Combat Flight Simulator was the third and last Sim title I worked on at Microsoft before I became the art director for Crimson Skies, High Road to Revenge. As with the the Flight Sim 2000 title I worked on, I worked closely with the art lead to establish tools, pipeline, and process before the production artists would join the team. Since Microsoft owned Softimage at that time, all of our content was developed in Softimage 3d.
The first thing we did on CFS2 was to prototype and spec the aircraft creation process and damage system.
I modeled the Japanese Zero for this effort and, as with the Flight Sim 2000 title, all details had to be 100% accurate to the original aircraft. Once the process for aircraft creation had been resolved, the production team could begin and I moved on to prototyping the virtual cockpits with the dev team.
For CFS2, our polygon and texture budgets made true 3d geometry virtual cockpits possible. There was a lot of experimentation at this stage since we had never produced true virtual cockpits before, but the final solution was very efficient and effective.
For the virtual cockpit prototype, I modeled the Corsair and, once again, all details had to be 100% accurate to the original aircraft.
With virtual cockpits ready for production, I was asked to flesh out the effects system with the dev team. This was an interesting task since all effects up to this stage were hard coded by the dev team and there was little time on their schedule for such an effort. Despite the scheduling challenges, we developed an engine and an effects tool that was fairly robust. After producing a fair amount of the effects for the game, the torch was passed to a production artist so I could focus on cinemas for CFS2.
As with with FS2000, management didn't think cinemas or a trailer were a high priority, so no time or money was budgeted for this effort. The art director asked me to mock something up that we could use to "persuade" the management team.
I quickly cut together a demo and the effort got us a thumbs up from management.
Time was short and we needed to be frugal, so I re-used much of the art that had already been created and worked with our concept artist on new content to fill in the gaps.
The art direction for CFS2 was a 1940's comic book look and I wanted to carry this direction into the movies as well, but didn't want a sequence of static images cut together with canned transitions. We split the illustrations into layers that I could animate to fake depth and make the cinemas a bit more dynamic.
The real challenge in all this was disk space. We required 22 different "phase transitions" but did not have enough disk space to hold more than 7. The solution required a bit of creative thinking, but we managed to write the VO for all 22 phase transitions to work with 7 generic movies and we would then combine the VO with the movie as it streamed off the disc.
