E3: Best of Show by Eric "Snacko" Marlow
	"The things you can count on after attending E3 are ringing ears and sore feet." - Snackoism The 1999 E3 conference in Los Angeles was my second opportunity to rub shoulders with industry insiders and knowledgeable military simulation enthusiasts. On a professional level it was a great opportunity to learn more about what's going on in the industry and communicate it back to the readers. On a personal level, it was a good place to hook up with friends and talk seriously about our collective personal passions for military simulations. Over the course of three days I was able to get my fill on both levels. I must say, while E3 is a great place to get a look-see at sims that are currently in development, it's a bad place if your intention is to wring the software inside and out. The loud, often obnoxious, roar of voices and music often drowns out your questions. Last year was better: we seemed to have access to more "behind the scenes" rooms that if nothing else were a way of sitting down and asking questions without straining your voice. Several people I spoke with on Saturday (the last day) had already lost their voice, or were quickly heading in that direction. Although my Mark One Eyeball is always on the lookout for the next killer sim, I have to constantly remind myself that we are viewing products that are in different states of completion. Most were in a high-alpha code state, which means that we could only observe small sections of the sim that were "working." Unfortunately, "working" can be a very subjective term. When conducting my interviews, certain patterns start to emerge: you can ask the person showing the sim about a certain feature, and the response is about 95% of the time "yes, it will be in there." Kudos to all the developers for trying to be aggressive with their feature set. But unfortunately the realities of business sometimes get in the way, and some of the features will get axed as delivery time nears. After seeing this pattern several times you learn to adopt a "wait and see" approach. "The feature set of any given sim will be the one decided upon about a month before it's released to manufacturing." - Snackoism Following are detailed previews of most of the popular sims, but for the moment let's take a look at our whirlwind tour of the E3 floor. Click to continue		Armored Fist III First on our stop was Novalogic. We hooked up with Dan Bennett who has taken up shop as Novalogic's PR Manager in-residence. We got a look at several sims: F-22 Lightning 3, Delta Force 2, and Armored Fist 3. Several sims in development were also noted: Maximum Overkill, Wolfpack 2, Joint Strike Fighter, and Commanche 4. Whew - Novalogic is going to be quite busy! Maximum Overkill The best look at a sim I received at the Novalogic booth was Armored Fist 3. Nigel Mills, Associate Producer on the product, walked me through the sim. Scheduled for an early fall release, AF3 emphasizes team-play more than any other tank sim to-date. Their interest is to allow up to 3 human players to play inside an M1A2 tank. Also emphasized is the commander function, which allows a person to coordinate the movements and actions of the 4 tanks in their platoon, and up to 8 platoons. Shadows, weather effects, smoke, fog, and grass will all be resident in the sim, but the sim continues to use the Voxel engine to render it's graphics. Voxel is great from a low-to-mid system where frame rates are a concern, but to me the engine has never been visually pleasing. F22 Lightning III Go to Page Two
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