A lost gem?

[Captain Zee]

I was meandering the Google-ma-bob, and I came across this FlyingGuns. I downloaded it (click Download, click FlyingGuns 0.3b3, then choose your OS), and gave it a play. The flight characteristics are strikingly similar to CS (PC) and pretty much feels like an Instant Action Dog Fighting a Squadron mission, only the planes seem to go after eachother with no real team-orientation (whether its German, French, or British). But it's a great way to waste time if you just want to shoot someone down.

You can fly either with the mouse by moving the cross around the screen (up and down is inverted), but it recognized my joystick after I moved the cross off the screen. Left mouse button or trigger shoots the gun, all (4) aircraft seem to have the same gun no matter what, so all craft are equally matched. It also looks to have multiplayer support, but I have yet to see if it works. Googling it seemed to get me no where, which explains the name of this post, and I can't find any mods or forums concerning it, which is why I posted it here, so that it may be ogled over by people who respect this sort of thing.

Anyways, you need a recent version of Java to play it (doesn't hurt to be new), doesn't need to be installed (just placed somewhere familiar), and barely takes up more than 4MB.

[foxmalcolm]

Your right about the look and feel it is uncannily similar, lets see if it is as good as it looks . . .

[Captain Zee]

WHOA, what the hell...? http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2005/02/17.flyingguns.html

Read the first paragraph of History

[foxmalcolm]

Back in 1998, I was a project lead at BlueByte for a multiplayer action flight simulator set in a parallel universe in the 1930s, the golden era of aviation, which featured these glorious racing planes. That game's background story was that America had been conquered by an evil European force. A small group of racing pilots in California equipped their planes with weapons and started to strike back, fighting against vast amounts of enemies on giant Zeppelin ships. Unfortunately, this project died before I could make it a reality. I really loved that idea. Later, Microsoft published "my" game: Crimson Skies.

I am wondering if it was a case of parallel concept designing, where two independent groups come up with the same or similar concepts.
In any case he started the concept in '98, and we know Weisman spent some time before '98 researching and working on Corsairs [later renamed Crimson Skies] before he released a fully developed title in '98.
Sounds like this guy came up with a great idea he was just a little slow in getting the word out.

[Grant]

Cool.

The Airplanes and zeppelins ain't brand new. There was a DOS game taht the name totally escapes me....a fantasy world styled after pre-WW1 Europe with a bunch of fueding city-states?

I ain't had a chance to look at this (Heading out), any chance of it working on 45K dialup? Or is it big enough to preclude trying to download/use it online?

[Captain Zee]

It'll take a while to download, but it's not too big. It has very low minimum requirements, so pretty much any system can run it. As I said, though, I haven't played the multiplayer yet.