by Leonard Hjalmarson with Neil Mouneimne

  CSIM: From the descriptions available so far, it would seem that Panzer Elite has you play the career of a single commander, trying to stay alive throughout various campaigns of WWII. If this is correct, it would beg a couple more questions: Does this mean you cannot jump from tank to tank as in a number of previous tank sims? Also, is keeping a single commander and his crew a realistic goal for players who choose American tanks, where attrition was really extreme?

WINGS: To restate, you are the commander trying to stay alive through the war. You cannot jump around tanks, as this would compromise gameplay and realism. In World War II, tank warfare was constrained by visibility and Panzer Elite convincingly emulates this using its detailed terrain engine. Allowing the player to change tanks dynamically runs completely against this design intention. We transmit spottings from wingman to player via voiced radio messages.

There is however a realism setting, allowing you to switch your external camera view to the turret camera of your wingman if this is desired. We would recommend playing the German side when you play Panzer Elite the first time. In keeping with WWII, --keeping your commander alive in an American tanks is tough. However, any crewmember lost during the battle can be replaced at the base camp, even the commander of wingmen. If you the player die, you cannot continue. You must restart the scenario.

If you adopt the fighting style of the American forces, your survival rate increases. At your disposal are:

• § more artillery strikes to use against heavy German positions
• § smoke for you or your accompanying platoon members to use against heavy tanks
• § a superior number of tanks and infantry to encircle heavy German tanks.
• Historically large numbers of German heavy tanks were rare later in the war. German forces lost over 60% of them due to artillery or air strikes.

CSIM: From the screen shots at E3 it would appear that the graphics engine supports sophisticated 3d hardware and special effects. Tell us about the graphics engine. What resolutions will be available? Will there be support for particular cards?

Italy. Click for larger image.

WINGS: The software renderer supports any high-color resolution your graphic card allows, everything from 640x480 up to 1280x1024 or more. We support 3Dfx and 3Dfx2 (Voodoo and Voodoo2) boards directly via Glide, while other cards will be supported via Direct3D. There will be more direct customization to some graphic boards, but those are to be decided later. AGP support is in place and our textures can be as large as 16 megabytes.

The engine is customized to push as many polygons as possible and configurable to lower the CPU speed needed to calculate the complex terrain we show. We also support alpha effects for smoke, dust and explosions with our particle system. The screenshots you saw at E3 were from the software renderer. Keep in mind that the game still looks great even without 3D acceleration.

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Buildings. Click for larger image.

CSIM: Depth of field in ground sims is closely related to mesh detail levels, and this becomes terribly important in sighting and targeting and reading terrain in order to maneuver and hide. How much depth of field will we have in Panzer Elite and how is mesh detail handled?

WINGS: Panzer Elite supports mip-mapping and LOD (Level of Detail) rendering for the landscape. This provides us the ability to display terrain at large distances. The renderer is designed to increase the detail close to your vision. In gameplay terms, this permits you to hide in gullies or depressions.

The smallest surface polygon we have is 2x2 meters. The landscape of a 5x7-kilometer battlefield consists of 11.2 million polygons. Add the ground detail and we manage nearly 16 million polygons per battlefield. The normal visual range in high detail is 500 meters, 1000 meters with binoculars (high detail) and 3.6 kilometers in low detail. Considering the average fighting distance in World War II of tanks was 800 meters, this is more than adequate.

Infantry. Click for larger image.

CSIM: Compiling enough detailed statistics to merit simulating so many variants of a single tank must require some excellent source information. How did you collect the necessary data to properly represent these variants?

WINGS: Our main source of information was the Panzer Museum in Munster. This institute has most common World War II tanks still in working order. Our secondary source was the original blue prints and data sheets of the German and American manufacturers of the armaments. Additionally interviews were conducted with veterans, providing us with supplementary supporting data.

Some information was difficult to establish, but Internet contacts provided us with this. The best source we found were the original manuals used by the tank crew. Not only did they describe how the systems functioned; the technical data included was invaluable.

Shermans. Click for larger image.

Go to Part III