By Thomas "AV8R" Spann

  No matter how good enemy and friendly AI can be programmed, it's never as unpredictable, challenging, maddening or rewarding as it is when you fly with human friends and foes. It is also where the biggest warts in any sim show up because that's where unforgiving demands of Internet or LAN require efficient code to be written and tested.

Online flight is also where you test your mettle as a fighter jock, or become another ball of fire and smoke. Wimps need not apply, both for sim developers as for the sim fliers alike.

Multiplayer Interface

The story of F2's MP sit rep falls into the good, the bad, and the down right ugly categories. As I have said in Part I of this review, Flanker2.0 is the most stable multiplayer code I've ever witnessed, especially in its unpatched state. By stable I mean how good the flying stability is when you get online and fly with others. We have had 12 players on various forms of internet connectivity flying together in one online mission, and very little if any "warping" was noticed.

Multiplayer Session Takeoff.

By warping, we mean the phenomenon where you see other piloted planes slewing or jittering around the skies in an abnormal sense. This is due to the ability of the sim's network code to deal with the many bandwidth and packet losses that are inherent to life on Internet. I have heard from those that have set up a LAN, (local area network as opposed to Internet which is a WAN or wide area network), and have had 16 - 20 players working with very little warp or plane jumping.

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F2 does also have some bad things here, but they aren't show stoppers. For example, while it's a great improvement over Su27 1.5 to have text chat, the in flight text chat window prevents you from using game keyboard commands until you close the large window. Another nasty is difficulty in seeing incoming missiles makes both multiplayer and solo survivability a bear.

In multiplayer, it's great to have wingmen because they can help to call out incoming missiles, but you are unable to lock missiles and the smoke trails are very faint and hard to see. And the wingmen do not audibly call out the incoming threats.

However, if you practice enough, you are able to learn to effectively dodge missiles. You should train for this offline before going into battle where it counts and can ruin your and your wing mates day. I recommend PaleRider's missile training track files, or the Iron Hand training found on Papa Doc's web page (see links).

Multiplayer Chat Interface.

The ugly bugs that ruin multiplayer show up once you introduce A2A or SAMS. There seems to be faulty missile logic code that rears its ugly head while online and not while in offline or solo game play. If you fly a COOP mission against enemy AI planes or even just with SAMS, then both your own and AI missiles will miss. (Note that this doesn't seem to be true for the master, just the clients).

If you fly against just other human enemies with missiles, you will see a gradual decline in the ability of the missiles to find their mark. This is not a simple problem, and I imagine it will take a patch or two to get it right. But the good news is that SSI is aware of it and has stated that it is a high priority. This ugly bug reduces multiplay flight to little more than sight seeing and guns only battles.

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