Real Stories of Simulation Development

Oh wow. I played a lot of Jane's F/A-18 in my youth, and recall some of the names and public issues mentioned in the article. There were many complaints about low framerates in the game, which had so-so graphics for the time. The developers stated this was due to the very complicated radar modeling loading the CPU, which apparently included raytracing and cloud penetration modeling. It's fascinating to see how far they took the radar simulation for a video game.

> We had CJ who had intimate knowledge of the radars, and we had Matt who had been at the CIA and knew about the information systems. So when I was doing the part of the A2A radar that identifies enemy planes by their radar signature, I had put something in and said to CJ ‘Is this how it works?’ he looked at it then went into Matt’s office and closed the door (something we never did unless we needed privacy). They were in there for 10 or 15 minutes, and then CJ came out and said it would be fine. I learned later that what I had put in was close to what the classified system actually does, and they needed to discuss whether it was too close to ship with, but they couldn’t tell me that (because then I’d know what the real system was like).

Also, funniest bit I found:

> We were now using EA’s QA department to test the game and quite frankly they didn’t impress us. One of the bugs they sent us was if you Alt-Tab out of Jane’s F/A-18 and delete the game directory the game will eventually crash.