Wondering if it’s the best thing to happen to hardcore flight sims since… well, Falcon 4, or if they’ve gone so deep into realism that only the anal need apply.
I have to admit I haven’t even checked out the other recent patches, due to reading thrilled messages about all the switches you have to throw to start the engines. Switchology <> entertainment. I want my sims to be convincing, but there’s a limit to the amount of detail that SHOULD be in a game that’s being played by people without the benefit of USAF flight school.
Of course, I’ll try it myself eventually. But I’m wrapping up a book right now, and I shouldn’t even be posting to QT3 right now, much less flying…
I just noticed it myself last night. You’re first challenge is to find a mirror site that doesnt’ cost anything. It’s 130mb. I havne’t installed it yet, but I’m looking forward. It sounds like they’ve finalized a few of the new airframes with 3d cockipts, like the A-10, F/A-18, and even an F-22. I agree about pushing all the buttons. I’m hesitant to devote much time to learning an old game.
Handheld Computing mag is currently pining for the fjords, so unless someone manages to nail it to the perch, I’m now living the rogue life of a freelance wordsmith.
Other things in life are preventing me from investing a lot of time into projects like this new SP4, but I plan to dig into it in a couple of weeks, life permitting. I’ve wanted to give Falcon 4 another go, and this looks like a good excuse. But I’m with Denny - having to spend 20 minutes flicking switches to start the engines may be realistic, but so is not hitting pause and running to the bathroom.
The patch is sitting in my documents folder. I’ve been too much on a retro kick lately to care about relearning Falcon, although with its age, Falcon may fall in that retro category real soon now.
I’ve also dumped the patch out on Bittorrent. Not one download. Simmers seem to like to hammer the enthusiast sites until they collapse under the bandwidth load, and then bitch that the patch doesn’t include 512x512 textures (which would easily double the download size).
I just installed and took a look at it last night. It’s pretty cool that so many people have stuck with it so long. But it’s starting to show its age. The graphics in particular, are getting a little long in tooth. Blocky smoke, odd looking cloud cover, and just really blotchy looking textures. I should probably hold off until I can see if I can find the high texture scenery and something to fix those clouds. I tried a few of the other planes and don’t really see the attraction. At the start of each F-14 mission, my plane crashed into the carrier on start up. The A-10 and F/A-18 worked fine, though. My opinion: If you’re going to play F4, you might as well stick with the F-16. It’s still the best F-16 simulator and (dare I say) best campaign on the market. It’s still pretty buggy–3 CTDs for me in less than 2 hours (although most of these seemed to be associated with the F-14).
Gotta head over Boston way and buy Con beers to get the scoop on that. :-) I’m guessing, though, that the “strongly opinionated personalities” in the Falcon modding community were not conducive to a business agreement.
No, not at all Denny. You know me dude, I whole-heartedly support the mod community and if i had my way…
Anyway, for once, Atari can’t be blamed for this…which is amazing to say the least…this was a straight up licensing deal. It was thier baby and not once did we get in the way of their “vision”. They had one milestone we had to approve, and that was beta. Remember how F4:OIR was supposed to come out before xmas? Rrrright…
Suffice to say that we gave G2 2 years and everything they needed to make a kick-ass Falcon game including yours truly digging where no one has dug before to find the all the source code and art assets and convincing the higher ups that this was the right thing to do…and they (G2) just totally dropped the ball. TOTALLY.
I knew I was up shits creek when Eric Marlow called me and said, “Con, I just left G2 and there are some things you need to know…”
Anyway, i’ll give you the full 5-0 over beers sometime.
It wasn’t an inexperienced team, at least not initially. However, when internal troubles at G2 came to a head and Eric left for greener pastures, a bunch of folks left with him.
One of the big reasons i did this deal was because of Eric and the core team of programmers; Eric is a super sharp guy who knew exactly what needed to be done. Obviously, the management at G2 thought differently.
Anyway, trust me when i say it’s better that F4:OIR not see the light of day (in its current form anyway).
OK, enough of this. I’ll probably have my lungs handed to me for even saying this much.
Like usual your wrong and have no idea of what you are talking about.
Atari was submitted multiple betas and 2 release candidates. They asked for things to be fixed and we did it. They never denied or dis-approved the final release candidate, they just asked for more than G2I was willing to give them…(G2I’s IP Source code) This lead to G2I making the decision to decline the latest contract extension offer and not release OIR.
Sean, of course there is a counter view - nothing is ever black and white.
Anyway, no more from me on the subject except to say that i’m bummed that it will not be coming out and that I wish G2 the best of luck with their new line of sims.
Con’s a good guy and I’d trust his word on this. And I think ya’ll can understand how he can’t get dragged into a public argument about this in his position.
As far as G2 goes, I find it hard to believe it would boil down to “You want our source code? We’d prefer to bury the source code and not make a penny than to share it with you.” Given that they were working with Atari’s source code to create their product, I don’t think reciprocal sharing would be unreasonable, if that was the demand.
To elaborate on the previous post, I’m not saying that the source wouldn’t be an issue – but I find it hard to believe that sharing the source was by itself the deal-killer, considering the source isn’t worth much without the Falcon 4.0 rights to graft onto it.
Shadow, no idea why you’d need to talk to the forum admin about this topic, but you can use the private message feature to send a message to TomChick or Mark Asher.
