I can’t believe you are actually comparing the jets that are in Painkiller to the jets used in LOMAC!? Are you being serious. As was stated before, the jets in Painkiller are just static models in a very static world (and small world for that matter!) The aircraft in LOMAC have many moving surfaces and have to be made in such a way that when used in the huge playing areas they do not cause the framerate to die. You go sticking huge polygon counts onto the aircraft then the framerates wil just bottom out… and LOMAC struggles as it is.

Fair enough the aircraft in Painkiller look pretty…. but you can’t compare them to the jets in LOMAC when the ones in Painkiller are purely there for eye candy.

I probably haven’t put my point across as well as I could have!

Apache- They are NOT static models, nor is it a static world. I dont know how to get this through to you guys , the entire 3D world is being rendered in realtime and any 3D object can be animated independantly relative to that world. The reason your not getting your point across is because youre WRONG!! The only people who have the luxury of pre-rendering are people who make cg movies or 3D games like Myst where you are limited to rotation spots in a pre-rendered 3D world. It is very easy to give these jets moving parts, and these animation sets move relative to the object itself and dont care whether that object is moving or stationary to the 3D world. If you gave thes planes say 100 moving parts, it would be dead easy for someone like me to animate them using simple keyframing. I dont know how modable Painkiller is, but maybe there is a chance I could unpack the object and texture files and load them into Max in order for me to do some flight sim looking animations with them to prove this could be done. To prove how easy it is to import 3D objects into a premade physics enviornment, take a look at this shockwave game that demostrates the Havok physics engine that is very popularly used in pc games nowadays (including games like Painkiller and Half Life 2):
http://oldsite.havok.com/xtra/demos/demo-ragdoll2.html

i can see squared off edges for rounded surfaces, for example the landing gear door.

mixtec, you simply cant compare and contrast the two.

coanda- The only reason the landing door is squared off is because it folds under to the flat bottom surface of the plane. Ive spent alot of time putting the camera right up against object surfaces in this game, and its very hard to detect either poly faces or texture edges.

good quality??? Those jets look like bloody rock formations with those textures

Ill admit that close up shot makes the textures look really bad, especially under the wing. Ill try and come up with a better close up of those planes. What you have to remember is that shadows and light mapping are faked onto the textures, so it doesnt look right at certain angles. Here is an article that explains that:
http://poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/tex_theory.htm

First off they are not static pre-rendered models. The planes you see here could be used in a flight sim. Technically speaking, there is no difference if the camera is moving toward an object stationary relative to the 3D world or if that object is moving torward a fixed camera in the 3D world. And for you to say you could slap together a scene like that in 3Dsmax, ha ha ha. Lets see it, anything at all. Sorry but the texture quality of those planes is supurb, and you would be very hard pressed to find the polygonal mess you see in LOMAC jets. And I hate to tell you this, but all the stuff you hear about realistic physics in flight sims is alot of bull. Game studios take alot of shortcuts to minimize calculation time for the CPU. Flight physics is the easy stuff compared to all the other complexitys that go into a 3D rendering engine. If your using a premade engine, flight physics is nothing more than scripting parameters.