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Why the Chinook stayed drawn
Every vehicle in Section Command is now a 3D model, built to its real measurements and photographed from above. The Chinook was built too, and went straight back to being drawn.
Until this morning every vehicle in the game was drawn in code, straight onto a flat picture from above. At a glance they looked the part. Close up, they were guesses. Today I rebuilt them as 3D models instead, at their real sizes, and the game photographs each one from directly above to make its picture.
Built against photographs
Each one is built from its real measurements and checked against photographs of it in Helmand. The Jackal, with its ring mount right round and the commander's GPMG over the front only, the way the real one's guns sit. The Coyote. The Mastiff and its remote weapon station. The Buffalo with its arm for digging out IEDs. Then everyone else's: the Afghan Army's Humvee, the Taliban's pickups with a DShK in the back, the jingle trucks and Corollas in Highway 1's traffic, and the old Soviet hulks rusting by the roads since the eighties. Each has its own wreck, burnt dark and flat, and the crews sit in their seats.
Then the Chinook
The Chinook was the last to be built, the RAF's HC2 at her real size, along with the Apache. And from above she looked wrong.
Built in 3D
Drawn
A Chinook is a long, narrow aircraft, and seen straight down, true to her measurements, she's a thin hull between two great rotor discs. Next to the men around her she looked frail, almost skinny. The real thing is a huge, solid presence on a landing site: in every photograph and every bit of film I've seen, she dwarfs the men running off her ramp.
The drawn Chinook isn't accurate in the same way. Her hull is fatter than it should be from above. But she reads as what she is: a big aircraft, the one thing on the landing zone you can't miss. So I looked at the two side by side and put the drawn one back.
She's the one exception in the game. The Apache is a different story. Slim is what an Apache is, and the 3D one stayed.
It's a small call, but it's one I'll keep coming back to. Accurate is the aim, but what counts is how it reads from where the player sits, and sometimes the drawing tells the truth better than the measurements.
Who makes this: Section Command: Helmand Ops is made by one person, Jack Mustard, who is the whole of Tactical Chicken Studios.