What made everyone play SF2

[TheStig 39]

We have quite a bit of users of the SFx series.   There are other sims out like DCS, but I find SF2 a lot easier to mod and create campaigns with.  

 

Before this, I was a very old school sim addict, addicted to the Microprose sims from back in the 486 days.   

 

SF1 came out and it brought me back into flight sims in 2009.   I took a break for 11 years to start a family.  Realizing how much stuff is out there for SF2, it brought me back in.  One of my kids has additional needs, and discovered became a fan of flight sims.   It was a great way to bond and teach him about flying.  Using SF2 WoV as his first experience, he was enthusiastic popping off Sparrows from an F-4D.

 

We modded further and now he's running buzz saws of 20mm from French Corsairs in the Madagascar terrain.  Guess it's his new favorite aircraft.  

 

We converted a Lenovo laptop as a dedicated SF2 gamer, and he has begun modding with me.  For those times we travel, he can sit all day at the airport terminal watching commercial aircraft depart and arrive ..

 

Anyway that is my story.  What brought everyone else here?

Edited January 16 by TheStig

[+DoctorQuest 125]

I liked it's equivalence to European Air War in terms of being able to jump in and fly a quick mission or dig into a campaign. I know people say it's "lite" compared to something like DCS but I think as a COMBAT sim it really excels at delivering that experience.

I really don't like DCS for a lot of reasons I won't go into here. Let's just say it is not my go-to sim. If I want a FLIGHT simulator I will go with MSFS or X-Plane.

Easy to play, easy to mod, great community, great mods. What is not to like from a easy to access COMBAT simulator?

[Spinners 15,986]

I didn't get on board until early 2008 when I saw a copy of Strike Fighters Gold (with an F-4E on the cover) in a local department store. My PC at that time was far from being a gaming machine but SFG worked just fine and I quickly caught up with WoV and WoE. This was a great time as WoI came out soon after and Strike Fighters 2 came in at the end of the year. From the very start I just wanted to modify the game to my own tastes and have the ability to place, say, an F-105D in service with the RAF and give it contemporary markings still gives me a kick. This nudged me in the direction of making my own decals and then making my own skins, mainly from templates but sometimes from scratch. I have tried other flight sims but I still find that SF best suits my interests. It's a pity that Third Wire did not continue to support SF on PC as I liked the direction they were going with DLC's and I'm convinced that SF2:Korea was on the horizon. Hey ho.

[+whiteknight06604 934]

I was a big janes fighters Anthology and Microsoft CFS 1 and 2 player way back and was a semi-regular on the old Netwings and sim-outhouse forums. I remember 2003? Dave posting some screen shots from the original Strike Fighter Project One there. i was hooked and the first opportunity I bought the game. Unfortunately it was a second hand "Wally World" edition. Took me a while to track down a "real" copy and the rest is thousands apon thousand of siming hours of history. 

[+Major Bloodnok 465]

51 minutes ago, whiteknight06604 said:

I was a big janes fighters Anthology and Microsoft CFS 1 and 2 player way back and was a semi-regular on the old Netwings and sim-outhouse forums. I remember 2003? Dave posting some screen shots from the original Strike Fighter Project One there. i was hooked and the first opportunity I bought the game. Unfortunately it was a second hand "Wally World" edition. Took me a while to track down a "real" copy and the rest is thousands apon thousand of siming hours of history. 

Netwings, there's a blast from the past.

[TheStig 39]

I remember Janes Fighters Anthology! I had a copy of US Navy Fighters before it became merged with ATF and NATO Fighters.  Didn't play it a lot since I was in HS at the time.  I do remember they graded you on carrier landings in there. 

[bazillius 1,258]

I've always played flight simulators. Since 1998. My favorites are Falcon 4.0 (FreeFalcon, OpenFalcon, BMS) FSX, FS2004. But I like Strike Fighters 2 because it's easy to mod. Modifying games, not only SF2, is my hobby. It calms my nerves. I love modifying while listening to music or watching a movie on the second display. For me this game mostley is not for playing, but rather as a collection of airplanes. Its too.. to arcade. No matter what game I start playing, after 20-40 minutes I already want to change something. I turn off a game and start looking through resources or seeing what I can add. The first game I started modding was Tank Platoon 2 in 1998

Edited January 16 by bazillius

[+EricJ 4,241]

I came from the Lock On/Flanker 2.51 community when me and Dave met each other through Eagle Dynamics. I flew many other games and didn't get much into games from Jane's (I did like Apache Longbow though), but for the most part got into the WOX series and then when SF2 came out I moved on to that. I like the replayability and what little modding I have done though, so while I go away I still maintain some kind of presence here and so on.

[+daddyairplanes 10,232]

started because.... Phantoms

stayed after I got teh modding bug

prior ot that, computer ownership (and therefore flight simming ) was a very on and off thing for me.

[+Trotski 936]

I had my first flight sim on my Amstrad 664, cannot for the life of me remember what it was called though, then I upgraded to the Amiga, and I really went in for Flight sims, I had Falcon, F16 Combat pilot, Birds of Prey, Gunship, F/a 18 , F14 fleet defender, and several more including several of the Janes series. I eventually got my first PC and continued the trend. My first big love was EAW, that got me hooked on modding and editing the sim, I prgressed to the IL2 series, and ended up with Lock on, then I discovered SF Gold........I have DCS, and IL2 Battle of.......well all of 'em actually, but I always come back to SF/FE as it is just so good, user friendly, uncomplicated, and fabulous to mod and skin, DCS is superb, but I am NOT a real fighter Pilot, and although I WAS in the RAF, I was an RAF Regiment Gunner, so I like things simple, as my poor ol' Rockape brain cannot be bothered with having to press 2 million buttons, and flick almost as many switches just to adjust the seat height in the pit heehehehehe. I find this series of sims ( SF/FE) to be fun, stress free ( mostly) and easy to use, fly, and mod/skin. Long may it continue.

[+streakeagle 871]

My goal was always to fly F-4 Phantoms in Vietnam, though I enjoyed many other aircraft and eras in flight sims. I started out the Jane's Fighters Anthology on a work laptop around 1998. I went back to college in 2000, so I bought a PC to allow me to do schoolwork at home, but set it up as a mid-range flight sim machine with Jane's USAF (and most of the other Jane's sims at that time). The graphics for Jane's USAF impressed me, particularly the nearly photo-real Nevada terrain. The cockpits and external models look pretty good. But then, I saw TK/Third Wire posting about their upcoming Strike Fighters Project 1 sim that featured the F-4 as one of the primary aircraft. I bought the half-finished/buggy Walmart edition as soon as I saw it on the shelf. I played the SF/WoX/SF2 series almost every day for quite a few years. Until TK had started dumbing down SF2 and finally abandoned it for the free-to-play tablet/phone games. At exactly that time, DCS World had recently released the P-51D Mustang and announced a crowd funded MiG-21bis. Beyond the MiG-21, DCS rapidly got the F-86, MiG-15, F-5, and UH-1. From that point on, DCS became my primary sim. I also migrated to flying in VR as well as flying lots of online multiplayer. I have had SF2 somewhat compatible with VR every now and then, but it cannot compare to the VR experience in DCS World. The F-4 Phantom is finally coming to DCS World, too. I very rarely startup SF2 anymore.

[+Soulfreak 6,524]

I startet with SFP 1, wich I found in a game store more than 20 year ago.

I always liked Flightsims & a flyable Starfighter was the reason to buy

I love the wide range of modding capabilities and of course the modding community here.

Edited January 17 by Soulfreak

[+dtmdragon 2,703]

Around 2010 I was trying to get Jane's IAF working on my new Windows Vista PC and came across SF2 Israel on the internet somehow. The rest as they say is history. The ease of modding and adding researched details makes the game for me. Early on I remember TK taking away subtitles in a patch at one point (gear up/down etc) and everyone begging him on the official forums to bring it back.

Edited January 17 by dtmdragon

[anunk47 370]

Same with some friends above, I'm a Scale Modeler who likes Vietnam War subject, love sim  and FPS games, and then Wings Over Vietnam brought me deep in this tar pit, and I don't wanna get out..  
Why?
- Wide range of downloadable mods (thanks all kind modders here!)
-(maybe) The only game I know that we could fly Pre-Historic Velociraptor to F-22 Raptor.. 
-This game becomes more like sandbox to me.. (thanks to Blender, and Mue's toolbox)
-This game are tolerable with my 90's Casio Scientific Calculator Processor laptop..
-And Lads round here are more kind and feels like family than my own brother.. (wait.. ah.. I'm the only son..)

[SUDNAVY 118]

because I love Vietnam war

[+Gepard 11,289]

The first flightsim which you could mod was USNF. This was back in the 1990th, when i started to create terrains for USNF. Then EAW followed, which had a great gameplay and was able to mod too, but not as easy to mod as USNF. When SFP1 came out i found that it was a good mix between gameplay and easy to mod.

SFP1 had a very good graphic for the time. It looked much better than Falcon 3.0 or so. But it was full of bugs. First i thought, that it was a waste of money, because it was nearly unplayable. But i found out, that a community was forming, were guys started to mod. They made not flyable planes flyable and they started to create new terrains. The first was Korea. It was simple, only some blue and red airfields, nothing more. Someone had made a F-86 Sabre and so you could play MiG-Alley. The opponent was the MiG-17, but who cares ... So it began.

I thought, that i could make better terrains and i started with Israel terrain. Others followed. Step by step it became better. Then i found CombatAce site ... I wrote the topic "My way to create a terrain", which paved the way for a lot of modders to make their own terrains. ... Great time.

[PeacePuma 569]

On 16/1/2024 at 3:08 PM, bazillius said:

No matter what game I start playing, after 20-40 minutes I already want to change something. I turn off a game and start looking through resources or seeing what I can add. 

Haha, that sums up what kind of players we are...

[PeacePuma 569]

Back in 2000 I was starting university and in the student residence there was a modest PC with Windows 98, at that time I painted things in paint with a style that decades later would be called pixelart, by chance looking for who knows what. , I found that it installed a demo version of F-22 lightning and from there I left the pixelart aside haha... then I went through F-16 MRF, Comanche and other Novalogic sims, F18 Hornet until I reached Flanker 2.5 there I learned about the modifications with various texture packs that I was downloading from the internet, and one day around 2008 I found a publication that mentioned several flight simulators that I already knew except one called Strike Fighters Project 1... I was struck by the graphics (much better than what I was playing then) and also the novelty of piloting a selection of Cold War fighters. I thought it was interesting to get it. When I got it I think it was the GOG editor, they had a free download of 5 modern era airplanes on their website, there was the f-16, F-18, the tomcat among others, at that moment I said wow  how can I fly such a variety of planes, then I met checksix.frw here I found many other planes and textures and then,...  and the greatest pleasure was reaching Column5.us... there I said "what kind of spell is this?" and my creative orgasm was total hahaha... from there to CA it was just a step to marvel at this community and here we are, fascinated by a modifiable simulator, the perfect game for an airplane lover who is also a graphic designer...

Edited January 17 by PeacePuma

[Viggen 644]

I saw a copy of Wings Over Europe on the shelf at Best Buy in the summer of 2006. Up to that point my flying games were Ace Combat or MSFS 2004. I tried LOMAC but my 13 year old dumbass didn't know what computer specs were so it barely worked on my home PC. I played it bone stock for about a year and then discovered that there were indeed mods for it when I found Column 5's old website and CombatAce soon after.

[MigBuster 2,884]

As a kid Flight of the Intruder on the Amiga which was by the same guys that did Falcon probably swayed me towards the Cold War era - thinking it even had inbuilt ROE (?) dont know.

Picked up SFP1 about 2004 which had Vietnam era jets so a natural progression - nothing else was like that.

[+Coupi 4,388]

In 2003... I discovered SFP1 with later WoV, WoE and WoI. I played FE also. 

In 2006... I met Combat Ace and the TW games community. 

Today I play only with SF2. 

SF2 (and FE2) is in my opinion very playable with its full "moddability". 

Here at Combat Ace I have found plenty of friends thanks to the games of TK !!! 

P. 

[PeacePuma 569]

Tell me how you feel about seeing this page... I am very fond of Colum5, it brings back many good memories like when you remember a song... and from here I discovered the CA site... for the nostalgic, I leave you a link to the old one. site in all its glory

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20100428115038/http://www.column5.us/aircraft.shtml

Edited January 18 by PeacePuma

[Spinners 15,986]

I've been hit by a big wave of nostalgia!

[+Sundowner 4,818]

I got my copy of Strike Fighters Project 1 shipped over to me just after the Wallmart release.

Anything with Phantoms got my instant attention..........I "played" it for around 6 months then thought I'd have a go at this skinning lark, I uploaded my first skins to Avsim.

In those days SimHq was the place to go & once SF P1 had got itself established a forum was soon set up over there but there still was'nt really anywhere to upload your work to other than Avsim....that's when Don aka Column5 setup the website as seen above.

Most of us "modders" were in touch with each other behind the scenes using msn messenger or ICQ and that's the way we got stuff done, files were shuffled about between us so fast it was sometimes hard to keep up, I'd sometime have up to 10 skins on the go at any one time but tried to have one finished completely new ( as is, started from scratch, no lines,paint or anything ) skin a week, either for my own choice or for TMF or whatever project was on the go at the time.

Those were the "good old days" always something new coming out, I'm mean "completely new", not like the re-release of a re-release that we get a lot of nowadays, there was always something to look forward to......then TK would release a patch which resulted in the mad scramble to see what's new and what had got removed or ended up broken.

It was all good fun though, and even though most of us old heads have moved on or even worse died (RIP) it's good to see that we do still have an active community to keep the old girl alive and kicking.

There are still plenty of quality mods available here to keep folks interested and that's what counts.

But we must also remember that without Erik providing this haven for all our work then the whole Strike Fighters family would of died off a long time ago.

So a big thanks to;

TK

Modders past and present

Erik

And good old "joe public" for enjoying what we do.

 

Blimey......it's taken over 2 hours to type this lot up....

 

[+whiteknight06604 934]

14 hours ago, PeacePuma said:

Tell me how you feel about seeing this page... I am very fond of Colum5, it brings back many good memories like when you remember a song... and from here I discovered the CA site... for the nostalgic, I leave you a link to the old one. site in all its glory

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20100428115038/http://www.column5.us/aircraft.shtml

I always got a kick when Column5 would decorate his page commie style for May day.