Strike Commander was technically a very impressive achievement for its time and I'm very sad that flight and race sims don't get the recognition they deserve for pioneering technology as opposed to Doom/Quake etc.
Anyway, those kind of Commander-like flight games have limited replay value, because of the lack of a dynamic campaign and a hollywood hero story doesn't sit well with most flight sim fans, so we ended up with dumbed down arcade shooters like Ace Combat.
There was a Strike Commander like flightsim back in 1999 called "F-16 aggressor", which had a very impressive flight model and cockpit, but sadly wasted on an even more forgettable hollywood hero story thing.
Contrary to what the article states, what Falcon 3.0 focused on wasn't the flight model, but a relatively realistic and more involved representation of a dynamic battlefield, avionics and combat tactics, one of the reasons I still played it during the mid to late 90's.
You are wrong, the flight-sim, RPG, adventure and space flight games genre together with many other types of first person games were flourishing way before Doom.
Also considering the lack of exposure and the amount of flack Elite: Dangerous is getting compared to the other space games it's also the gamers who sadly don't care.
Btw here is an interesting interview with David Braben somewhat before the time of Frontier: Elite 2's release.
There is also an impressive universe simulator called Space Engine and they are planning on adding gameplay to it, but it will probably take a long time before it's ready.
Frontier: Elite 2 from 1993 and Frontier: First Encounters (Elite 3) from 1995 did it way before I-War was even a thing, complete with full freeform seamless landing on planets with real celestial mechanics.
Check out "Elite: Dangerous" it has a scientifically accurate 1:1 scale, fully Seamless Milky Way galaxy using a mix of procedural generation with artist direction
I'm personally more excited about Elite: Dangerous. http://elite.frontier.co.uk by David Braben (from Raspberry Pi)
It will have a scientifically based galaxy with rotating an orbiting planets which I think is very important in a space game like this, it also features a mass multi-player dynamic galaxy.
* .NET runs everywhere now without problems, the JVM doesn't have a reliable IOS implementation and Dalvik on Android is too slow for the things I'm doing and many desktops don't come with a JVM installed.
* Better type inference
* FP isolated from OOP
* Lighter indent aware syntax.
* Easier to reason about performance because of lower abstractions
* Pattern matching can be used in performance sensitive situations.
* Easier equational reasononing because FP and OO are isolated from each other.
* Initialization order bugs can't happen easily by design due to the way class ctors work.
* Easy to use Native FFI without having to write boilerplate C stubs
* A generics aware runtime so cross language .NET interop is seamless and without perf cost.
* Built-in Units of measure without perf cost or having to wait for a mature macro'ed implementation..
* Built-in Type Providers allowing typed access to untyped data and much more without having to wait for a mature macro'ed implementation.
* Built-in support for runtime code quoations, with code inspection
* Extensible computation expression syntax for more than just monads.
F# is general purpose and multi-paradigm, it even has OO classes and imperative for and while loops. I for one got into .NET because of F# and to me .NET is just like any other language runtime.
F# is general purpose and multi-paradigm, it even has OO classes and imperative for and while loops and I get the same perf as C# and even more in some cases.
I for one got into .NET because of F# and to me .NET is just like any other language runtime.
It's not just tied to MS, it runs on every major platform thanks to Mono see the left bar on this site http://fsharp.org/
http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ