Team Alligator Interview by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson
	Q: What APIs will be supported and what will be the maximum resolution? A:We will be supporting only Direct 3D, and at the moment we are undecided as to the maximum resolution but we have run up to 1280x1024 without major problems. However, Ka52 looks gorgeous at 640x480, so there's no problem for players with lower end machines. Q: How configurable will this engine be in terms of detail level and features? A: The largest challenge for the team making Ka52 Team Alligator is one of technology scaling. We are making a product here which has to excel on both a P200 with a 4Mb 3D card as well as on a Pentium 3 600 or so, with a G400 or similar top end card. As such we are designing the game with a whole raft of options and features which can be turned on or off depending on the power of the machine running the sim. Additionally, the graphics engine dynamically calculates the number of polygons to draw each frame based on the current performance of the PC Alligator is running on. This means that the poly-count will rise and fall to keep the frame rate at an acceptable level. Vista in Team Alligator Q: The Ka52 helicopter that I saw at E3 was graphically stunning, yet I was told it wasn't finished. What difference will I see next time? A: You're too kind. The list of additions to the game between the E3 demo and the final product is almost endless. We are still pre-Alpha. The version you saw was the bare 'vanilla-flavoured' graphics engine and terrain system with very few special effects (no, honest!); we've hardly begun to add in all the neat lighting effects, dust 'brown out' effects, battlefield smoke and other goodies. You really ain't seen nothin' yet! Q: How much detail will go into object animation? Will we see turrets moving, guns elevating, rocket flares, tracer fire, men popping out of hatches? A: The answer to all of these is 'yes'. To which you can add animated infantrymen, moving cockpit crew and sensor turrets on the helicopters, aircraft undercarriage action and some pretty cool explosion animations. Our 3D cockpit alone has dozens of animations: levers; switches; control pedals, cyclic and collective; and a fully-animated weapons officer in the right-hand seat! Click to continue		Ka52 Alligator Q: The "team" in Team Apache was the heart of the sim. How does Team Alligator compare? A: We have quite a similar mechanism for Team Alligator, though we have rationalised many aspects of the team management. We've also expanded it; whereas in Team Apache the player only managed a team in the campaign, in Alligator you can create a 'crew file' and fly that team in the stand-alone combat missions too. The aircrew's improvement and advancement is much more visible than before. If you recruit a guy for your unit and fly him for long enough without dying, you will see him advance all the way up the ranks from a Mladshiy Leytenant (2nd Lieutenant) up to Polkovnik (Colonel). Q: The "team" aspect, while a unique component of Team Apache, was also confusing to many players. Is there a way to compensate for this in gameplay for less interested weekend sim pilots? A: Yup. As in Team Apache, there will be the facility to simply ignore the team management and fly missions or campaigns with a default aircrew. Q: For those who took the time to learn the ropes, the "team" component provided a new level of immersion. I remember the first time I noticed that a particular team mate was NOT into formation flying while another had a habit of shooting at anything that moved. I paid more attention to my team the next time and had much better results. I felt like an actual commander! How has this aspect of the game been received by most of Team Apaches' fans? A: A lot of people liked this and really got into the whole Company Commander deal. (Though there were a few for whom the crew voices and dialogues grated.) Some players were even picking up some of the more subtle features we had built into the mechanism, such as the compatibility between the various aircrew. That feature survives, by the way. There will be some pilot/weapons officer combinations where the guys just click, and some where they don't work well together. It'll be up to players to find these out, though some time in the future we might publish a 'cheat sheet' giving away the combinations. Oh yeah, and we're getting the voices right this time. We have a number of Russian speakers and a Russian intelligence expert helping us get the dialogue authentic. You will even be able to fly the missions in Russian! Go to Page Four
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