Golden Gate Bridge is in. I read a fair amount about this amazing bridge. Its a really impressive structure and so pretty too.
I hope I do it justice - my 3d modelling skills are… erm average at best. Need to figure out a nicer way to render it from a distance too - the resolution technique I use is quite destructive, so I need to add a special shader in for things like roads, and bridges.
Cockpit dash is in. I made something close to the original. Still a few items to finish.
Launching and physics is a little better. Still need some tweaking.
New resolution rendering - still playing around with ocean and ground markers (so you know where ground is 
).
Hopefully ready to play before xmas
Will put a demo up on itch soon.
Here’s a little demo (early test) that people can try out.
Various broken things:
Will have some updates soon.
Note: I noticed the web release has some floating point issues and the pitch and roll, really bounce around alot. I’ll try to get that a little better. It shouldnt be doing that.
getting a 404 on that page
Sorry had it in draft mode
ahah that’s super cool! Brought me back quite a few years 
How are you getting the upres/downres?
Its a post shader quantizer. You can press 1 to up res and 2 to down res 
A little more detail:
It does a modulus of the resolution with a block step, then some adjustments based on Z.
Its a pretty simple shader. Will put it on github along with the camera system after xmas.
A little discussion on the build of f18.
I was pleasantly surprised to find Win10, OSX and Linux builds are between 8-10MB in size. Addmittedly this is a very long way away from the original 880KB on the Amiga, but Defold has show how good it can package well. Its quite impressive.
I’ll have the Win10, OSX and Linux versions up on itch in the next hour. Feel free to download and drop in some feedback either in the comments on itch or here.
Thanks for trying it out!
@Dziq Asked on the discord forums about the size of the San Francisco area. I thought it was around 140km square, but its not Its 240km East<->West and 270km North<->South.
The accuracy is not great - its been optimized to have a fairly small data set. Originally it was weighing in at around 200MB. Now its down around 9MB uncompressed. I hope to have weapons, targets and some missions ready over the next day. With some improvements to the map.
Updates:
This should be released in the coming week on itch.
Added:
Some thoughts on building f18 hornet so far…
As I have been going through building this project, a number of interesting things have happened along the way. Firstly, I ended up building a 3D export/sync tool for Defold which has made building full 3D scenes quite fun. One-click export directly to a Defold project means you dont need to be playing around with import/export settings. The additional benefit to this tool, was beginning to embed meta data into the map so I can have missions and assets completely content driven (no code needed to specifically load and manage resources). Its a nice way to iterate.
The merging of 3D with the 2D gui and different resolution outputs concerned me at the start too. I wasnt sure if Defold was going to allow many of the things I wanted to do. I was wrong… very wrong. Many of the Gui features for instance, took minutes to implement - again, very surprising.
Then there was the 3D. I have built a few demos and tools in Defold with 3D previously, and so I knew the 3D would be doable, it was a question of complexity and time. With the export tool, and a handful (around 4) of custom shaders it was quite easy to achieve. Its been very good fun and I would liken it to building 3D in Unity (with the right tools). Sure the rendering in Unity is much more complex, but Im referring specifically to the development experience, and not the user one.
One very odd issue with doing a game like this, has been how different it is to build an “old school” rendering output for modern 3D systems. Creating a wireframe styled look has been full of compromises (I considered writing a software renderer to get it more accurate). For example to replicate the Nimitz carrier I ended up using textures for some of the lines. This is because 3D meshes dont really have “coloured lines” in their structure. You could do some sort of weird shader, but it made me realize we have lost a certain capacity to do some things in modern GPU rendering - kinda sad, since the original looks so clean.
Im looking forward to putting the final touches on this little game. I hope people have enjoyed reading and playing (I hope you played it!). There will be multi-player down the track and missions, and even custom user generated content (maps and missions). So keep an eye out
Cheers,
Dave
Hi there, I have been following your posts with keen interest. The work you have done is just amazing, your tool pure wizardry. And the game looks awesome!
Thanks for the support. I appreciate feedback. If you have good or bad things to note or ideas for features, feel free to make suggestions (much easier to change something while its in dev ).
I hope to have a new build up this friday. There have been many additions
There is one downside: I crash your beautiful planes all the time!
Apart from this, to me, the game looks perfect.
The new release is up. I didnt get everything in I wanted this week.
What did make it:
Known Bugs (there are lots):
These are the bigger ones I hope to address today and release an update. I hope to get weapons on Mission 1 all working today. If not, it will be in next weeks release. Im going to start releasing every Saturday.
Hope people enjoy it. Will be more fun when you can shoot down the threats! See if you can find them in Mission1
A little update. Added a nice “fly in” from the mission view to the cockpit.
Working on weapons and AI atm. Hopefully a mission or two by the end of this week.
I saw this on Twitter and immediately thought of your game:
