OSX SkyFighters 1945 wMB

SkyFighters comes to OSX
OSX SkyFighters 1945 was released in the mid-2000s. It had been released in advance of Dec 2005 as Inside Mac Games published a review of it at that time, but how long before that it debuted is uncertain.

The game was published under an unusual scheme: Early buyers purchased a pre-release game, knowing it was still a work-in-progress. Buying the pre-release version provided funding for continued development, and the buyers were guaranteed that all versions short of 2.0 would be a free upgrade for them.

Versions ran from 0.8 or earlier, and were PPC-only. Later versions of the game were shipped as universal binaries compatible with both PPC- and Intel-based Macintosh systems. The last version of the game released was 1.0.8b.

Getting the OSX SF1945 to work with Mac OS 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") through OS 10.11 ("El Capitan")
OSX SkyFighters development ceased before OS 10.6 came out, due to the death of the developer, Don Hill, Jr. Starting with OS 10.6, the game will crash during loading. A SkyFighters player with the callsign "Cyril" determined the crash occurred while the game was loading JPEG files for textures. He found that converting the texture files from JPEG to PNG format allows the game to load and run properly.

You can convert the textures yourself using a program like Photoshop or Pixelmator, or you can find already-conveerted files for the textures on this web site. To find the texture files for the game itself, locate the OSX SkyFighters 1945 w/MB application, left click on it, and select "Show Package Contents" from the resulting menu. From there, navigate to Contents -> Resources -> Necessary Data -> Textures. The contents of this folder are what need to be converted (or replaced with files from the web site above) in order to get the game to run.

Before attempting to replace the textures, it is strongly recommended you have a good, verified backup of the application you can restore if something goes wrong.

Note that with the release of the 10.11.3 OS update, the Mission Builder can crash SF on startup. See the Mission Builder page for details and a workaround.

Hardware Compatibility
SF1945 is compatible with most later PPC based Macs. It's been compatible with all Intel based Macs up until the 2015 models, but one player discovered the game would not run on his mid-2015 spec MacBook Pro with Intel Iris Pro graphics. The game appears to work on other systems of similar vintage with different graphics chips, so the issue is probably confined to systems using Intel Iris Pro. With this development, be aware that upgrading to a new Mac may prevent you from being able to run the game.

Fighter Aircraft
The following fighters are available to fly in OSX SkyFighters 1945: Players requested a number of additional fighters, especially the Supermarine Spitfire, while the game was under active development but they were not added.
 * P-51D Mustang
 * FW 190 A8
 * A6M Zero
 * F4U Corsair
 * Ki.84 Hayate
 * F6F Hellcat

Locations
Play in OSX SkyFighters 1945 takes place in one of six locations, three fictional and three based on real locations where combat took place in WWII. All of the real locations modeled are in the Pacific, despite the inclusion of a German fighter (the FW190) in the game.

Degree of Realism
OSX SkyFighters 1945 straddles a middle ground between hard-core flight simulator and arcade game.

In the air

 * The game does pay attention to angle-of-attack (the difference between the direction the nose is pointing and the direction the aircraft is moving in).
 * The aircraft roll, pitch, and yaw in a (mostly) realistic fashion. Turning requires rolling the aircraft, then pulling back on the stick. Using the rudder causes the aircraft to yaw rather than turning it.
 * It's possible to stall the aircraft (although there is a stall limiter option that's engaged by default, advanced pilots turn it off). Recovering from stalls is unrealistically easy, however, as most of them will pitch nose-down on their own.
 * To shoot down an aircraft, you have to "give some lead" to get the path of your bullets to intersect with the aircraft.
 * The game makes some attempt to model damage in a realistic fashion.  It's possible to lose varying amounts of aileron (with consequences on roll rate), elevator (ability to pitch up/down), throttle (stuck at the last power setting you used), flaps, etc.  Your engine can be shot out or burn out from too much use of War Emergency Power (W.E.P.).  Your guns can refuse to fire or be stuck on until you exhaust your ammunition supply.
 * The game is overly forgiving with fuel and ammunition.  Both take much longer to exhaust than in real life.
 * The game doesn't model very well what happens when you exceed the aircraft's maximum speed.  In reality, WWII pilots found the controls "loaded up" and became very difficult to move when they reached an overspeed condition.  This was due to a phenomena knows as "compressability", where the air passing over the control surfaces compresses and resists movement.  In OSX SkyFighters 1945, the controls still work perfectly well at high speed and allow the pilot to "rip the wings off" the plane from applying too much control input at high speed.

On the ground
The physics of ground movement aren't modeled nearly as well as in the air:
 * Aircraft lose no speed when coasting on a level surface and can continue on indefinitely with the engine off.
 * Aircraft can land safely on their gear in water.
 * All fighters can successfully take off from and land on carriers (the P-51 and FW190 would not be able to do that in reality)
 * Ships change direction far too rapidly.

Known Bugs/Issues/Oddities

 * One of the most annoying issues in the game is the "explode on respawn" bug. Basically, when your aircraft restarts/respawns after being shot down or crashing, on occasion it will immediately explode. In some cases it can cause you to fail a mission -- for instance, if you restart on your aircraft carrier, exploding may sink the carrier and if the mission objectives require you to keep you carrier alive you've just lost.
 * Once the win/loss dialog is displayed, once you dismiss it other fighters in the game will appear to have serious problems -- they'll seem to have a wing missing, look to be moving sideways, etc.
 * If the victory conditions for a mission require a plane to arrive at a particular location, when playing online only the host's plane is capable of fulfilling this condition. If the host is out of restarts/respawns, it's impossible for the host's side to win the game even if he has wingmen still alive who arrive at the location.
 * Non-fighter aircraft can sit motionless in mid-air if they weren't set up correctly in the Mission Builder (i.e. they've been placed but not had a starting waypoint set.)
 * The game sometimes starts responding very strangely to the joystick, and restarting the game may be required to correct the issue.
 * Objects placed on a steep slope may be impossible to destroy, even with direct bomb hits or flying your plane into them.
 * Online games only: The position of moving objects other than fighters (e.g. ships, bombers) can become inconsistent for different players in the same game.  For example, say you host an online game that involves moving ships, and ten minutes into the game a new player joins.  At that point, for the players who have been in the game since the beginning, the ships have been moving for ten minutes and so have moved some distance from their start point.  However, for the player who just joined, those same ships are in their starting position.  This can really screw up a game as for some players the targets can be in different locations than for others, making it impossible to defend them.

Mission Builder
The "wMB" in OSX SkyFighters 1945 wMB stands for "with Mission Builder". The Mission Builder is a utility that allows for the creation of custom missions that can be flown solo or online. All of the User Defined Missions missions were made with it, and presumably the game's developer (Don Hill, Jr.) used it to create the Training Missions and Combat Missions that are included with the game.

The Mission Builder is powerful, but fairly complex to use. More details can be found on the OSX SkyFighters 1945 Mission Builder page.