Dear All,
Greetings to you all in 2020. We’ve had an amazing year in 2019 at Heatblur, which saw the launch of the F-14! We still can’t believe it - and all of it has been thanks to all of you, who have supported us throughout development and beyond. Thank you for a wonderful year!
2019 was no doubt a hectic year for the team. Not only with the launch of the F-14 itself, but with the post-launch roadmap, and trying to squeeze in as many improvements over the course of the year as possible. While we’re proud of what we’ve achieved and the state that the F-14 launched in, we had a number of unfortunate and significant misses towards the tail end of the year. These include:
- The launch of the Forrestal
- The launch of AIM-54 improvements and TWS-A
- The launch of crew-position overhauls
- Launch of JESTER LANTIRN
- …a few other more minor bits and bobs
While there are numerous causes for these features being delayed, the primary reason has been the interwoven and difficult nature of some of these additions.
Both AIM-54 additions and TWS-A were developed together, in one leading edge development branch that was very close to launch last year.
Unfortunately, we suffered a large setback with the new missile API in DCS not working as intended in Multiplayer.
Decoupling all of the features that were to launch combined together proved an insurmountable task, and we hectically backtracked and pushed stripped down builds of the F-14 in the last patches of 2019.
These kinds of issues are frustrating to deal with. We’re now working to decouple the features that are working properly from each other and begin to get the rollout of the above features back on track.
We’ve also involved our partners at Eagle Dynamics with regards to the missile API, but we unfortunately cannot offer any ETA on the AIM-54 changes and associated system issues.
Our current major efforts are focused almost exclusively on the above, and we intend to begin shipping features throughout Q1.
We’ll soon be coming up on the 1 year anniversary of the launch of the F-14; and we intend it to be a year of product improvements that we can stand behind and are proud of.
Beyond that; we do not want to see a second Tomcat anniversary without a completed product.
As an addendum, for the first time in a long time, we decided to take some quality time off from development over the holidays.
We haven’t properly done so in many years; and approaching 2020 in a recharged state will allow us to more effectively deliver on our roadmap.
Stay tuned for more information soon. We’ll also be starting to discuss the F-14A much more thoroughly as we steam through Q1.
Sincerely,
Heatblur F-14 Team
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