Strike Fighters Project 1

Re-Review by JerseyD  

-Post patch-

Tsuyoshi Kawahito (Third Wire founder), Also known as “TK_ThirdWire” was the lead designer on European Air War. (A multi award winning WW2 prop sim.)

“Project 1” as it is referred to buy some, is his current project, and it’s truly something special in my opinion.

Strike Fighters Project 1 is set in the 1960s. A time when Air to Air missiles and radar in use where not as failsafe and reliable as there modern day counterparts. Third Wire kept that in mind and modeled it into the sim nicely. There are occasional malfunctions to simulate what it was like for these pilots back then.

Don't expect to be able to lock on to a target 100+ miles away that just showed up on your radar and fire and forget a missile at him. Since this sim is set in a time when you had to work alittle harder at acquiring your target and engaging him you'll have to maneuver into a suitable firing position and range before you can successfully take them out using your Air to Air Missiles.Also don't forget you'll have some powerful MGs and even a Vulcan on some planes so your battles won't be limited to just using Missles.

All in all it just feels right. Everything seems to be as I always envisioned as far as how these planes handled in real life. But don't take my word for it as I'm not a real life pilot and I really have no idea how these planes actually handled and functioned in real life.

Personal stat tracking is built into the game beautifully not only can you ad your own pic to your pilot data and view your continually updating in-depth stats but the game automatically puts kill markings on your fuselage as time goes on.

Stats are tracked for SP as well as MP

For one the graphics are quite good. They are comparable to IL-2’s And Lock-on’s graphics. Yes they are that good!

I’m running it with all my in-game settings maxed at a resolution of 1024x768 32Bit

With Quincunx Antialiasing on and it runs nice and smooth on my system.

My specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (266FSB)

1GB RAM (PC 133)

GeForce3 Ti500 64MB

Sound Blaster Audigy OEM

MSI KT7 Turbo 2 Mobo (266 FSB)

If your experiencing slow Frames Per Second you can try turning off cockpit mirrors and/or shadows.

Amazingly a full install of this game takes less than 300Mbs of Hard Drive space.

A big plus considering this game will no doubt have literally hundreds of user made add-ons, skins, aircraft etc… that a lot of us will be downloading and installing over the next few months and years. There are already a good amount of user add-ons out there and I expect that amount to increase at a fast rate once this game goes “gold” on a global scale. Mine has already swelled to over 600MB in less than 2 weeks time from all the add-ons I’ve DL’d already.

Unfortunately some of you outside the United States wont be able to find SFP1 on shelves in your local stores until January or possibly February 2003. But there it has shown up in some stores in Europe already and there are some UK based online stores such as Amazon.com that will ship to Europe that I have seen so do some hunting around and you can get it now from one of those sites .

The Campaign:

The Campaign is set in a fictional desert scenario where you get to fly different planes and earn money for new planes weapons as time goes on depending on the carrier path you choose. There are also some really good 3rd party campaigns in the works that will be available soon.

I've only just begun on the default campaign myself but I can tell you that it is pretty well done from what Ive seen so far and quite fun and immersive.

 The Joystick I’m Using is a Saitek x45 in combination with my Logitec Wingman Rumble Pad. Yes the game allows you to use and map multiple input devices.

Why do I use 2 controllers?

Because this sim has a mind numbing amount of things that need to be mapped in order to make your sorties productive and to be able to find braket and and splash enemy planes. “This is a proper sim” as a friend of mine put it, In the sense that you’ll need to spend a good hour or two at least before you have your controls mapped just right to your liking.

Iv'e added a section that will make your keymapping a lot easier and to spare you the frustration that I went through during the first few days after brought this puppy home.

The Flight Model, when flying on Hard Settings seems right to me as well. There are red outs, blacks outs, stalls, working airbrakes multi positional flaps etc…that all seem just right as far as I can tell.

Combat, depending on the individual difficulty settings you choose can be quite challenging and exciting.

The current default Flyable Planes are as follows:

A4B Skyhawk
A4C Skyhawk
A4E Skyhawk

F-100D Super Sabre

F-104G Starfighter

F-4B Phantom II
F-4C Phantom II
F-4D Phantom II
F-4E Phantom II

The Soviet Aircraft in the game don’t yet have cockpits modeled (they are currently in the works by some 3rd party modelers) but can still be flown using the cockpits of the US aircraft by doing a little simple editing of those planes ini files until the cockpits are added in a future patch (I’ll explain this in-depth in the keymaping section)
They are as follows:

MiG-17F Fresco-C
MiG-19S Farmer-C

MiG-21F Fishbed-C
MiG-21MF Fishbed-J
MiG-21PFM Fishbed-J

Su-7BM Fitter-A

There are also 6 AI controlled Aircraft currently, which are also flyable after some editing to there ini files

They are as follows:

B-57B Canberra
C-130A Hercules
O-1E Bird Dog
IL-28 Beagle
Tu-22K Blinder-B
An-12BP Cub-A

Now the really cool part about this game (at least in my opinion)

MODABILITY. You can mod every single aspect of this sim to your hearts content

I mean EVERYTHING

From the flight model of the F-100D to the skin of a T-55 tank. From the sound of the Vulcan to the menu screen itself. You can modify EVERYTHING.

With the help of a newly released piece of free software called The SFP1E short for (Strike Fighter Project 1 Extract Utility) You can extract individual files from the ObjectsData.cat file. This is the big daddy of all the files in the SFP1 install. It contains everything that makes the game tick and weighs in at 171MB. But don’t let that scare you. You only need to extract the files that you want to skin or modify. (usually they are less than 1 MB)

As for you 3D Modelers out there this sim will allow you to Model new aircraft using aircraft 3DS Max 3 4 and 5 as well as the Freeware version of 3DSMax called Gmax

You'll be able to get your work out to the public fairly easily as well since this game was designed with the Modder in mind. your 3D models that you create wont have to get any sort of approval from the creators, They'll just have to work.

Skinning the different Aircraft in this game is also great. The aircrafts skins are broken into 5 separate 512x512 bmps allowing much more attention to detail than a single 512x512 does. Plus you can even do the 5 bmps in 1024x1024 and they will work ingame as well as the fact the decals can be done separately and applied ingame by configuring the Decals makes this sim an absolute dream for skinners.

Also it's worth mentioning that TK (the creator of SFP1) has, and still is making himself very available on the various SF boards when it comes to answering peoples questions and helping them out not unlike Oleg he's shown himself to be a stand up guy who really cares about his games community and the future of his sim.

There are already some very good templates and tutorials out there for DL that will let you get right into skinning these bad boys.

Multiplayer:

Although the recent patch ( Service Pack 1) address all of the crash to desktop issues in single player as well as fixing the SAMs so that they now fire on you as well as some nice new explosion effects and various other fixes. Multiplayer is still plagued by some crashing and lockup problems.Hopefelly this will be fixed in the next patch.

All in all I'd have to say that if your a flight simmer and your looking for a high quality 60s era jet sim then this is the sim for you.

Well that's it. This was my first review (actually re-review now ) of any game I hope I covered all the bases for you and I hope you'll join the growing number of us who have purchased this sim and are enjoying it tremendously.

See you in the virtual skies,

JerseyD