Without actually fueling the anti-TW fire here, I have to say Stiglr's looking a bit hypocritical here...
TW is so flawed that the individual damage points are given weights, and the durability is tied to that weight. It's hard to explain, but there've been countless issues with tweaking settings because people trying to add planes can't do what they want (or what is historically correct). On top of that, custom ammo belting, almost all folks were loading the best rounds all the time (not overly historical, eh?).. it would be like loading mgechoss for every round, or HEI for every round, when historically these were dispersed every 5th round or less.
On top of that, the underlying flight model is so buggy that ALL planes suffer the same radiator cooling drag (it's coded in) despite the actual drag from actual cooling flaps -- and we all know different planes have different drag.
Then there's the black box style of programming.. Creators set parameters and the game engine "creates" the plane out of those... Half the folks putting the planes in coulnd't even tell me what the proper cruise, WEP, max continuous, etc, settings were for the very engines they had "programmed" in... They had no idea whether their creation was accurate or not, they just plugged in horsepower and a few other variables and left it up to a generic model to make it fly properly.
Frankly, there's almost nothing historically accurate about TargetWare. There's more interest in player-created content, for sure, but there is no quality control, no vetting of information or historical authenticity. It looks nice, but frankly so does IL2 (and that isn't very historically accurate either).
So when he comes in here harping about how inaccurate AH is I have to wonder: Why doesn't he turn a critical eye to these very glaring flaws in TW?
I wish TW had been better, but frankly it wasn't. As far as flight sims go it's a failure. Even the game code is so obsolete (The TargetWare itself, not the sub-divided game packs Tobruk, Poland, etc) that they've stopped working on it. The game coders disappeared last I read, or moved on to other things. Heck, I even seem to recall Target Tobruk shut down indefinitely until the new code was released because folks were hacking it (yes, with a player base of 5, they were hacking).
IMO, where TW went wrong was trying to promote itself as an online game. Might have worked out really nicely as an offline (AI-based) campaign type game.
I really don't want to add to the flaming of TW here because I wanted it to succeed (competition breeds technological improvements!), but I did want to point out to Stiglr that he's throwing a lot of stones while living in a house full of broken glass.
