by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson December 16, 1999

  Q. Making a simulation accessible to the novice is also important. How does C-H accomplish this? Are there training missions? Will they contain a simulated instructor?

A: We have improved the accessibility to the novice player by having 'Novice' and 'Realistic' avionics modes and we will have a quickstart keyboard guide in the box.

Ejection Sequence: #1

There are no scripted training missions, although 'Free Flight' will still be included and the player can practice flying, targeting and weapon drills in a passive environment.

The AI engine for C-H is fully dynamic and therefore it is very difficult to script training missions because you can't guarantee the same events will happen time after time. We made a decision to put our effort into improving the AI for the dynamic campaign instead.

Q. Tell us about the terrain. Will we see individual trees?

A: The terrain is similar to A-H in that we have the solid forests with a skirting tree line but we will include more individual trees. We have also made the curves in the roads and rivers smoother.

Ejection Sequence: #2

Q. Will you support hardware T&L? How does this impact the frame rate?

A: We do support T&L and it makes a substantial difference to the frame rate.

Q. What will be the recommended system spec to run at high detail at 1024x768? What about medium detail at 800x600?

A: It's impossible to state system specs at this time because the program needs to be finished and optimised. The memory footprint for C-H is smaller than A-H so there will be less memory paging. On my development system (PII 400 + VooDoo3) changing screen resolution doesn't affect the frame rate too much because the program is not fill rate bound.

Click to continue

Ejection Sequence: #3

Q. Tell us about connectivity between A-H and C-H?

A: If you have A-H installed on your PC, C-H will detect this and allow you to select the Apache and Havoc gunships in addition to the Comanche and Hokum gunships.

Ejection Sequence: #4

Q. What is the goal for multiplayer features?

A: The goal is to make a C-H campaign playable across the Internet. With A-H the LAN game worked fine but the Internet game was troubled with the reliability of packet delivery and latency. Oh.. and there will be tandem cockpits for two players to co-op in the same machine.

Ejection Sequence: #5

Q. Any chance we'll see a spiral bound manual this time?

A: Not sure yet. Manufacturing decisions are made by our publisher.

Q. When can we expect to see this one on the shelves?

A: C-H will be completed by the end of March 2000 and should be available soon after that. Thanks!!

Join a discussion forum on this article by clicking HERE.