To be honest, I find this confusing. I just googled Flashpoint 2 and it seems BI and Codemasters are in a dispute about the game.
What I wonder most for some years, is where the engine actually comes from. Does anyone know? To me it feels like an abandoned tank simulator for military training purposes.
All vehicle physics are very close to tanks. If you take a Humvee at fullspeed and alter the course, it slides sidewards like a tank. The left/right/forward/reverse commands are singing from the same hymn sheet.
Furthermore the game offers 10 different formations at 4 different combat states, offering crouched and prone positions. And that refers exactly to what the military needs.
On top of that targets, positions and destinations always refer to distinctive points in the landscape that have orginally been added to the groundmap or they are given as 6-digit GPS positions. Tankers do the same. Their field of view is divided into sections, each of them named after a distinct object in that area. Most likely a tree, house or any other object. The engine can assign these positions that easily, because only a small share of the objects have been added to the groundmap, which the engine is referring to. The rest of the vegetation and objects isn't part of the groundmap, but added afterwards. Accordingly the engine can refer to a single tree, though there are hundrets of other trees visible for the player that the engine consideres as non-distinct objects that are simple obstacles for the AI drivers to avoid when they close in on them.
In my point of view this indicates the purpose as a military tank simulator from the 1990ies with only very little vegetation, due to the poor performance of computers in this decade. If the engine is that old, it would also explain why it makes such heavy use of the processor and the harddrive, while the graphics are totally scaleable. An old military training simulator had most likely a slow processor, forcing the engine to make high use of the harddrive, as fast SCSI harddrives where only a matter of money in those days. And the military got money.
So, basically I believe the original purpose of the engine was a tank simulator, similar to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcwDPZh6Se0I just can't imagine that a developer designs such an engine for the game market. It simply doesn't feed the needs of the late 90's game market that prioritized totally other aspects if you think of engines like UT or Quake 3.