by Leonard "Viking1" Hjalmarson

  Q: After many thousands of hours building Panzer Elite, will you play it yourself? What is your favorite tank to fight with?

A: I will, of course. I only do games I would love to see myself. Why bother with a game I dont like to see and play myself? I started a desert campaign recently I need to finish. Although its fun to fight in a Tiger or Panther I must say playing a Panzer IV throughout the war is my way to go.

Q: What was the public beta process like? Would you do it again?

A: It was great. We had tons of feedback which helped us set priorities. And certainly we would do it again, although I would clearly mark the beta as such: many people thought it was the official demo (and still think it is). It was less work than I thought it would be, so that was a surprise.

Planning for German Campaign

Q: If sales go as well as you expect, how long will we wait for the first expansion? What can you tell us about it? What would you like to do if sales go well?

A: Well, the mission disk is the first thing we already planned. It will cover the Battle of the Bulge plus the fight to the Rhine. That should be ready mid of next year if things go well.

If sales are going well and we can place Panzer Elite II it should be a release of mid 2001, that heavily depends on what the final design will be. If the mission disk does well a gold version might contain addtional features too. We want to fully continue support for the game throuhg our website, so expect goodies being posted there :o)

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Italian Town

Q: How will recent hardware advances influence future projects from WINGS?

A: A lot of course. We are looking forward seeing T&L (Transform and Lightning) in all cards and in consumer machines. The more work those new cards do the more we can use the processor for the game and not the graphics. We can now plan for uch more than we could in Panzer Elite. PE was planned for P166's, now we can plan for P2's which means better math support, more cache, more memory, MMX standard etc.

But the 3D hardware cards aren't at the end yet. If we come to the point where every pixel got its own math unit then we can talk serious business :o)

Q: How will the growth of the Internet influence your future projects?

A: Yes. We used the internet for work already but will use it now for games at the customer end as well. All future projects are planned as front ends for massive multiplayer games, even if the massive online game never would see the light of the day. If a developer doesn't prepare their game to go massive MP as a front end he is throwing his work out of the window. In the hope that our future games are successful we want to be prepared to move it online as well.

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