Desert Fighters Interview by Jim "Twitch" Tittle
	Q. Are we going to see persistent damage and resource management across missions in the campaign? Yes. Permanent targets, such as ports and airfields, will have damage persistence that is repaired at a variable rate, depending on relative supply levels. Q. What elements create the flow between missions? What will we see for mission debriefs and mission intros in the campaign? Well, since this is not a scripted campaign, there aren't all kinds of fancy briefings with videos, voice, and such before and after each mission. The daily mission flow will commence by checking your missions listing to see the primary and secondary missions for the day. If your pilot is of sufficient rank (you can start with any rank you like), you can choose which mission to fly, how many planes to use, and which pilots will fly those planes. After clicking the FLY button, you get the opportunity to set the loadout for your flight and read the mission briefing, complete with the goals of the mission and the criteria for success. Upon returning from the mission, your performance is evaluated and you are told why you succeeded or failed in the mission. A log of mission events is displayed and your kill/strike totals, damage, and losses are displayed. Upon returning to the shell, you can view the world news, which includes news bites from various parts of the World War, information about pilots or other intel about theater, and any results from the ground war. You can view and print the various scoreboards, which detail the top pilots for each squadron, service, and for the entire theater, and can edit paint schemes as well as squadron and pilot names. Q. Are there any night missions? In regards to the dynamic campaign, no. As far as the multiplayer sessions, there is continuous time - dawn, daylight, dusk, night. Q. Are the single missions based on a historical event that the pilot determines the outcome of, as in previous Dynamix simulations? No, we do not have any historical battles or pilots, like in previous Dynamix flight sims. The intent here is to allow the player to create their own history using an historically accurate environment and equipment (with some licenses). I cannot think of any way to allow historical events to occur within a truly dynamic campaign system without them appearing out of place. Click to continue		Q. If pilots create custom missions, how much tactical/strategic detail can they design? There is no mission builder, per se. The player can save an exciting mission after it has been flown, allowing a others to try their hand at the mission. The player does have the ability to set the mission type, mission area, type and number of aircraft on each side, whether the player's flight has escorts, whether to allow encounters outside the mission area, and whether to use unlimited fuel, ammo, and/or ordnance, for FLY NOW missions. Q. Will we meet real aces as we did in Red Baron, Aces Over The Pacific and Aces Over Europe? Who will we meet? No, we have avoided the use of real personnel in the game. There are several reasons for this, chief among them being the expectations raised by using an historical figure. Additionally, with the shorter development schedule we had, it was not possible to both research out all historical facts and figures and to design a unique, dynamic system that will give far more replayability than has been in any of our historical sims in the past. Q. Tell us about the challenges this creates from the designers perspective? How many individual characteristics can be programmed for the fighting style of one Ace vs the other? Well, to be honest, this wasn't a very difficult process for me because of my background in working with Front Page Sports titles. I took the basic design of the "player generator" in baseball and modified it to fit the unique requirements of a "pilot generation" system for a combat flight sim. The specific abilities were determined by the AI programmer based upon his AI system. Simply by the process of random distribution we will have a wide variety of pilot abilities, from the Experten to victims. Go to Part IV
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