Take you point and heartily agree with the sentiment. We need to look forward not back.
Having said that… the birth of a phenomenon and its growing pains will always be of interest to some… particularly those of us there at the beginning and who continue to devote our time to it. I don’t think it should be completely ignored just because its past is messy and possibly painful. Continued Falcon refinement (in all its variants) has hopefully still got some life in it and with a bit of luck will continue for many years. As a piece of entertainment software it is unique and it deserves more than a mere foot-note in history. Yes, history as you say is subjective as all human history tends to be. F4 is no less susceptible to opinion, hazy recollection and not a little bias, that’s just the way it is. As someone with their name in the credits at the back of the original manual you certainly have more history than most of us. I hope you will indulge the rest of us in our humble curiosity and allow us a little peek into its past now and then?
I think Skyhawk’s account is fair, impartial and well written considering it’s not his native language. He even admits to it not being 100% accurate & invites others to correct it. I salute him. Personally I’m only vaguely interested in who pissed who off who or even how fragmented the teams became (but I respect that others may be). What I am interested in is the bigger picture. The one that helps explain why the hell we’re all still here executing thirteen year old code on our multi-core, GPU addled mainframes running software that’s more stable and infinitely more sophisticated than 99% of ‘triple A’ titles on the market today. Good luck to the FreeFalcon guys I say and anyone else who cares to keep the old girl alive. Falcon 4 is one of a kind (well several of a kind and I think it will be a long while yet before the competition catches up. No, I’m not dissing the competition but they’re still flat footed by the dynamic campaign (however imperfect) and without that, their cool gfx and avionics lose a little shine due to their placement in a hollow, barren and sterile world. (Don’t bitch to me about that btw checkout this epic thread here if you disagree: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=64161
Keep up the good work Skyhawk