The Evolution of Strike Fighters: Project One Page 5

By SimHQ on November 10, 2005 in _air4, hide

Patch Wars

It’s a fact of life these days that niche markets games, such as flight sims, are not going to be 100% perfect out of the box. Flight sims developers are usually small outfits, and don’t have the resources to make a sim that includes what everybody wants. And despite copious amounts of beta testing, some faults do ship with retail versions. SF was no different.

The “large” amount (to some) of bugs, and the apparent lack of features (to others), in the initial SF release caused those with “glass half-empty” attitudes to complain relentlessly. This lead to heated debates (“flames”) on the Forum, and in the end TK (the developer) had enough of the unprofessional behavior and left our Forum, never to return.

Heavy moderation of the Forum was required, and the complaining continued in anticipation of “The Patch To End All Patches”, or perhaps “The Mother of All Patches”. Mostly speculation of when it would arrive and what it would include. Despite the aggressive nature of some, TK did, and continues to; support SF through “patches”.

Service Pack 1 – The First Patch

Released around the middle of January, 2003, Service Pack 1 was eagerly downloaded by the thousands. What did it include and what did it fix? Approximately 45 FM fixes, bug fixes, improvements to the AI, and further small improvements were incorporated. A major improvement was an all new set of special effects by Scott Gentile.

Unfortunately, much more was expected by some, but it would be a while until the next patch was ready.