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''A-10 Attack!'' is a combat flight simulator for the Apple Macintosh computer released by Parsoft Interactive in 1995. The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft that takes part in a variety of missions in West Germany during a hypothetical limited conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact. A-10 boasted one of the most detailed flight models of any game of its era, a physics model that extended to solid-body interactions with the ground and complete aerodynamics for every object in the game, including ordnance. Macworld rated it "Best Flight Simulator" in a review of Mac simulations.〔("Best Flight Simulator: At-10 Attack" ), ''Macworld'', 1996〕 The game was followed by a sequel named ''A-10 Cuba!'', originally as a stand-alone game on the Mac and Windows-based PC's, but later re-released on the Mac as a plug-in module for the original game. The Mac OS versions were produced by Parsoft, while the PC version of ''Cuba'' was a joint production with Activision. This partnership was renewed for Parsoft's final release, ''Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe''. ==History== Development of what would evolve into ''A-10 Attack!'' started after the release of ''Hellcats: Missions at Leyte Gulf'', an expansion pack for ''Hellcats Over the Pacific'' that was released in 1992. Although ''Hellcats'' managed to do a lot with limited capabilities of the hardware, the game had a number of obvious drawbacks. For one, the missions were written in computer code as part of the game engine, which meant the user could not add new missions or modify the existing ones. Another problem was that the vehicles and other objects in the game were hard-coded with various behaviors, which likewise made them difficult to customize. Even the game map itself existed only in the code. Parsoft started experimenting with a plug-in system to replace the hard-coded objects in ''Hellcats''. Known as the Virtual Battlefield Environment (VBE), the system still required programming tools to build out the objects, but once they were completed they could be loaded into the game engine from individual files. Adding these into a game simply required the files to be placed in the appropriate directories in the user's file system. VBE allowed anything to be added in this fashion; aircraft, vehicles, missions, and maps. Another problem with ''Hellcats'' was its very basic physics, which simulated only the most basic flight dynamics and resulted in flight that was unrealistic in a number of ways. There were no structural limits either, allowing a number of unrealistic extremely high-g maneuvers. A completely new flight engine was created for the VBE system that simulated subsonic aerodynamics with a fair degree of realism, with effects like dutch roll and adverse yaw "falling out" of the engine without being deliberately coded in. Additionally the system included a new physics engine that featured simple finite element analysis that allowed damage to be realistically simulated, including its effects on the flight dynamics of the aircraft. The resulting simulation was arguably the most advanced of its era. All of this was combined with an improved version of the graphics engine developed for ''Hellcats'', allowing players to use multiple monitors and any resolution their machine could support. ''Hellcats'' used a polygon-based flat-shaded system that used differential updating to avoid bottlenecks in the computer bus and thereby improve frame rates. ''A-10'' retained the basics from ''Hellcats'', but added the ability for small areas of texture mapping to be applied, which was used on the vehicles to add roundels and squadron markings. A combination of improved code in the engine and the rapid improvement in computer performance since the release of ''Hellcats'' allowed the new engine to feature greatly increased scene complexity. Early versions of the game were shown at MacWorld Boston in the summer of 1993. At the time the physics and graphics engines were operational, although there was no "game" per-se. The world consisted of a single-runway airbase and a nearby target range with several "bullseye" targets. This was followed some time later by a fairly functional demo version, which took place on a mythical island with a number of friendly and enemy objects in the area. For the release version, a series of missions in northern Germany were created, along with a new mission-planning map system that was widely lauded. As the game was being finalized for release, Apple introduced the new PowerMac systems. Running in the 68k emulator the game proved to be very slow, so a delay followed while they wrote a PowerPC "native" version, and the game was finally delivered in 1995, a full three years after starting development and about a year later than promised. Although it was claimed the VBE could allow any sort of customization of the engine, documentation and tools for VBE was never released, so users could not create their own modules and the power of this system was never fully explored. ''A-10 Cuba!'' followed, although at first it did not use VBE and was shipped in the form of a stand-alone application. It was only later that Cuba was re-released to run as a "real" VBE module in the original shell. The specifications were never released to 3rd parties, and the few public comments on the topic from Parsoft claimed it was simply not ready and required work to clean it up and document it. By 1997 Parsoft had already moved onto a new project, and it was clear that VBE had been abandoned. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A-10 Attack!」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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