple missions for each combination, as well as network play with up to sixteen players.

SDOE was originally scheduled to ship in 1998, a year that also saw the release of Jane's WWII Fighters and the very successful European Air War. The game was delayed several times, missing the release of these two games, and then the critical Christmas season. When it was released in early 1999 it sold poorly, in spite of some good reviews. Activision stopped working with Parsoft, and the company folded soon after.

Fighter Squadron was based on an extensible plug-in engine known as OpenPlane (OP). OP was not well documented, but as experimenters learned more of its workings the game gained numerous features it lacked and any number of new aircraft and vehicles. As the system expanded it took on a new life, and the modding scene for the game remains active to this day.

Development

Previous efforts

Parsoft's first flight simulator was 1991's Hellcats Over the Pacific, arguably one of the most advanced flight simulators of the era. The game ran with high frame rates at any resolution the computer supported, and had a "busy" map with aircraft, ships, vehicles and complex missions. One of the few common complaints was a fairly simplistic flight model. Behind the scenes, the game engine used hard-coded instructions for game maps, mission details and vehicle models and behaviours, making it difficult to modify for new missions. In spite of this, the company released a mission pack, Leyte Gulf, in 1992. The game was very well reviewed, with Computer Gaming World simply calling it "outstanding".^[1] A mission pack followed, Hellcats: Missions at Leyte Gulf

After Leyte, Parsoft began work on an entirely new simulation engine, combining Hellcats‍ '​ incremental rendering engine with a new flight model and solid-body modelling system, as well as a unified battlefield system known as VBE. While development was being finalized, the Macintosh platform was moving from the Motorola 680x0 family to the new PowerPC, and VBE ran poorly on these machines. Delays followed while a new version for the PowerPC was readied, and A-10 Attack! was finally released in 1995. It was widely lauded in the press, and awarded "Game of the Year".^[2] A mission pack, A-10 Cuba!, was released in 1996, which was also ported to Windows published by Activision as a stand-alone game. This was not as well received due to what were now outdated graphics support, although reviewers often described it as a diamond in the rough.^[3]

Dogfight

Previous Parsoft releases had used an Gouraud shading software renderer which was advanced for 1992, but no longer competitive in an era when graphics acceleration was becoming common. With the release of Cuba!, Parsoft began a major update to the engine to combine a floating point version of the flight and physics engines from A-10, known as SM, with a new graphics engine supporting texture mapping, known as G3. Work on the new system began under the name Dogfight in 1996, intending to release a game based on it in 1998.^[4]

Another major change to the system was to replace the Mac-oriented VBE from A-10 with a new system based entirely on editable data files. This developed into the OpenPlane concept, which would allow users to add new objects to the game simply by placing files in certain folders. At the time, the company boasted that it would be "the most expandable flight sim ever".^[4]

SDOE

Activision, who had supported the port of A-10 Cuba to the PC agreed to act as distributor for the new game. Casting about for good names, they finally settled on Screamin' Demons as the name of a fictional squadron. Feedback from Usenet suggested the name wasn't descriptive enough, and it evolved into Fighter Squadron. The company later learned that the original name was actually used by a B-17 squadron during the war, and therefore not as fictional as they had imagined.^[4]

By 1996 the game was well known in the flight simulation market, and its official announcement had the "hard-core community... dancing in the streets".^[5] Early communications from the company simply increased the tension. By 1997 development was reaching a point where a game was possible, and a number of previews were given to major magazines, further enhancing its reputation.

However, as was the case with earlier ParSoft releases, the ship date continued to slip. By early 1998 two major competitors had come forth, European Air War (EAW) and Jane's WWII Fighters and by the later part of the year there was a rush to hit the Christmas market. EAW and Jane's were both released late in 1998, SDOE missed the season. At some point Eric Parker left the company and was replaced by Michael Harrison, who had joined during the A-10 efforts.

Reception

SDOE was released to reviewers in March 1999, and a flurry of reviews followed. All of them, bar none, complained about the low-quality of the flight model, noting that earlier preview versions included a more accurate model. Parsoft blamed this on Activision demanding changes in light of user feedback.^[5][6] Some noted that the model suddenly switched to the original high-fidelity version when damage was taken.^[7]

SDOE's time in the market was relatively short, and the poor reviews did not help matters. A single official patch to the game was released, and a number of basic tools and documentation for the OpenPlane system on a company-hosted site. Activision dropped their collaboration and Parsoft itself folded not long after, re-forming as Inertia Games and releasing a radio control simulator based on the same OpenPlane engine.^[8]

Modding

Like many games with an "open" engine, SDOE was quickly supported by a strong user community who kept the game alive. Although the company's troubles meant that complete OpenPlane documentation and tools were not released, the modder community slowly reverse engineered the system and its associated Parfiles.

References

Citations

Bibliography

External links

• Openplanesim
• Skinpacks for SDOE
• Fighter Squadrons Screamin' Daemons Commentary