What's the Status of the Series - Cause I Dearly Miss my IAF Jets.

[Arrow 83]

Recently all my air time has been spent with DCS World, IL2-CoD (Team Fusion patches to the the max) and BMS Falcon 4. I own all of 3rd Wires Wings Over series, but never did make the upgrade to SF2. The thing I miss most is flying those legendary birds of the IAF. But now that I check back in on this combatsim, I see that there hasn't been any updates since 2012. If memory serves me correctly, the Wings Over series never got beyond 3rd gen avionics, with the most advanced being in the F-18A and F-15A. I'm enjoying the more recent gen in DCS and BMS Falcon and always wanted to see that come to WO. I'm considering purchasing SF2 Israel for my IAF fix, but I'm not that enthused about flying jet aircraft that haven't even made it to the 4th gen. As well, I remember being quite frustrated with kludges in WO campaigns that I at times had to edit files to work round. So did the avionics in the SF2 series ever advanced beyond what was in WO?

 

As well, in the past few years I've noted 3rd Wire arcade sims showing up on Android store - installed a few, but TBH they paled in  comparison to the more realistic combatsims on Android like Gun Ship 3. Now I see that one of those has been brought to the the PC. So is SF2 pretty much abandoned now, with TK and 3rd Wire now just focused on arcade sims?

Edited May 16, 2017 by Arrow

[MigBuster 2,884]

Short answer = Yes

 

Here is some recent comments from Facebook

 

 

Third Wire

We're working on more PC games, but they won't be anything like the SF2 series, they'll be based on the more successful mobile games. We wish we could continue to work on SF2, but not enough people bought the last two SF2 titles for that, so we are trying something different. 

 

If you are one of the few people who bought every one of our PC titles, we thank you for your support, we really do appreciate you, and we couldn't have done it for so long without you. Unfortunately, there just wasn't enough of you out there for us to continue. If you want SF2 to continue, it's not us that you need to try to convince, it's the other players. We have too many players who only buy one title and expect us to continue to update it forever. Even if only half the people who own one of our games (either SF1 or SF2 titles) have bought SF2NA when it came out, that would have been more than enough to fund the next SF2 title. But unfortunately, that didn't happen, only a small tiny fraction of our users returned to buy SF2NA. 

If you're still on SF1 series, that means you haven't bought our last 8 titles (at least!). If you only have SF2 Europe, then you haven't bought our last 4 titles. It should be no surprise that we're not making more games like the ones you haven't been buying, and making something else instead

 

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Third Wire 

There is a good market for flight sim, and plenty of other people have bought (and enjoyed) our games over the years. SF1 series was successful enough for us to do SF2, and SF2 series was successful enough for 2 expansions, countless DLCs, and SF2 NA. All of them have been successful, except the last two (SF2 Exp2 and SF2 NA). That's how we know the series has exhausted itself, and we know we've taken the series as far as we could. 

If you didn't buy them because you didn't like how our games worked, then it shouldn't matter to you if we had continued the series or not. But if you didn't buy them because they were too similar, then that pretty much says it all. Any new flight sim we do would be very similar to ones we already have – same game, different planes. 

Atlantic Fleet was an iOS game, so if you could enjoy that on PC, then maybe you could enjoy our mobile games on PC too ;) And you do know Cold Water is a completely different game in different genre than Atlantic Fleet (real-time vs turn-based), right? That's basically what we're doing, instead of doing the same thing again, we're doing something different.

 

 

 

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Sadly PR and advertising were never introduced to Thirdwires business plans it seems...............

 

 

 

Actually I will add..........I think Thirdwire can be commended by changing with the times, (as many other companies have failed to do and gone under)......and seizing on the opportunity of the mainstream move to mobile PC platforms (iOS, Android etc). From their point of view their customer base and exposure went through the roof, the tech support issues and hassle were reduced to pretty much nothing (to what they were) and have a new business model with a successful revenue stream.  

 

The comments above regarding SF2 however are poor and TK does himself more justice when he shuts up.........you could add to the above:

 

"If you didn't buy SF2 because you had never heard of it"

or

"If you didn't buy SF2 because the limited visibility upgrades gave no incentive to do so!"

 

Problems he might have had to answer himself had the technology not changed at that point.

Edited May 16, 2017 by MigBuster

[Arrow 83]

Thanks for the reply and info MigBuster. Yikes, talk about a facebook post that gives a guilt slap to others like me who didn't upgrade! Heh, heh. I didn't make the update to SF2 because I didn't think I had a good enough PC, as I was still running WinXP until 2013 for resource reasons and SF2 was targeted at Vista and Win7.  A Buddy recently told me I could have run it on WinXP though. lol,  guess I should have upgraded, but I'll take my slaps like a good fighter jockey now.

 

So I'm taking it's a yes too to my question about not advancing SF2 to 4th gen avionics?

 

I really wish the manufacturer of DCS and those wonderful BMS Falcon modders would start thinking about an Israel theater. But BMS efforts are free for fans, so who's to complain. The manufacturer of DCS is bringing part of the Desert storm theater to their sim, but from my understanding there's no allowance for any mods to reskin it to Israel - not to mention hardly any of the appropriate jets are available.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Arrow

[MigBuster 2,884]

SF2 is stuck at around 1982 officially regarding time lines out side of what has been modded.........so the 4th gen F-14A / F-15A / F-16A all have pretty decent radar sets to that year...although you need SF2NA for the F-14A avionics (IIRC)

 

 How long is it since DCS:A-10?............. is that 6/7 years since all the excitement of this and that will happen etc?........ED look to be happy to go it slow alongside their commercial flight sim business and cater for a specialist niche...............SF2 was a niche within a niche when desktop/Laptop & Windows was the only game in town!   

A full working Desert Storm with all objects as we had in SF2 years back?........ETA = 2029

 

[Do335 382]

doesn't BMS have a pretty good Israel theater?

[Arrow 83]

doesn't BMS have a pretty good Israel theater?

You know, TBH I'm not even sure. I just got it installed a few months back when I was finally able to dig my old F4 CD-ROM out of storage. I've still got my nose stuck in the Training and Flight manuals, barely have gotten my wheels off the runway.  ;)  I will do some checking into that though.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Arrow

[Do335 382]

https://www.bmsforum.org/forum/showthread.php?29823-Israeli-Theater-1-0-3-for-BMS-4-33-3

 

 

 

You know, TBH I'm not even sure. I just got it installed a few months back when I was finally able to dig my old F4 CD-ROM out of storage. I've still got my nose stuck in the Training and Flight manuals, barely have gotten my wheels off the runway.  ;)  I will do some checking into that though.

Edited May 16, 2017 by Do335

[Arrow 83]

 How long is it since DCS:A-10?............. is that 6/7 years since all the excitement of this and that will happen etc?........ED look to be happy to go it slow alongside their commercial flight sim business and cater for a specialist niche...............SF2 was a niche within a niche when desktop/Laptop & Windows was the only game in town! 

A full working Desert Storm with all objects as we had in SF2 years back?........ETA = 2029

 

Yeah I hear you, ED certainly seem to plod along at a snails pace. My bigger concern though is the amount of bugs and kludges in DCSW that don't get fixed and worse; new ones errantly intro'd by patches that don't get fixed.  Don't get me wrong - I bought FC3 in a sale for the same price as SF2 Israel and I've had a fun time and good experience with it, but have definitely had to make a few compromises with how I play.

 

I also think it's very impressive what the WO and SF2 fanbase of modders was able to do for the sim. When I'm feeling I need a break from DCS and BMS Falcon, I might just buy SF2 IAF and Vietnam to relive some of the fun.

Many thanks for the link Do335 - looks like I've got some IAF possibilities after all.  ;)

  Edited May 16, 2017 by Arrow

[yubba 70]

aaaaaaaah,, hmmmmmm. A bunch of us down here in the basement with SF-1 and WOV-1 have brought forth a top notch fight sim for low end computers and first timers

[Do335 382]

how much avionics do u need on a Mirage III, primarily a gun fighter. i find the avionics "lite" of SF suit the era very well and we got a ground up built sim for it. it is good fun dogfighting migs over the desert, instead of pushing switches.
 
i also flew BMS heavily pushing many switches and ivc the hell outta fighter brevity as i please, the F-16 is very much an IAF jet with the one in ITO modded to its special israel flavor.
 
heck, who says one can't have both! pick yer poison!

 

Many thanks for the link Do335 - looks like I've got some IAF possibilities after all.  ;)

Edited May 17, 2017 by Do335

[jeanba 1,920]

Thank you Migbuster for what you wrote here.

Not pleasant to read (sorry, no "like"), but as a facebook hater, I was not aware of this.

[PFunk 198]

The status of SF2 is that we have what we have and it's all we'll ever have.  Has some great advantages in that it is remarkably flexible and it has as much soul as the creator of the stuff you're using dares to put into it.  It has an avionics suite that is easily approachable.  It features in-game aircraft that no other company has even touched.  And, thanks to the efforts of a very stalwart group of people, an exceedingly large number of places to fly and things to do while you're there.

 

That said, it has a number of ridiculously bad flaws that make it impossible for me to enjoy any longer.  The AI can no longer use external countermeasure racks and we're not even really 100% sure it can use external ECM pods.  You cannot fly at night during a campaign if its a naval map.  The stock red side carriers are non functional and took the efforts of modders to fix.  The AI is atrociously bad at situational awareness.

 

I'm actually moving on to DCS and Combat Air Patrol 2, which is still in very early access phase, but looks promising.  

[alexis99 124]

Well TK designed a Sim that allowed us to get under the hood and tinker with. He's surprised we're still enjoying tinkering? Ha ha. I'm with Yubba.

[Foxhound1 6]

It's a terrible shame, because there are no other modern survey sims like Strike Fighters 2 out there. SF2 hit right on the mark for me in terms of realism. Games like DCS, Falcon 4 and even Flaming Cliffs 3 are too complex for my taste. I can understand the appeal, but they're not for me - I simply lack the patience and/or brain power, I guess. It seems that flight simulators today are either extremely authentic study sims, or simple arcade shooters like Ace Combat. The games that are somewhere inbetween (moderately realistic, but with some simplification), like Jane's US Navy Fighters or Strike Fighters 2, are simply not made anymore.

 

I can't argue with the economic realities of ThirdWire, but I still think they could make a fair bit of money with minimal effort if they released some sort of SF2 compilation on Steam with all the expansions, similar to IL-2 1946, and priced it at around $10 - $20 (IL-2 is sold for $10 currently). It would add a new standard for modders to work towards, since they would no longer have to concern themselves with all the different versions and packages of SF2 that people are currently using.

[CowboyTodd41 134]

I love TK, and am forever grateful to him for what he did produce as per the SF series over the years. But as much as I'm grateful to him for that, I'm far more grateful to mod community for years and years worth of content that has held my interest for well over a decade. The Falkland Islands campaign alone is worth ever single cent I ever paid for the SF series, and I've bought every one. So... I guess what I'm trying to say is huge thanks to TK and TW, but an even more massive thanks to all the modders who have held my rapt attention for the last Fifteen years.