I'm still wondering what it is that HTC is supposed to be "winning"...
Well, seems every time a new flight game hits the market it is an "Aces High killer". I remember when Targetware hit and we were "doomed", and then IL2 hit (along with several incarnations) and with each version, we were going to be "out of business".
There seems to be a never ending supply of people who want to proclaim Aces High is going to be killed by the next game. They all come in here and talk about how we have screwed up so bad and how the next best thing is going to kill us. They are happy to recite how we must change our business and are very willing to tell us what we need to do to stay in the game. It is simply amazing how many people think they are experts in this field.
It is easy to sit back and act like you have all the answers, but when it becomes a matter of keeping a roof over your head and feeding your family, it takes on a different perspective.
Over the last 12 years, we have shown the industry we never rest on our laurels. We challenge ourselves more than any other competitor could. There is a passion at work here that is still alive and well. One only has to look at how many times this game has been updated over the last 12 years to know that is true.
One of the most frustrating things to deal with are end users who measure the complexity and sophistication of a game by its graphics. Anyone in the business knows great graphics is about artwork and a lot of it. The underlying display code is trivial as compared to the amount of artwork needed.
A major cost, in our business, is the download size. We have to be conscious of it. End users are so used to just downloading whatever they want without worrying about that cost. Who do you think pays for that? We do. There are other issues that go along with the size of the download, but those are irrelevant for the purposes here. Resource management is what it ends up being about. We could build a single airplane model that would swamp a 512MB video card. How far would that take us? You cannot make a slider which reduces the artwork for a model. You would have to make different models to solve that one.
How many of those great looking cars are you going to see on a race track? What is the actual view distance? Again, resource management. The fewer models you have in view and the less the distance, the more detail you can afford to add to them.
Personally, I have yet to find a game, with so many models, do what Aces High does, while keeping the entire game under 300MB. I am not saying there are not any, but I have not found one.