EAW Screen...Click for a larger shot...

The European Computer Trade Show held annually in London is the european equivalent of the E3 in Atlanta but on a somewhat smaller scale. Exhibitors come here to show their games and of course get the chance to play everyone else's games.

My attention chiefly went to stands offering combat simulation titles. So this report is heavily biased in that department. It's also worth noting that ALL (with the exception of Red Baron II) flight sim titles were 3DFX accelerated.

Microprose have always had a strong presence at the ECTS over the years being one of the major sponsors of the event. A "bevy" (can I use this term or is it too english?) of up and coming new titles were seen strutting their stuff. Most notably was "European Air War", "Falcon 4.0" (version 0.1).

European Air War (EAW) is still a long way from completion, they estimated it at 60% complete so far. But it's presence proved that the project is still alive and not the figment of a deranged mind. No internal cockpit views have yet been implemented (in the 3DFX version) and as far as anyone could tell no campaign shell was available. As they said, "a long way from completion". But what is worth commenting on is the landscaping. I've noticed that when it comes to implementing 3DFX accelerated terrain, you can do it well, and (more often in my opinion) do it badly. EAW I'm glad to say does it well. Although visually the whole product looks like a polished SVGA version of Pacific Air War (no bad thing) this must rank highly among the better 3DFX implementations. There is a good view into the middle distance with a natural progressive fading of detail right up to the horizon.

On flatter terrain you can see further into the distance.

Close to the ground the trademark "fuzzy" texturing is minimal giving a good feeling of height (you can make out individual trees in the texture) and also it manages to convey a sensation speed.

Microprose are reluctant to allow anyone but their reps any "hands-on" demonstrations due to the buggy nature of the game in development. In fact with Falcon 4 one rep' was showing another one what -not to do- or it will crash the system.

Falcon 4.0

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Comes in two separate varieties, non-3DFX "syrup-o-vision" and 3DFX "ever so gentle jerko". And yes I know it's unfinished and not optimized (this should go without saying but I've said it anyway). But this is because despite whatever graphics work you take away from the CPU Falcon 4.0 is doing a hell of a lot more behind the scenes.

But before I get ahead of myself let's talk interface. Someone with a clear understanding of user interface design has crafted the front end for F4. Usage of such things as mental "Chunking" and the old Schinderman golden-rule of "7 plus or minus two things" are all at work here. So when you see the interface for the first time somehow you know what does what and what's going on. Several bonus points to Spect...sorry Microprose for that.

Click for a larger image...80K

The campaign shell was not seen but the mission planning was. And it's very comprehensive, allowing for creation of "packages". So you can divide up aircraft into "OCA Strike", "SEAD" and so on. This is evident in the picture above. In fact while all this mission planning is taking place "off-line" (for want of a better phrase) the war is STILL going on in the simulation.

Instant action is available offering quick selection of mission type, difficulty and the combat area is chosen by dragging a box over a map. Very quick indeed.

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Also worthy of note is the comms facility. Up to 16 players (human or computer controlled) can fight on-line, head to head or co-op. For team competition there are 4 texture schemes available (4 teams of 4, equaling 16 players). These look very nice indeed, this changes the F16's overall texturing and nose art. Choices include Shark and Tiger artwork and look quite authentic.

On the subject of graphics, compared to "another sim" that's nearing release it's already beginning to look a bit dated, but you don't fly Falcon 3 or Su-27 for the graphics do you? Terrain resolution height mapping looked a bit low, with textured "pyramids", though this is only evident at low level and only in a few places I saw.

Transparent smoke and explosion effects are employed though I couldn't say if light sourcing has been implemented as only daytime missions were flown.

Like in the original Falcon 3 you can "interact" (somewhat loosely) with other members of the squadron. Battle fatigue among your fellow squadron members is something you have to keep an eye on, because not only are they a danger to themselves but your life is on the line too. Some F3 fans will recall the sensation of loss when someone you've kept alive for the most part of a campaign suddenly dies.

Oh, and yes you can shoot the parachutes just like in Falcon 3. :)

If anything irks me about F4, it's the fact that Microprose have tried to copyright the phrase "Campaign Manager tm". What the hell for?

It's a sad fact of the industry today that publishers/developers will spend a great deal of money to produce mediocre but highly polished games.

Walking past stall after stall of such titles has a numbing effect on the brain. To the point where if a title stands out then it surely has that "wow" factor. You might find one or two titles like this at such an event as this. One such title is MechCommander from Microprose developed by FASA interactive.

MechCommander

MechCommander is an isometric 3D real time strategy game, point and click tactical combat with between battle resource management. This is not simply Command and Conquer with battlemechs.

The game scenario involves you as the "MechCommander" in command of a group of "MechWarriors" attempting to re-gain control of the planet Port Arthur from the technically superior Jaguar Clan. This is done over a linear series of 30 missions which tells the story of your conquest.

Battles take place with the player controlling up to 12 mechs to achieve specific mission goals. Terrain is typical of Port Arthur, rolling grassland with roads, rivers, bridges, trees and buildings.

The control interface is intuitive with plenty of keyboard shortcuts and your fellow MechWarriors keeping you up to date with their situation via digitized speech.

On the surface it does sound like C+C except you don't harvest or build anything. If any similarities can be drawn with game play then the management is almost exactly like that of a little known shareware game on the Amiga many years ago called "BattleForce". I mention this to MechCommanders game designer to which he smiles and nods gleefully. This is perhaps where the strength of the "game" lies. MC is not just eye candy (which it has in buckets).

There are 18 different mech chassis each is fully articulated and lovingly detailed. Combat visuals are best described as "kenetic", with so many explosions and debris it would tax the processor of a modest Pentium.

What about replayability? Well the hardware you build up in the game tends to be parts from "salvaged" or damaged mechs retrieved from the battlefield. Your equipment will be different each time you play. Add to this the multi-player feature where after each battle, your unit can salvage your opponents remains. Internet play will allow for up to 6 players, 3 on 3 co-op or competitive play.

The games mission scripts are user editable and there are plans to make new missions available via the internet.

What about the computer AI? The game designer explains, "we had to dumb down the AI, we found that if you told all of your mechs to storm the objective, if you went away then came back they would have won...We spent a lot of time tweaking the game play."

As a side note, MechCommander wins my vote for best game of ECTS.

Go to Mech Commander

Screaming Demons - Activision/Parsoft

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Parsoft made a name for themselves with a little number called A10 Attack then A10 Cuba. What they managed to create with A10 was perhaps the greatest physics model for any home simulation. Screaming Demons has nine aircraft, therefore Parsoft went and created nine physics models, one for each aircraft. In addition, with the earlier A10 simulation there were only 6 things you could damage, now up to 250 items can receive damage. Even down to an individual polygon I'm told. To demonstrate the physics model the Activision representative chose a P38 and wheeled it around the taxi way with much turning and wheel braking thus sending the poor aircraft up on one wheel strut, down on the other, compressing the nose wheel strut until one of them broke. Crump.

Much like Falcon 4, you have to take good care of your squadrons morale, various parameters include such things as fatigue, combat skills and sanity. "Wait hold on", I ask, "Did you say sanity?" Yes, if your compatriots are "close to the edge" they can flip during combat, turn them into kamikaze screwballs or lilly-livered cowards that run away at the first sign of danger. This sounds interesting but could get a bit frustrating.

There are actually going to be ten aircraft that ship with the game but one of them is going to be a dummy so you can learn how to create your "own" aircraft. But this feature is somewhat advanced and not for everyone. For a start, to edit the 3D model you'll need 3D Studio 4 or MAX. Also damage "scripts" need to be edited so you can give functionality to the various parts of your 3D model. No aircraft or script editor will be included.

One editor they are including is the mission editor, the same one they used to build the game no less.

The visuals of the 3DFX version running had some form of shadow dithering on the 3D objects which degraded slightly from the impressive visuals. Frame rate performance was smooth with only some noticeable slowdown near a complex ground object, in this case a castle nestled on the coastline. The view system is the snap type I couldn't say if there is a padlock type as at this point I managed to find a bug...oops not supposed to say that.

Drawing a comparison with the landscape rendering of the still unfinished European Air War, the ground features of SD are more interesting but EAW somehow looks better. I put this down to the more natural distancing of EAW. I suspect it's down to personal taste.

DID F22 Air Dominance Fighter

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Anyone familiar with EF2000 will be able to grab some sky with this one right away. The front end has been re-designed and looks just splendid. But inside the cockpit (or outside it if you spend most of your time playing with external views) reveals that F22 ADF is certainly the most impressive combat flight simulator purely from a programmers perspective. DID stockpiled users requests and crammed in as many as they could.

The SVGA MFDs are there. Not only that, they are anti-aliased, even in the virtual cockpit you can just about the text. It's harder to make out at some angles but you can. Light reflecting off the MFD glass is something I've never seen before.

The ACMI is there too. In fact you can switch to it at anytime during flight. What's more, you can still fly the plane, there is a shrunken cockpit view in a small window to the left of the ACMI window. All recordings can be saved after flight for later playback. Weapons, target locks are all recorded and can be viewed from free floating, chase, object tracking viewpoints.

640x480 and 800x600 video modes are supported, it's possible to switch between normal and 3DFX (glide) on the fly, though switching to 3DFX reduces your viewing angle. Lower parts of the cockpit you could see before disappeared below the screen. I suspect this is because the cockpit image is larger on the 3DFX or I don't know when I'm in 800x600 normal going to 640x480 3DFX. I suspect the latter.

AWACS view was not available for me to see, for some reason the ESC key (which I'm told was supposed to bring it up) didn't start working til later in the show. But if it did I'm assured that I could redirect local aircraft to anywhere I felt like on a whim.

There's much more ground combat in this one. Bringing the aircraft screaming down through the whispy transparent cloud layer, vapor trails streaming off the wings an enemy road convoy was heading up a valley. On approaching to the convoy, the left hand display shows numerous tracking radars, mobile AAA and SAMS which open fire. This is a worthy successor to EF2000.

The effects that will have most people skipping a heartbeat or two are the new smoke, clouds and contrail effects. Clouds probably more so as until now we've never seen a natural transition through them. In EF2000 they were a polygon mesh you could fly through. Now, they are...well semi-transparent clouds. You fly over and through them watching the ground below, it sure looks natural to me.

I asked DID about the new features.
ME : "What was the hardest thing to implement?" I asked.

DID: "Erm, the Wargen system I'd say".

ME : "Why's that?"

DID: "Because it's so big now, compared to the wargen in EF2000"

ME : "Is that why it's being released as a separate product?"

DID: "Not just that, we needed to get F22 out but the new Wargen is so complicated we knew we'd have to spend much more time on it so it was decided to split it."

ME : "So what about F22 Air Dominance? Are you saying it won't have Wargen?"

DID: "No, it has a campaign system, but it doesn't generate the war for you."

(I'm thinking that either he's completely mad or there's much more to this wargen thing than he's letting on)

DID: "Let me put it this way, if you didn't know about the other product you wouldn't miss it. But with the Commander add-on you'll experience a whole other side of the war you couldn't before."

(I'm relieved it was the latter)
ME : "I understand you're [DID] are working on a tank simulator for the military, can you tell me anything about that?"

DID: "Well it's just a challenger sim for training, much like our laser guiding training thing."

ME : "Are we going to see any of this technology appear in future games?"

DID: "Erm, don't think so, it's a separate thing but you never know. I don't know of any plans but who knows?"

ME : "Thank you very much"

Honorary mentions

Plane Crazy - Europress

Plane Crazy is a game which is about as close to simulating realistic flight as is tiddlywinks. It's an arcade game. But not only is this game fast and colourful it's fun and network playable. It's about flying improbable looking stunt planes around various courses made up of canyons, bridges, tunnels, hoops and loads of other imaginative obstacles. And all at speeds that make the hairs on the back of your neck curl. Fans of Gee-Bee air racing might want a look at this but don't take it seriously as any form of simulator. plane Crazy is a great showpiece for 3DFX and PowerVR hardware.

Quickshot "MasterPilot"

Masquerading as an aircraft multi-funtion display it is in fact a keypad with slide-in sheets informing you of each buttons function.

The device is surprisingly large, the width just bigger than a 5 1/4" drive bay. Sadly not user programmable, programming is done via a slot-in cartridge system with specific games (30 or so) coded into it. With the cartridge inserted you press a button, select the code for the game you want displayed on a 3 digit LED numerical display and you're there. Very fast, and it comes with a setting allowing you to launch Windows 95 utilities. So perhaps you could justify the cost (50 uk pounds)

This is not a new device, it's been around for several months, but a new cartridge is available providing support for additional games/sims. After all, who needed one of these for DOOM?

It plugs in line with the keyboard and enables you to chain several units together. So you can use them in conjunction with your existing programmable joysticks. They do look quite smart.

Looking at the rear of the unit where the data card fits, it looks easy to drill out and fit a small video monitor, erm well maybe not. Quickshot Web Site

Richard Albert Hawley, Leeds, England

Flight Sim News, Longbow, Hornet 3.0

[url]http://www.euronet.demon.co.uk[/url]

Sabre Ace: Virgin Interactive

Saber Ace represents Virgin IE's first part of a two part assault on the flight sim market this christmas (the second being "F16 Aggressor"). I'll get to the point and say that this is aimed squarely at the ATF crowd. Nice presentation combined with simplistic operation. I feel this is kind of at odds with the chosen subject aircraft. Fans of the era are generally either vets' with real flying experience or hardened sim' enthusiasts. Saber Ace is likely to disappoint both.

I wanted to like this one so I spent some time with it.

Even if you don't mind dumbing down your flying style for "a bit of fun" the overall quality of the sim is let down badly by the really poor 3DFX landscape. It's really fuzzy at anything except high altitude. At low level if you don't keep checking you altimeter you just can't tell if you're near the ground or not. The fuzzy brown, green, blue smear looks pretty much the same at 10 ft and 1000 ft. This is only broken up by the odd mis-aligned join in the "terrain".

Okay, apart from the bad 3DFX rendering the aircraft look great. What about combat? This is what it's all about. Five minutes of this sim and you quickly miss the comforts of radar and virtual padlocks. It uses a snap view type system that is surprisingly quite easy to use, in fact one of the nicer types I've used. Also you can toggle the "Lock Enemy" which will snap your view around if your visual target enters another view plane, this is confusing if you're not used to it. In fact I forgot this feature and just relied on manual view switching.

Objects seemed to scale correctly which is unusual, most flight sims cheat a little and scale their 3D objects by say a factor of 2 to make them easier to see at greater distance. In Saber Ace you spend a lot of time tracking dots around the sky, if you close the range too rapidly you only get to make out the shape of an airplane as it goes whizzing right past your canopy. (There may have been an option to change the scale I missed.)

So to assist long range identification a "colour coding" feature is available, this means that friendliest are easily distinguished by means of a flashing green dot.

I can safely say low speed stalls are modeled, reducing airspeed results in one wing or the other dropping followed by the rest of the airframe. I never found out how difficult it was to recover as I always smacked into this big fuzzy blue/brown blob thing. (If that's supposed to be a beach then whatever you do, don't go there for a holiday.) All aircraft handling felt a bit too "bouncy" than what I'd imagine, I really had to concentrate hard on not over controlling the stick the pull my sights up onto targets.

Saber Ace picks up points for the sound, the quality of the whining turbines and machine guns are well above average. Good overall presentation, good view system, nice choice of aircraft terrible terrain graphics.

Flying Corps Gold

Right-o-chaps, listen up, what we need here is a couple of Lewis guns, some grenades and a little bit of luck. Looking near identical to the earlier release it offers two new features, network head to head play, a paint scheme system and 3D accelerator support. Okay that's three things but the paint scheme is really part of the network combat thrills and spills.

The same fog-of-war terrain is present from the earlier 3D patch version making ground features difficult to see at high altitude. The cloud transition while no longer supposed to cause slow-down looks a bit odd (holy polygons) but who cares about such minor things? Well YOU might if you're into the suspension of disbelief. This is not a major re-working of Flying Corps, it's more of a tune-up with an extra aircraft thrown in.

Back to the networking, going head to head you notice a momentary "warping" of your opponent, actually it's more of a stutter. This is running on a direct connection? No one could tell me if this was a serial or IPX network connection. It if was serial then either there is some inefficient code in the DirectPlay serial driver (as I've noticed something similar in my own games) or position updates intervals are widely spaced (if you update positions at 15fps on a "snapshot" 3D system running at 30fps then you would see such stuttering).

If you went out and bought Flying Corps when the 3D accel' patch came out then you would be hard pushed to justify buying essentially the same product all over again. (Ed. Note: Empire and Rowan have pointed out that existing FC users will be able to upgrade to FC Gold at a very reasonable rate. Additionally, Empire has promised that the final 3dfx patch and the multiplayer patch would be free to existing FC owners when FC Gold is released.)

Control Devices

Thrustmaster first dabbled with PC game pads last year with the "PhazerPad" which was/is a very nice digital controller but a bit limited in use. Introducing the new RAGE 3D, an aggressive name for what is an aggressive device. The main part of the controller is the "thumb roller" which is said to use some patented "Hall-Effect" sensor. Tested with the excellent "Moto Racer" it offered precise control over its full range, (considerably less bulky than ) allowing gentle banking into curves and full opposite steer for tight switchback bends. What's more it converts to a digital pad at the flick of a switch.

There's a cluster of six buttons on the right hand side, two top triggers and two bottom triggers (same functions but for different holding styles). All buttons are programmable with Thrustmapper software.

You can plug in up to 4 of these units at once on a standard PC. Gravis have always had a more competitively priced range of flexible joypads but the RAGE's 3D analoge/digital capability coupled with it's very comfortable design makes it worth paying that little bit extra.

Suncom - Split Throttle

In the wired and wacky world of noble throttle controllers Suncoms' Strike Fighter Dual Throttle system is one ugly muddy-funster. Though it can be used with any joystick it complements Suncoms' F15 stick. It's a large unit that takes up more desk space than any other throttle controller out there today.

Programming is identical to the F15 Strike Fighter stick, you press a button, record the keyboard stroke and assign it to a position. No additional software is required. For more info go to SUNCOM Throttle or to SUNCOM.