From: malloy@crash.cts.com (Sean Malloy)
Subject: Re: STUNT ISLAND - SIMPLY _AMAZING_!                 (Long Review)
Organization: CTS Network Services (crash, ctsnet), El Cajon, CA
Date: 10 Nov 92 22:28:59 PST

In article <1992Nov10.225601.10425@news.columbia.edu> am66@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Alexander Maldutis) writes:
>Hi!  I got Stunt Island [SI] on Sunday.  My recommendation:
>2) Delete Aces of the Pacific, JetFighterII, Secret Weapons from your HD. 
>	MAYBE leave Falcon3, if you're not playing the game for the graphics.
>	Be prepared to ignore F-15 SE III when you see it in the store.

None of these are in _any_ danger, as long as you're playing them as
_simulations_ and not just for the fun of throwing a plane around the sky.

>3) BUY THIS GAME!

 . . . after carefully considering the pros and cons of the program.

>I am NOT exaggerating the above.  I guarantee you won't want to look at any
>flight sim after you see this game.

NOT!

>The game is essentially a VERY sophisticated VCR/Editing deck wrapped around
>a pretty good flight sim and scene creator [For you ex-Amigans out there,
>you get something similar to Imagine or SA4D, but in realtime.  Remember those
>Lambo-Apache demos by Allen Hastings?  Now you do it].  

"Pretty good" is _not_ the adjective I'd use. Try "almost worthless".

>The plot posits an island created for the sole purpose of shooting stunts, 
>somewhere off of California.  On the island you find an unbelieveable variety 
>of locations, each rendered in EXTRAORDINARY detail.

 . . . but a certain lack of attention to fiddling details like _scale_.
For example, in the stunt where you have to fly a Mig-25 down a street
between skyscrapers (in excess of 1000 mph for the run), either the street
is about fifteen feet wide or a Mig-25 has a 150-foot wingspan.

>                                                      There is the Golden Gate
>bridge, but it is rendered as a bridge, with rounded H-beams on the towers, 
>cabling junctions in the middle of the span, cars moving along, and so forth, 
>not a pathetic collection of sticks that JFII calls a bridge [you will notice 
>your tolerance for other simulators' scenery dropping precipitously].  You 
>will also find an aircraft carrier, Stonehenge, LAX, three stadiums, Alcatraz,
>an old castle, an aqueduct, an eight lane superhighway, a powerplant, a forest,
>a jungle, train tracks, a canyon, a reservoir, a hydro plant, to name a few.
>The centerpiece and masterpiece of the scenery, however, is the urban setting.
>There is a major city on both sides of a river, with bridges, skyscrapers, 
>parks, the UN, industrial areas, and so on.  There is a smaller city, as well
>as a fairly large town.  Now the important thing to understand is that
>YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN CITIES LIKE THESE.  These cities are not retreads of
>"a couple of boxes on a gray patch of land with some black lines 
>running through it" which you have been seeing since Flight Simulator 1.0.
>Nor are they absurd bits of bitmap noise seen most recently in the F15 SE III
>demo.  These are cities with defined blocks, multiple buildings on each
>block, plus skyscrapers, roads, trees, parks, vehicles, and other urban
>phenomena.  In other words, they are complete cities, with all of the surface
>area filled in with structures.  I can only repeat that you have never seen
>stuff like this before, except as renderings on high end machines.  There is
>simply no comparison.

I concede that the amount of detail that has gone into building the
simulation world blows away any flight simulator on the market, but that's
only part of the program.

>Most of the world's major aircraft are present, including WWI biplanes
>and triplanes; WWII Corsairs, Mustangs, Junkers, as well as modern planes
>such as the Boing 727,737,747s, E3C AWACS, the Space Shuttle, MiG-29
>Fulcrum, F/A-18 Hornet, SR-71, F-15C Eagle, F-16 Falcon, Tu-95 Bear, 
>F-4 Phantom, A-10 Thunderbolt, plus a bunch I can't remember.  You also
>get balloons, paragliders, hang gliders, meteors, as well as your basic 
>pterodactyl and duck.  All of these aircraft are GOURAUD SHADED in REALTIME.
>Yes!  Each aircraft is shaded in approximately 1-2 pixels colorbands.
>The net effect of this is not so much to make the lightsourcing perfect
>[even JFII does that], but to impart roundness to aircraft with round
>surfaces.  Even the propellers are round and curved aerodynamically.
>YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN AIRCRAFT LIKE THESE.  I guarantee that you will laugh
>at Aces of the Pacific's Corsair, Mustang and Lightning after using this
>program, after which you will AOTP.  I doubt that Strike Commander will
>have such graphics.

The graphics in the other games may be blocky and poor, but _Stunt Island_
loses _big time_ in the flight simulation itself:

First, the only sounds you have while flying are the sound of your plane's
gun firing and the sound of things blowing up. If you're not looking at the
control panel, you have absolutely no idea of where your throttle setting
is.

Second, you can have either rudder control or aileron control, but not both;
moving the joystick from side to side controls both the rudder and aileron,
and which one is active is controlled by pressing button 2 on your
joystick. Performing complex aerial maneuvers becomes an exercise in
guessing whether you have rudder or aileron active at the time.

Third, there are absolutely no G effects on the pilot. You can pull 9G
turns all day, both positive and negative G, and never blink.

Fourth, the flight models for all the planes are _pitiful_; there are not
sufficiently strong words to express my disgust at this aspect of the
simulation. The place that you will find this most clearly is in handling
the joystick inputs. You're flying along straight and level, and push the
joystick hard left to roll into a 90 degree bank. When you reach 90
degrees, you push the stick hard right to roll back; somewhere around a
bank angle between 135 and 180 degrees, your plane will stop rolling left
and begin rolling right; if you wait until your plane is upright before
centering the stick, you'll overshoot and have to roll back. It feels like
there is a delay of up to a full second between your moving the joystick
and the plane responding to it.

Fifth, and this isn't really a complaint about the flight simulation as
much as it is a warning, these planes have been rigged out for stunt work.
Not only do you have unlimited ammunition (unless the stunt is specifically
designed to limit you), but the planes are going to be flown by civilian
stunt pilots. This means that the cockpits for the military aircraft will
have their instruments ripped out and rebuilt; you get airspeed, altitude,
an eight-ball, throttle, and a bunch of switches for the other controls --
there are _none_ of the nifty targeting aids you will find in _real_
warplanes. And without any targeting aids, small targets on the ground will
go from invisible to visible at an _amazingly_ short range; you're going to
have problems making the course corrections to bring your aim on target,
given the problems with the flight models.

>The framerate of this game is AMAZING! 

Without any significant detail in the flight models, it's not surprising. 

>The most important element, as far as we Internetters are concerned, however,
>is the stunt design option.  You get something like 800 objects to place,
>eight cameras to set up, and a complete event-driven programming system
>to make all of them move.  
 		.		.		.
>The possibilities really are endless.

There are, however, some dismal problems with the event programming that
appear to center around problems with the collision detection and weapons.
If you create an event that says "When any weapon collides with any object,
explode 2nd object", you will discover that certain aircraft, the A-10 in
particular, cannot fire missiles -- the missile, immediately after launch,
"collides" with the A-10. I discovered this by accident; I had used an
event similar to the above, except that I had "wait 5 seconds and" inserted
before 'explode', and every time I fired missiles, round about the time
that the missiles hit the target I was shooting at my plane would explode.
It wasn't until I watched the spotter plane's film that I saw that the
first missile I fired exploded immediately, triggering a five-second
countdown on my plane exploding.

Also, in the selection of objects to put in a scene, you have very little
indication of _scale_ of the objects; you don't really know how big
something is until you place it.

>someone designs a fiendishly difficult stunt, posts it to wuarchive, and the
>first person to complete it puts the tape on there and wins.  This could be
>a lot more interesting than the Links386P tournament.  

A warning for the would-be stunt designers: the section of the manual
explaining how to build sets and construct events doesn't do a good job;
load and examine all of the pre-defined stunts and go over them
_carefully_; they explain things that you never see word _one_ about in the
manual.

>I have only one complaint with the game - semi-bizarre flight models.  The 
>pitch control of some prop planes is sometimes unresponsive, and the only way
>to get out of a climb is to roll.  On the other hand, this may be realistic.
>The jets are fine.

Speak for yourself. At least you recognize that the flight dynamics are a
problem.

>My recommendation - BUY THIS GAME!  The programmers will make money, you 
>will have plenty of enjoyment, and the Net will have some amazing stunts 
>to perform.  This is the game of the year so far.  SC might only equal it.
>YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A GAME AS THIS.

If you can get used to the . . . baroque . . . flight models, and the other
limitations of the flight simulation, then I agree with this assessment.
Once you get past not having the plane behave properly and the poorly-
written stunt design section of the manual, then the program becomes an
incredible amount of fun to play with.

One final note: The tunnels at either end of the "Golden Gate Bridge" are
_not_ real; they are, like the tunnels in a Coyote/Roadrunner cartoon,
simply painted on the mountains at each end, and you cannot fly through
them, even though you _would_ have clearance in a Pitts Special.

-- 
Random sig #9:
 Sean Malloy        Navy Personnel R&D Center | Any sufficiently advanced
                    San Diego, CA 92152-6800  | technology is indistinguishable
 malloy@nprdc.navy.mil        < different     | from a rigged demo.
 crash!malloy@nosc.navy.mil   < systems       |