The Rebirth of Falcon 4.0

Test System:

• P2 450 @ 504, ASUS P2B
• 256 Megs PC100 RAM
• Canopus Spectra 2500 Riva TNT, AGP
• 2- Creative Labs 12 meg Voodoo II-SLI
• SB Live PCI
• 3COM 3c905 10/100 NIC, PCI

It is time to take a good look at Falcon 4.0 again. We at the Deltahawks spent months (years?) on this project and contrary to what was recently posted, the beta testers we worked with were VERY surprised that Falcon was going to be released last Christmas.

There were a lot of things we still did not see accomplished or completed, but as MPS broke for the finish line we stopped getting any more updates. When we heard they went "gold" we all crossed our fingers and said, "I hope they fixed the crashes," "I hope they fixed BVR," "I hope they fixed…"(insert long list here.)

To further frustrate our local group, multiplayer was about as broken as it could get. We all knew the main crux of our input was multiplayer and we saw some GREAT versions of multiplayer but as the release date approached, multiplayer took a back seat to fixing "Class A" crashes. But we had glimpsed the grail, and we knew what we saw.

We knew that Falcon even in its EARLY beta phase was the best flight sim we had ever seen. RHINO had just received a release version of another beta project he was on that NEVER crashed and even then we knew that Falcon 4 beta was still a better game. We KNEW that it was unsurpassed in its combinations of options, gameplay, realism and detail.

Secure in our convictions, we had NO problem touting this fact to every newsgroup, Internet mag or whoever would listen. Even after constant personal attacks about our motives and having to defend ourselves every step of the way from newsgroup "annoyers par excellance," we felt it was vital that we let you all know that this game was the best thing we had ever seen. We felt that it would be foolish to call yourself a modern flight sim fan if you did not own this game.

This approach didn't endear us to everyone, and some were suspicious of us. Everyone had heard far too many times how this sim is gonna do this and that sim will do that, and many were skeptical. How could any sim be all that we claimed for F4? But we had no ulterior motive; we were fans of the genre, maybe the biggest fans out there. We don't work for any game company. We have no sponsorships. We would gain or lose nothing if the game sold 1 copy or 10,000,000 copies.

Rhino's HUB.

F4: MAYDAY!

As F4 hit the shelves we saw over 700 posts a day about Falcon 4.0. Everyone was excited that they finally owned the elusive Falcon 4.0. Then, inevitably, the weaknesses were exposed. Many parts of the game were broken, and for many players crashes were frequent.

Worse, the multiplayer campaign was almost completely gone. Sadly, many of you that tried to see the forest through the trees, gave up.

We LAN players read all the magazine reviews and watched the awards multiply, and RHINO joked that Falcon was deservedly the "Simulation of the Year", but perhaps it should be rated at 50%. Where was the BVR AI, the ATC, wingmen AI, the TWS, missile launch warnings, MULTIPLAYER, etc. etc. ...

OK. That was a mere four months ago. But today, on April the 19th, 1999, fellow flight sim pilots, Falcon 4.0 has arrived. There are still some tweaks and some fixes to deal with, but ladies and gentlemen, we have a game!

April 17th, 1999 LAN Meet

On this weekend the 209th VFS Delta Hawks met for their monthly LAN meet. We had the latest and greatest network code to test in FALCON 4.0. My last report revived the excitement of some members whose attendance had waned. We have also had some potential new members prowling the fringes, and they pounced after the earlier review.

On Friday night we usually have five or six pilots setting up and starting off the weekend, with the balance showing up Saturday morning. This meet we had sixteen on Friday night. This number was stable through Saturday and we still had ten or eleven on Sunday morning. As people kept showing up, RHINO and I starting wondering just how many we would be able to get into a campaign together. We were soon to realize that we didn't have a lot to worry about.

Friday night, tech issues were quick and petty, so flying was going to happen early in the meet. We found out immediately that we didn't have to wait until the flight was in the air in order to avoid moronic AI pilots taxing through us, being set in the middle of a field somewhere, etc. We were able to all click on FLY and drop into our cockpits as fast as our machines would let us. We would get clearance to take off, pull onto the runway and go.

There are still some ATC issues, with the controllers giving clearance and then reprimanding you after you follow their instructions. But since the code we are testing is strictly network code laid over 1.06, I am not overly concerned. I expect we will be testing 1.07 with this new network code by next fly in and will see improvements in all these areas.

Ten Little Vipers

Our first few missions were flown with ten human pilots and one acting as a severely handicapped AWACS station. (We hope in the future that a real AWACS interface can be developed but in the interim we desire some useful AWACS info like the "F10" view info in Flanker 1.5.) We initially all chose the same squadron to work from, so we were able to choose flights that would be close together in time and target area with ease.

We started off emphasizing attacks on air defenses and SAM sites. Having all humans flying made these attacks very effective. Unfortunately many of the newer and less experienced pilots had some difficulty evading SAMs and air attacks. A few quick lessons and we were able to teach most of the others how to break and dive for the deck at SAM launches, the most effective SAM evasion tactic we have found. Radar masking is still not employed due to the huge CPU hit it would bring to the game, but at least it appears that flying low will not allow SAM gunners a target and of course, missiles cannot fly through a mountain.

LAN Meet.

As for the air threats, we decided we needed to support the strike packages with ESCORT flights. When they were available, I would grab an ESCORT flight that was supporting one of the STRIKE packages. With anywhere from one to three pilots on my wing, the STRIKE packages did much better at getting in and out alive without getting jumped by enemy aircraft.

The SAMs, however, were still a problem. After a few flights, we were getting a little tight on available aircraft. When you have twelve humans, and three or four lose a plane per mission, after three missions you're running short on hardware. We got a re-supply at one point, but it was only a temporary stop gap.

Come Home, Boys!

Our biggest problem was that we had learned some very bad habits. We were used to just flying until the game crashed and at least we could have some fun. But then we noticed something, we now have FAR more humans in the game than we ever did and the game is NOT CRASHING!

All of a sudden reality set in and RHINO, our illustrious CO, insisted that the group pay far more attention to bringing the aircraft back than how many tanks we killed. "He who runs away, returns to fight another day." Ok Not real brave but at 25 million a piece, why waste your Viper to kill one more $40,000 T-55? GET HOME, your family loves you and your Squad needs the hardware!

Saturday we started a fresh campaign. We decided to try a little twist and split up the pilots among 2 squadrons. This gave us 40 planes to start with instead of 20. This also allowed us to test a feature we never thought would work or we had previously overlooked.

By splitting into two Squads we now could have half the guys (the guys on the carpet in the bunker) fly for the 36th FS while the other half (men on the concrete) fly for the 80th FS. We should be able to sustain a campaign much better and still fly cooperatively AND competitively as the inter squadron "esprit de corps" could now come to full fruition. The fresh campaign started great. Again, I was flying and serving.

By setting the player bubble to 1, I was able to maintain very good FPS throughout the missions, never dropping below 16 fps even during heavy action. (We did decide that we will be building a dual processor server before our next meet with NT 5 to see if this increases the stability.)

Eleven Pilots in Campaign!

Now, if we had eleven people in, why would we need it more stable? Well, as the war raged on, stability started to drop. We began to notice issues from previous builds that caused problems. Crashes became more common by Saturday afternoon. Lock ups and the dump to "fly by" view returned. But we had to do a reality check as we looked around the room at all the onlookers and just giggled like little schoolgirls (shut up) "We have 11 in the campaign!"

We started saving each mission and started either reboots or memory flushes every mission or two, when we could time it so all the flights were down at the same time. Dynamic re-entry was working much better, with only a couple of occurrences where people dropped into the right location but at ground level instead of in the air.

So, players were getting out of the game to reboot or freshen up and coming back in pretty reliably. But for the server, me, to do this, I needed to make sure everyone was out of a mission. And the server is the system that you need to refresh regularly. (I do need to note that I always save after every mission. And I did not crash or lock up until well into Saturday afternoon. We did get one severe occurrence of taxi way hysteria when our flight was positioned behind 4 A-10s that seemed to have no desire to take off.)

By dinner on Saturday night, we had had almost 16 hours of pretty solid campaign flying. (I told you guys before, we don't sleep much these weekends. ;-D ). We had to start saving and refreshing frequently, but for the most part, it was very good. We secured the banquet room at Valley Brewery for the loud, large group for dinner, and the war stories began to be told.

Debriefing

It was incredible to hear about a hellacious furball some 100 miles away that BIGFOOT, TANGO and some others had while at the same time STAIN and I were keeping MIG-29s from scooting in behind RHINO and VELCRO and their wing on a runway strike. Of course someone had to ask … "How many do you think we will eventually see in a campaign?" We can't answer that right now, but it is obvious the more we can include in a stable campaign, the more fun we have. We saw the enemy engage BVR, the TWS is working very well, we got missile launch warnings and most importantly, we had eleven in a campaign!!!

LAN Meet.

After dinner we decided to break up the weekend a little and play some RAINBOW 6 with some of the new maps available. Now, THIS is a statement on how well FALCON 4.0 was working for us. RAINBOW 6 is a very stable networking game; one of the best we have seen with large gaggles of people. We went back to F4 after a short time with RAINBOW 6 because F4 was more stable!

TE in LAN Play

Sunday morning we decided to see if our huge Tactical Engagement mission would work. It was incredibly frustrating to say the least. It just would not let us in without crashing. We later found out that our old TE missions were all hosed but all we had to do was open the mission in the current executable, save it, and it was now ready for action in the current EXE.

Detemined to try TE, RHINO took about an hour and whipped up a quick TE mission with about 100 ground units, a bunch of enemy and friendly flights and we took off. We had about 3 hours of solid play in this mission with the culmination being ESCORTING eight B-52's to bomb Pyong Yang.

This mission saw seven of us flying, some ESCORT and some STRIKE with the B-52s. I happened to come across an enemy airfield with aircraft scrambling after the bombers. I passed quickly and banked around looking for my wingman (I had a computer jock with me on this one) to no avail, but did catch a few more blips on my RADAR over the field.

I called for help from the other humans in the air, but they were a bit too far out and most were occupied with bombing or protecting the package from fighters farther to the west. So I drove in and shoved two heat seekers into what turned out to be the two Leads of four MiG-29s.

Okay, 2 kills, 2 AIM-120s and 2 AIM-9Ms left with to MiGs a little pissed off. I blew through the remaining MiGs in full burner and started a slow turn into the strike package. Sorry fellas, I don't care how tied up you are, I need help … NOW!

I underestimated how fast the MiGs would convert and came to the realization I would not get to the safety of numbers before they got in range to fire. I pulled hard into the MiGs, locked the first one up and let loose with an AIM-120 way too close. The missile missed, but the MiG broke.

I switched to seekers and stuffed a 9 Mike up his tail pipe, then rolled hard for the deck, franticly looking for the last MiG. I pulled down and under for the ground and when I came back up and my blackout subsided, I had a perfect rear quarter shot of the last MiG that was turning into me. FOX 2 and my last heater took him out.

I turned back toward the strike package;'one AIM-120 and bullets is not the safest load out in un-friendly skies. As I banked around, my RADAR crossed the enemy field and more blips were coming up. It was time to vacate and I went full burner for the strike group. I have no problem admitting I called for help the whole way. RHINO and BIGFOOT got a tally and started to come in to help, and an AI flight of friendlies also picked up the MiGs and engaged them. All I had to do was get home.

I dropped into the middle of the BUFFS and flew most of the way back with them. There was some feeling of safety tucked up under the wing of the big bomber. I pulled out of formation as I approached my base, lined up for landing, got clearance, dropped gear … and locked up solid. This phenomenon seemed to happen at the exact moment that SHOCKWAVE tried to dynamicly re-enter. He came in and was our only "XYZHSA" (A bug acronym for XYZ coordinates, heading, speed, altitude) casualty of Sunday.

Other than the few glitches which were looked at this week, and new builds are addressing them already, the LAN meet was a roaring success. Once this code is combined with the soon to be tested 1.07 code, I think we will be seeing what most people thought they should have seen when they purchased the game. Things are coming along nicely. Hold tight for the next patch. (Ed. Note: 1.07 should be released to the outside testing group this week.)

It is apparent that the team of multiplayer testers called the "I-beta" team have greatly helped MPS get to where we are today in such a short time. Many of the bugs that have been fixed have been due to all of you sending in your bug lists and these address many gameplay issues.

But the "I-beta" team tests Internet multiplayer ONLY and clearly this is the biggest area of improvement in Falcon 4. 1.07. They have been able to achieve some good numbers in Internet play and it is LAN groups like us that can stress things that much further by having a larger group gathering and no limitation on bandwidth. That was always the promise with Falcon 4. " No limit to players, just a bandwidth limit."

Well my fellow pilots, we are that close. It is time you take a second look at Falcon 4 if you gave up before. If you have been a dedicated F4 pilot, then the world of multiplayer F4 is about to open your eyes to all that Falcon has to offer. Clearly, this game is unsurpassed and is the new benchmark in flight sims.

RHINO would like to add, "I will brag about this game until I've lost my voice when they give me 24 players in a stable, reliable LAN campaign. Thank you, Robin." (Robin Heydon- Falcon 4.0 multiplayer engineer.)