Thursday

Setup-day. It is standard... People arriving, putting out all their gear, cables and than trying to get the networkup and running. It's a mess; cables everywhere, boxes everywhere, but merry sounds from people rejoining or people discovering the faces connected to the callsigns they know.

Friday

I myself arrived friday morning so I don't know much about Thursday itself. Lots of new faces, some Gods had arrived. Meeting Stinger, Adamski, Heascase and many many "famous names". This promised to be good! The preflight utility by Michael Barnes which I had arranged just prior to the meet had been tested with excellent results. Some flying had been done, so the atmosphere was there when I arrived. Given some faces Quake had had its first evening and night victims. And the bar had had a wonderfull time ;-)

Friday morning more people came in and we got on full strength. The problem is, when people are drippling in the network will get unstable. The network appeared to be not efficiently wired, so we had to rewire the network with 16port hubs to get it right. Than we started to do some serious flying....

Taxiing appaired to be a whole new experience for most of us in Flanker... That is to say, on this scale. Being an AWACS controller myself, I noticed a lot of confusion at take-off. It appeared to be that blue and red flight (= 8 pilots) were -due to a plnningserror - trying to take off from the same airbase. The radio CB comms again proved their value! But the side of these 8 aircraft sorting it our was a Discovery Wings episode in itself.

"JayCee ready to take off..."

Organizing 28 pilots flying a mission is not an easy job... Especially since we discovered that with our technical outfit 14 players on the LAN is the maximum using TCP-IP (which seems slightly more stable than IPX).

The base of operation in its full glory

The comms / radio proved once again their invaluable contribution to atmosphere and sense of immersion. Unofrtunately, we had to split up the group in smaller ones, (3 groups of 8 people) because of network losses several times. And you don't want to end each mission in the heat of battle. But after this decision we had some great missions cooked up by our master mission designer Chera Napalmski Becker.

In the evening I designed a funny mission in true Unit 13 tradition. We used to pick Papadoc as main character for these missions, but switched to Bill Gates and Steven Spielberg who bought a datcha on the Crimea. Objective: destroy the convoy of lorries carrying copies of Windows 2000 and destroy the replica of a battleship in the backyard of the datcha from Spielberg. (Latest news is that Flanker 2.0 will no longer support "silly objects in silly places" which will unfortunately end this great tradition :-(

Click to continue

Formation take-off in Michael Barnes Style...

But making fun of Bill Gates is not without risk. We got punished, severely punished. Call it stupidity, too much good faith, whatever you like. But fate knocked at the door.

Monster on high virus alert!

Monster fortunately detected it; CIH Virus alert!!! And we all on a LAN exchanging mission files etc. But such an event is like getting a heart attack at a meeting of doctors. Killerbee extended his callsign by becoming Viruskiller Bee and saved all our butts. But it took several hours to clean all machines, and we learned an important lesson... Why do you only learn these once it goes wrong and not before...

Friday evening late ended up in a raging Quake battle and the sun came up when the last stiff pilot removed himself from the room, with sore muscles from the tiring gaming for hours...!

Saturday

This was the day.... Adam Banks and Marek Paul (if you don't know them, leave this page immediately!) had arrived on friday afternoon bringing interesting boxes and packages. A presentation on the state of development of Flanker 2.0 was to be expected. A Dutch magazine had been invited, representatives from TLC/Mindscape Germany and TLC Holland had arrived. This was an important day for the RNLVAF.

At about eleven we couldn't wait any longer. Marek turned a monitor towards the group and began his expose. It was brilliant. From utter silence so soft whining but in FULL attention. Lots of questions, lots of answers, and a brilliant Marek turning up the suspense by the minute. Are we getting a dynamic campaign? What radar modes do we get? What about scaling? (if you are a regular on the flanker mailing list you know what happened after that question was being answered...)

Marek Headcase, Paul and twenty+ little boys drooling, changing pants and moaning.

We got it, we got it all and more.... after lunch we returned and Marek finished his presentation and pulled the big surprise; We got extensive sticktime with the New Lady. Carrier landings, O my, what else do you want. Sheer beauty. Of course, still a lot of work to be done. Objects seem too "crisp" against the background, plane and cockpit are "paint-fresh" from the factory. But give these guys time and credit, they only know one way to do it: they do it right or they don't do it.

In the afternoon we got back to good old faithful version 1.5 and flew several COOP missions. I had to bail out in the evening due to other obligations. Therefore I missed an important competition.

Go to Part II.