The terrain is rugged and combined with a dense forest canopy ‘line of sight’ tactics become a significant part of the gameplay. Naturally, the forest is penetrated by roads, rivers and hydro corridors including electric towers creating a landscape well suited to low-level helicopter combat.

The terrain engine has been extensively optimised in both speed and data size. Whilst the flying areas are large (for a helicopter sim) the data size is relatively small. For example, the Cuban area consumes about 35Mbytes of data.

The upshot of the speed and data optimisations is that we have now surrounded the raised forest canopy with individual trees and scattered trees across the landscape.

The maps are richly populated with buildings and bridges. The towns are large, approximately the same size and shape as the real towns. All of the buildings have damage levels and in the case of bridges they actually collapse. In the Cuban map there are approximately 350 bridges.

We have built over 50 highly detailed and articulated 3D models (including retractable undercarriage, doors open and close, weapons systems make ready, tracks and wheels turn around, rotor blades droop at low RPM, etc.)

Click to continue . . .

Weapon Systems

Over 70 different weapons systems have been modelled and every vehicle in the sim has a realistic payload and every weapon detaches properly from its launcher. In some cases such as the SA-13 Gopher SAM launcher a very elaborate articulation is required to make the weapons systems ready.

The ground and air radar have been implemented with full, and accurate line of sight. This means that it is possible to hide behind buildings and forest whilst scanning for targets.

Decoys such as chaff and flare actually change the coarse of incoming weapons and this is noticeable. We have also implemented smoke grenades for the ground vehicles.

The sim is built from the ground up as a multiplayer sim. In fact this was the first part of the code to be completed. We have been flying around in multiplayer Lan mode (8 players) since last October.

Razorworks is obviously thoroughly committed to producing high end multiplayer simulations, and flight modelling will also be intended to make the hard core crowd happy. However, they also intend to allow enough user configuration to ease the learning curve and make the sim attractive to the weekend chopper pilot.

Apache Havoc is planned for release in October, 1998 by Empire Interactive. We'll keep you up to date as new information is released.