[FA_Cheech]

The problem with the PTO was not understanding the theater well enough to make good decisions. In trying to encompass the entire thing, they ended up doing everything poorly instead of one area well.

PF needed focus. One small area (and time, perhaps) of the war, done well. The SWPA (including the Slot) is one obvious choice. Not late war, either, August '42 through mid '44 at most. Some of the atoll maps like Midway can be thrown in because they are so easy to do.

Doesn't matter, now

Buddy, I agree with you 100 percent. I am a big proponent of doing one thing well, vice many things poorly. If the creators of PF had provided two quality maps, The Slot and New Guinea, it would have given the combat flight sim community a masterpiece and been a whopping success. This map of The Slot is a great example.

The Slot was the scene of intense combat action from August of 1942 to the end of the war, if you include the ANZAC campaign on Bougainville. As you can see from my previous post, a single map can be adapted to provide a large number of maps that are well suited to mission builder requirements.

We could have also parsed The Slot into a myriad of Dogfight maps, with even more detail, and excellent potential for on-line playability, but decided to leave that to the community. That is something that could also have been done with PF, if the developers had seen fit to trust the community with the map making tools.

I guess my final verdict is...coulda, woulda, shoulda can be discussed ad-nauseum, but Oleg gave us a wondeful tool, that I personally have enjoyed tremendously over the last five years. In the big scheme of things, I figure that is great value for the money I spent on all of his products, and testament to his perserverence and creative genius. Without him and his development team, we would never have been able to create the things we have in The Slot.

So, IMHO, Oleg Maddox is pretty high on my list of stars in the flight sim community.