Jane's A-10 Warthog

Engine Trouble
The development of A-10 became one of unchanging goals coupled with evolving means. As a source on the development team puts it, "Besides all the people coming and going, and trying to get the graphics engine nailed down, the game we were working on the last day was the same game we pitched in our design document." Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the development team. When dealing with a team as talented as the Austin Skunkworks, it was perhaps inevitable that individual team members would leave to pursue different or more lucrative projects. As a game, A-10 never changed focus. But as a development project, it was a completely different story. As work progressed, it became clear that the initial intention of using the Longbow 2 code would simply not fly.

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As a source from the team explains, "The A-10 engine started as the Longbow 2 engine. This was a huge mistake, but we had no choice, since we had to get a game done in about eight months. As time went on, we realized that this was not going to work, so we started changing systems out." Eventually, all of the graphics, all of the network code, all of the flight model, most of the simulation, and some of the wrapper would be changed. In yet another irony, according to several sources, the game could almost certainly have been finished faster had the decision been made from the outset to develop a brand-new engine. Furthermore, most of the Longbow 2 code had been written by people "long gone" from Origin Systems, and as work progressed it became clear that this was a significant obstacle to the game's timely completion.

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This problem of outdated, cryptic code permeated every aspect of the sim's development. Alex Pavloff, who was then between his junior and senior years at the University of Houston, was hired as a summer intern on the project just as it was beginning, and shared the difficulties presented by having to reuse old programs. Still, A-10's basic concept remained on firm ground. It was to have a fully-3D cockpit and flight realism at least as good as those in A-10 Cuba.

Pavloff was assigned to help with the campaigns. There were to be two, one set in Korea and the other in Germany. The first was to be scripted, while the second would be "apparently dynamic" like that in Longbow 2. Pavloff was to develop the single missions for the game (a total of 16, with eight for each campaign) and after doing some write-ups and having them approved, he started to work on them in the mission builder. Says Pavloff, "This is where my problems began."

Next: The pain of the campaign