My plans for an upgrade to Fleet Defender hatched many years ago. While I regard Fleet Defender as one of the best in-depth DOS simulators of all time, it also has some bad flaws that no patch addressed. And once you see them, you cannot un-see them. For a long time they really put a damper on my enjoyment of the game, to the point I stayed away from the game altogether. The first main issue is the ships textures, and to a certain degree the shape of some vessels. I have no idea what happened in the development process or the testing phase that allowed those textures to pass quality control. Most of them are dirty to such degree that you can hardly make out the vessel at all. So my first task was to remedy this, as well as improving the 3D models themselves where needed. For reference I have used real vessel photos to touch up ship textures, and add more detail where possible. All ships have been improved, you will find them all in an own mod pack here.

The second huge issue for me was the ocean. Why? All seems fine when you are flying and well up in the sky. But try passing over your carrier or any ship in the stock game, look down on the ship, and you will see a weird effect! The waves / ocean texture keeps racing under the ship at an incredible speed. It is a very distracting effect and seeing as it always races towards the player aircraft like a treadmill, I can only assume this was implemented to increase the sense of speed. Problem is that the ships seem stationary on top of it, while it also seems to do 300 mph! This can cause you to misjudge approaches and disorient you in general. Fact is the game did not really need it at all, as the sense of speed is fine without that artificial effect. “1942: The Pacific Air War” has none of that weirdness going on. Anyhow, with some hex magic that is fixed now and with my "patched" executable the textures will act normal and static in relation to your plane and all ships -the way it should be.

Since I was fixing up the ocean, I decided the texture itself could do with an upgrade. So I have made a more realistic texture based on a satellite photo of the Atlantic. And I thought it was time the pilot got some legs to go in the space below the cockpit panel, so I added those as well. In addition I have included a few modded aircraft, as a preview of a larger future aircraft upgrade pack. Improved aircraft include the F-16, F-4, MiG-21 and B-52. The F-16 has gotten more or less a completely new and realistic 3D model, while the others are tweaked somewhat for more realism. These aircraft have also gotten improved camo textures.

Fleet Defender: Visual Upgrade Mod 1.0

Fleet Defender - Quick Keyboard Reference
Fleet Defender - The Official Strategy Guide
Fleet Defender - Icon for Windows 3.1
Fleet Defender - Update 2.0 (Non-Scenario)
Real Stories of Simulation Development
A Player’s Guide To Fleet Defender

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