Machine-Readable

TFXplorer

A flight simulator that I’m developing with bored from the Air Dominance Discord.

It aims to be a clone of F‑22 Total Air War (), but it is also compatible with its predecessors F‑22: Air Dominance Fighter (), EF2000 (), and TFX ().

in-game snapshot

Downloads

Installation

  1. System requirements:
  2. Extract the archive to an arbitrary directory.
  3. Run install.cmd to add your installed DID games to TFXplorer.
  4. If the above fails to find a game, run the corresponding install <game>.cmd and manually enter/paste the installation path.
  5. Start TFXplorer.exe. The splash screen should appear.

Total Air War’s Gameplay

HUD snapshot

We ported TAW’s aerodynamics & flight controls to TFXplorer and improved them:

HUD overhaul:

Sound effects & Bitchin’ Betty:

Animated MFDs:

Realistic landing gear:

Improved Graphics

F-22 on an airfield

Graphics is built natively on Direct3D 9 and features a vastly improved experience over the original games.

The simulation can be run either in full-screen or in windowed mode.

Alt + ⏎ toggle full-screen/windowed mode

EF2000 compatibility

F-22 landing on an airfield in EF2000

All TAW gameplay features are also available in EF2000 mode, just with EF2000’s graphics.

Hidden Levels

F-22 over TFX’s hidden Libya map

A variety of levels from TAW, EF2000, and TFX is supported, much of which were never accessed before.

SmartView

Watching a 767 in SmartView

Enable SmartView via F12. It allows to inspect every unit in the current level.

F12 switch to next unit
⏎ (only if playable) take control

Explorer Mode

EF2000 level in explorer mode

In explorer mode, you can inspect the terrain freely without gameplay or physics restrictions. It is accessed via Shift + Q; X.

left mouse button move forward
Shift + S cycle the time of day
N toggle night vision (only at night)
F1 toggle wireframe rendering
F2 take a screenshot and save it as a bitmap with a reconnaissance-like look
F3 switch from Glide to Direct3D and vice versa (only important for developers)
F4 toggle target names
F5 back to in-game mode
repeat S or X increase or decrease range of sight
Num 8 glide north
Num 2 glide south
Num 4 glide west
Num 6 glide east
Num 5 glide up
Ctrl + Num 5 glide down
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Plane spinning out of control due to a torque error in the flight model. Not even the wingtip vortices can keep up!
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Two F-22s competing for their place at a 747’s center. This was during a test of the autopilot’s air refuelling capabilities.
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Color theme support in the GUI; here with Windows XP colors.
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The Settings menu has been extended with new tabs for View and Extensions.
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The old, vertical settings layout wasted lots of screen estate on wide monitors. (Just like the Windows 10 Settings App.) The new, tiled layout shows more controller hardware at a glance.
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Settings layout, computed with the new layout engine.
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Using Rich Text Format, briefings can be displayed in various fonts and colors. There are still problems with embedded graphics, table cell colors, and shadows, though.
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GUI rendering bug: Keyboard indicators are copied when content is scrolled. This gives a nice visualization of smooth scrolling.
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The pages for scenario selection and controller settings were reorganized to look more like Windows 10’s settings: Fewer margins, i.e. more room for content. Dark background not on the category, but on the content. Focus through text colors.
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The settings now include a controller hardware page. This should allow users to find out whether their hardware was correctly recognized.
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The new splash screen in action.
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Errors are now printed to the loading screen instead of the console. Multi-line error messages are not yet supported, so contexts are separated by vertical bars.
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The new GUI in action.
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Angola, 2020 version. The holes below the tiles have been filled with ground color and the palette was changed to something more tropical.
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EF2000’s Norway in Twilight using the pal_dark color palette.
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Every other year I check again whether EF2000’s dark colors stem from me misinterpreting the color depth of the color palette. No they don’t.
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Total Air War’s F-22 drawn with EF2000’s textures.
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Sky colors were not set correctly, resulting in black air.
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The new GUI can, for the first time, list all EF2000 levels.
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The main page of the new GUI. The tile buttons need larger text, icons on them, and the background is missing antialiasing.
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Gameplay embedded as a child window into the UI dialog. This turned out to be the wrong way of glueing GUI and game together:
  • Even though Direct3D can render to a child window, it requires a top-level focus window. So the renderer had to serve two masters.
  • Input from joysticks and gamepads must be captured by the game window, but it’s needed for the GUI (the outer window) as well. This means even more glueing inner and outer dialogs together.
  • Many more special cases during page transitions etc.
In the end, I settled with game and GUI in the same window, but never side by side.
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The second UI draft is still based on Win32, but mimics the Universal Windows Platform look. It’s compatible with Light and Dark theme, which required some hacking due to Microsoft abandoning Win32. Smooth scrolling is a huge problem because GDI does not support vertical synchronization.
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First draft of a UI to select one of the available scenarios to play.
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Ongoing efforts to support new level formats: The sky color must be handled in a central place. Previously, the renderer picked it ad-hoc from the TFX palette. Assigning ridiculous colors is the easiest way to spot oversights.
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In order to prepare TFXplorer for new level formats, dynamic tile sizes must be supported. This is a first test.
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Pseudorandom noise in the wingtip vortices. The vortices share the particle system with the contrails and are physically-based.
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The contrail size got out of control.
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Contrails during dogfight. Mind temperature and humidity in bottom-left corner.
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Contrail rendering. Intensity is controlled by fuel consumption, altitude, and local weather.
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Contrail rendering gone wrong.
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The KC-135 is now flyable.
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Accidentially left wireframe rendering enabled during in-game mode.
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Plane spawning bug during route processing.
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New wheel rendering. The wheels in TAW’s models are coarse, static, and displaced; this made a new solution necessary.
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F-22 taxiing on runway, compared with a photograph of the real plane. The red wheels are the ones actually processed by the physics engine.
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HUD indicator for vertical velocity in ft/s.
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The code for center of gravity and angular inertia takes into account the mass of cannon rounds.
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The nose wheel broke during a hard touchdown.
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TAW 2’s Custom Combat site in TFXplorer.
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Overloading the left wing.
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A ZSU-23-4 Shilka on the instrument panel.
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Aerial perspective.
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Two F-22 flying in formation.
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TFX’s hidden Libya level.
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bored ported EF2000’s Norway level to TAW, including a moving map.
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EF2000’s Norway level with doubled brightness.
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EF2000’s hidden Wales level.
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EF2000’s hidden Newworld level.
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EF2000’s hidden Martin level.
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TFX’s hidden Libya level.
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EF2000’s hidden Korea level.
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EF2000’s hidden Iceland level.
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EF2000’s hidden Faeroe level.
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EF2000’s hidden Craig level.
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EF2000’s hidden Atlantic level.
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EF2000’s hidden Angola level.
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DrKevDog’s island and its moving map on the MFD.
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TAW’s Red Sea level with the 0093 opcode disabled.
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TFXplorer now has a proper Task Bar icon.
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Flying under realistic stars.
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All F-22 cockpit MFDs are finally working.
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Unicode font rendering via GDI.
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EF2000’s Norway level featuring the F-22 player model.
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Weird/wrong collision triangles in EF2000’s Norway level.
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EF2000’s F-22 player model. The MFDs work, but the cockpit texture is broken beyond repair.
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The air traffic algorithm works just as well with EF2000.
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Checking whether the contrail algorithm is suitable for smoke trails by assigning each piece of debris its own contrail.
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Contrails as seen from the ground. The polyline optimizer broke in several places.
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A steep takeoff.
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Testing contrails on a civilian plane.
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Simulating air refueling behind the first civilian plane.
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Due to an error in the waypoint algorithm, ships are gliding through the air.
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The first ship.
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The F-22 canopy shining in the sun.
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Finishing the moving map on the center MFD.
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Adding a moving map to the center MFD.
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Tile map and individual tiles of the moving map for TAW’s Red Sea level.
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Tile map for the clouds in TAW’s Red Sea level.
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Tile map for TAW’s Seaworld level.
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Extending terrain size in TFXplorer beyond 400×400 tiles in order to support DrKevDogs extended terrain.
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Replacing the distance-based tile rendering order with Z order for better locality led to a 20 % speedup.
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Introducing SIMD instructions reduced the size of math-heavy code considerably.
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Added an overlay for the state of each terrain tile. Red tiles are within visible range; green tiles contain some kind of damage state (e.g. for buildings).
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Uphill race between a Shilka and a F-22.
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My F-22 tipped over after rolling a tight curve.
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F-22 cockpit displays.
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Various development stages of the artifical horizon MFD. The filtering of the detail texture was especially problematic.
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Polishing the new F-22 HUD.
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Visualization of spring forces. Subtle errors accumulate over time and cause periodic bumps.
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Testing suspension of the ZSU-23-4.
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Introducing the new F-22 HUD.
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TFXplorer can now load Seaworld.
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Undersampling of textures due to wrong texture coordinates.
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Due to problems with the texture coordinates, all triangles appear flat-shaded.
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SAMs are hard-coded into one of Djibouti’s terrain tiles.
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Coloring each particle individually.
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Testing whether the particle system can be used for contrails. These screenshots don't show the rendering order issues.
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More particle system tests.
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Testing a level-of-detail system where overlapping particles are combined.
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Forgot to limit the maximal particle size.
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Scratch version of a particle system.
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TFXplorer, for testing purposes compiled with Clang instead of Visual Studio. There are problems with floating-point numbers, causing incorrect object transformation.
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Explosions now spawning random debris.
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Line vs. bounding box collision detection is now finally working; the engine can now detect cannon rounds hitting buildings and display explosion sprites in the correct places.
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Various kinds of COLLISION_BOXES in supershapes.
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Visualizing bounding boxes in Luxor, on Aswan Secondary Dam, and in various other places.
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Adding ground explosion sprites.
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An error in the 004B shape opcode causes incorrect scale of sprites.
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A F-22 hides under a bridge.
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Now supporting more than one plane.
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Incorrect depth buffer configuration.
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Trying to simulate flight physics via aerodynamic surfaces. The experiment failed miserably; the handling was extremely unstable.
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Weapon models attached to the F-22. This is the highest level of detail TAW has to offer.
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Adding the 0086 and 008D opcodes enables rendering of all control surfaces.
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The first attempt at landing physics.
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TFXplorer 1.1 at TAW’s Custom Combat location.
A subtle bug in the rendering code draws everything but the objects one expects.
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Texture coordinates and vertex colors are fubar.
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Textures have not been loaded correctly.
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Experimenting with different texture filters. Top-down: bilinear, less quintic, quintic, bicubic, bicubic in-game. Shader model 2.0 instruction limits were a serious problem with quintic filtering.
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Adding reconnaissance-like looks to screenshots.
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TFXplorer 1.0 working with TAW 2.
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Glitches in palm tree rendering, caused by rounding errors in the triangle culling code.
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A triangle glitch due to incorrect cache management.
Collision detection test: bullets and the F-22 bouncing under a bridge.
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Flying over the King Abdul Aziz International Airport.
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TFXplorer with TAW 2.
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Aden at night with the full moon.
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King Khalid International Airport.
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Sunset over Luxor.
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We decoded the correct order of rendering shapes in a supershape. Airfields now render correctly (shown: Bergen and King Khalid International Airport).
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Tile rotation in EF2000 levels is wrong, roads and rivers not matching.
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The smoke on EF2000’s chimneys is actually animated.
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An airfield in EF2000, shown from below the ground due to rendering order problems.
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An iceberg in EF2000 – in tristesse and on a clear day.
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Correct tile rotation in EF2000.
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A dam in EF2000.
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Incorrect shape scaling in EF2000.
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First snapshot of EF2000 terrain in TFXplorer.
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Approaching Debre Tabur.
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A 50 𝑔 turn at 7690 kt.
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TFXplorer with TAW 2.
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TFXplorer with HUD and physics.
A first attempt at controlling the camera with the joystick, and adding a simple cockpit overlay. Looks almost like a real game.
Testing the frustum culling.
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Displaying the Seaworld level (through renaming of the files).
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Textures on the Aswan dam.
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Comparison of a Djibouti tile in TAW (top) and ADF (bottom), revealing a terrain bug.
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Comparing non-linear and linear color space during shading.
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A terrain bug in TAW’s Hurghada.
Water animation in a dam.
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Rendering statistics for performance analysis in the bottom-right.
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TFXplorer with TAW 2.
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Wrong order of transformations.
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Loading from did.dat instead of extracted files.
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Comparing the rendering of TFXplorer (then still 3View) to TAW.
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Adding a simple cockpit overlay to make it look like a first-person view.
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Testing frustum culling. The green rectangle is the simulated screen.
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Sunset over Gonder.
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Rendering Djibouti International Airport with all global flags enabled / with 0076 disabled / with 007B disabled.
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Added place names from TAW’s internal database.
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TAW’s Custom Combat location.
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Clouds look fine, but they better be disabled at night. (TAW draws clouds white, but does not maintain a consistent white level.)
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Two-pass rendering (terrain first, buildings later).
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Adding a tile grid and sky rendering to 3View. This would later become TFXplorer.
Have you seen 3View?