You chaps amaze me, I must say.

There is no more faithful rendition of the Battle of Britain than this sim (with its 500 bomber raids and terrible pressure on Fighter Command) but you choose to niggle.

Flight sims are effectively dead commercially. The more you criticise, the less there will be.

That is the sheer genius of Rowan Software, which is why they are so sorely missed.. It runs on any system with a 1G processor and Geforce3/Radeon 8500 level hardware. Lower is possible.

There are lots of technical reasons as to how they do it, but essentially it’s about intelligent LODs (Level of Detail Models), clever use of ‘distance’ (you don’t need aircraft a long way out of view to behave as the one in your sights), and a design approach, from the outset, that asked “how would we have 50+ fighters attack 100+ bombers”.
It’s very clever, and 1C Maddox/Microsoft are yet to find the same formula to large scale combat.

BoB was at the end of a long line of sims for Rowan. They had a lot of experience. Just a bloody shame they couldn’t make any money at it. Rather British, really, they spent all their time modelling every single airfield building in Britain in detail, but neglecting to market or promote the game adequately…

By far the best for me is Rowans Battle of Britain. Its billed as a strategy game but its really not, its a sim. You can allocate fighters to different squadrons, but once the planes are in the air you no longer have any conrol, its just you in one plane. What makes this so great is that you are really dealing with hundreds of planes coming across in realtime, in real distances. And there is an exact number of planes on each side so kills are counted against the overall number of each sides. So you really are fighting the Battle of Britain, its not like fighters are just spawning out of nowhere in endless scripted missions. If you set your plane with unlimited fuel and ammo, you can really follow the german bombers back to thier base and continue to strafe them as they land and park. This sim is 3 years old now so the graphics arent at current standard, but they are still plenty good. Watching the german bombers drop their sticks of bombs over London is nightmarishly real. If the graphics were updated on this sim to IL-2 level, this game would be unbeatable. Its interesting to note that the IL-2 design teams next project after Pacifac Fighters is to do a Battle of Britain Sim.

Mixtec, you may be rather pleasantly surprised to hear what has happened to Rowan’s BoB in the last three years. The small British flight sim developer, Rowan, is sadly no more. This is a great shame since they made sims with simply the best Artificial Intelligence in the business, IL2 included. As a parting gesture to the community they gave the source code to a group of us and we live here: http://www.bob-ma.org

We are now onto our fifth free update patch for BoB. The very latest is v098:

The visuals have been completely overhauled and the long list of bugs has been squashed. We have also introduced dozens of new features.

If you like Rowan’s BoB, you will not be disappointed. It is the most accurate portrayal of the greatest air battle in history and renders melees of up to 400 aircraft in a single clash. What’s even more amazing is that these battles play out very credibly indeed, breaking up into dozens of individual swirling fights as aircraft wheel and turn to gain advantage over their fighter or bomber adversary.

Some threads with plenty of pics that will show you just how it looks today. 🙂

http://www.bob-ma.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=632

http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=40;t=007635

And a couple of samples:
An unsuspecting Hawkinge: (SE Kent, home today of the truly wonderful Battle of Britain museum).

Trouble brewing:

145 Squadron to the rescue! (well ok, just green section ;))