iMagic games

Interactive Magic is making some interesting moves lately. While in the past, they have basically relied on DI to handle developing their air combat simulation games for them, their newest games show more in-house effort than before, especially their biggest baby, iF-22. iMagic has actually been rounding their staff with a substantial number of real pilots, both civilian and military. This is an interesting development, as it seems that they may now have a strong and steady flow of input from pilots at all phases of game design rather that the typical "tweaking" sessions at the last part of the game development like many companies do.

iF-22

Another point of interest in the game is the MFD's. Looking at the simplified interface of the MFD's in iF-22, one might easily be lead to think that the game designers chose to go "lite" in the avionics department. Indeed little could be further from the truth. A look into the "F-22 Raptor Special Issue" of Flight International revealed that the layouts of the MFD displays on iF-22 are a nearly perfect duplicate of those in the actual jet.

As it turns out, Lockheed has placed so much effort into using computers to control and simplify some of the more difficult aspects of equipment management that the information displayed on the MFD's results in a kind of situational awareness display taken from the collection of various data sources. Instead of specifically managing the radar all the time, the computer takes data from the LPI radar, AWACS data net, and so forth to create and display a complete picture of the situation rather than technical equipment readouts. Additionally, all the buttons on the outside of the MFD's are clickable to allow realistic management of the displays - minus some of the more technical display screens, of course.

Like iF-16 and Hind (to a lesser extent) iF-22 will support a bitmapped cockpit in its padlock. The HUD display is very carefully modeled, not faking anything at all in its representation. In fact the only significant part of the F-22 missing from the simulation are the secondary CNI displays - as it turns out putting them in would have taken away more of the windscreen view than it was worth. It's interesting to see all the MFD's and various HUD displays all tracking and reporting on the same target simultaneously. Even with the F-22's simplified style one can feel a bit of information overload.

Dogfights and missile combat look good so far, playing out graphically like you would expect, and the actual gameplay looks very promising from the glimpse we had. Those details will have to wait for a proper review, which we'll bring as soon as possible.

M ost likely you've heard about the dynamic campaign. It looks like it will have an interesting flow, both weighting according to mission success and opportunity strikes. One feature that may make it into the game (that we're hoping for) is resource management. As cool as super weapons are, it's more entertaining (and more realistic) if you can't always pick the easiest smart weapons on every mission.

IF-22 is iMagic's first totally in-house made flight-sim, and between the dynamic campaign, accurate avionics, and incredible terrain graphics they're clearly off to an exciting start.

iPanzer '44

iPanzer '44 is still in the very early stages of development, so it should hardly be surprising that at this point it has extremely strong resemblences to iM1A2 in almost every respect. Nevertheless, iMagic has some interesting news about the development of the game.

iPanzer '44 will allow you to drive any of the three most famous tanks of WWII: The Sherman, the Panther, and the T-34. As this might imply, you'll be able to fight on either the Eastern or Western fronts of the war. The current version on display was basically a modified engine from iM1A2 at the moment, but there are some substantial differences.

ISince infantry played such a major role in the battles of time - as tanks were certainly not invulnerable to infantry attacks - infantry units in iPanzer will be fully articulated polygon models that will have distinct resemblances to those in Hind - and like Hind can operate in groups or solo. An enourmous change from the "paper target" infantry in iM1A2.

While the game isn't going to have the fancy laser sighting of iM1A2, it will have manually controlled battlesights that can be used to get rough range estimations and can be adusted to compensate for various shell trajectories. It's certainly going to be a bit more of the old "dead reckoning" style over the digital equipment modeling. Also the game will carefully model the differences between the major tanks in the war in virtually every respect: from gun performance to armor styles, mobility, and shell behavior. WWII junkies should be in for quite a treat!

Another new twist to the game is that it will support forested areas. You can't have a proper tank simulation in Germany without forests, and iPanzer delivers. Currently the forests are somewhat abstracted - being large blocks of area that cannot be entered or seen through at all. These sections might get broken up some in the final version to allow at least some degree on penetrability. We'll see what direction it takes.

Finally, a great relief to many, iPanzer is almost definitely going to support the 3dfx cards. That will help considerably in boosting the graphics speed and quality - finally blending graphic quality and speed with the detailed gameplay of iM1A2.

Warbirds 2.0

Warbirds 2.0 is going to be a very familiar playground for many fans. That may disturb some people, but the way the game has progressed should leave little room for complaint. The downside is that Warbirds isn't going the route of the typical 3dfx supporting sim these days - in fact the engine has changed very little in the graphics department.

The rest, though, is great news. Warbirds 2.0 has taken the route of such popularly acclaimed titles as Su-27 and A-10 Cuba! in that instead of doing heavy texture mapping, objects have extremely detailed non-textured polygons. Much of the time there, the person demonstrating the game would take strafing runs at a convoy of ships. Not only do the ships have wonderful detail on their hulls and superstructure, but the framerate of the game was continuously running obscenely smooth. The designers obviously took a careful course between gameplay and glitz, and it has resulted in a very good balance of the two.

Things get more interesting. As it turns out, the obscene frame rate wasn't because iMagic was doing the demo at E3. In fact, all the playing they were doing was over the internet at 28.8 to their server back home - they were playing live. Having played my share of internet multiplayer games, I found the degree of continuity in the game quite surprising.

What is most interesting, however, is that WB2 now supports live voice communications over the internet while in the middle of a fight. I'm sure many of you have tried sending messages to a teammate unsuccessfully in combat before, and no doubt a good number of readers have probably experimented with internet telephony as well. Both of these have been fairly unsatusfactory in general and had considerable difficulties with bandwidth issues. So it was with great surprise to find that the radio sqawking I was hearing wasn't a sampled sound but a live wingman flying from his home in some other part of the country. Quite frankly, I was expecting the game to loose synchronization every time someone spoke considering the difficulties of sharing bandwidth for game networking *and* real-time voice communications.

while we discussed other enticing details such as the possibility of having a bomber man an entire crew and so on, just seeing the game running without a hitch as radio announcements flew in and out really represented a technological and gameplay improvement for an online game that makes 3d card support seem hardly important by comparison.

iF-16

Our guide dove into a valley and scooted along the bottom in the game, "Being an A-6 driver, I like to bring it in down low." In this case, being low also served to show off what the engine was doing well, which was giving a sense of speed and altitude over the valley floor. His engine exhaust was causing a lot of light refraction in a very nice effect reminiscent of EF2000, but it had a much more natural look. (I couldn't help but think what a graphical coup it would have been for one of the more recent helicopter sims to model the exhaust refraction effect cascading down from the engine exhaust of a chopper sim.) The afterburner also continued the look and possessed several stages as the better sims have come to model lately.

What's interesting to see is some of the new direction iF-16 is taking from its predecessors. Models in the previous games of the series have always been very static. The "Viper" in iF-16 will have a tremendous attention to detail and boast fully articulated and animated control surfaces. It's not clear what the final polygon count on the jet will be, but it certainly will be considerable.

To give a better idea of the effect actual pilot input has had on the game, I asked the pilot to pull a vertical stall. He explained that the physics modeling was not yet finished so as to caution me not to expect too much but went ahead with my request. Even at this stage, the flight model seems to be doing pretty well, but what really caught my attention was that engine lag was carefully modeled.

On a lot of these powerful fighter jets, the factors between rotating mass and engine management hardware and software tend to create an engine system that takes time to respond to throttle inputs. Early generation jet fighters had some serious problems in being unresponsive in the throttle department, and even the F-16 (which boasts a "fast response" engine) still has a very real throttle response lag compared to most sims that requires a bit of planning to master. While this may seem rather simple, it really helps create the impression that the throttle is controlling the F-16's *engine* and not merely managing its velocity - just another aspect of the suspension of disbelief that pilots are helping to bring to the mix. As far as the campaign and mission play goes, it looks like it will fall somewhere between Hind and Tornado. Exactly where will it fall along the scale isn't clear yet, but iMagic does understand the popularity of the degree of command and control Tornado's mission planner allowed.

"Wild Bill"

On a side note, I also got to meet "Wild Bill" at iMagic's booth, which was an interesting experience. Bill Stealey has quite a "gung-ho" attitude, so much so that you can't help but wonder if he's got just a hint of U.S. Marines in his blood. If my experience with him at E3 is at all representative of his work at iMagic, then I can't imagine a dull moment at the office!

W e talked about some of the issues with multiplayer gaming in a typical simulation. My position was that I felt that as desirable as it may be, playing a simulation cooperatively is more difficult than in a deathmatch, because one of the players is always tempted to goof off rather than take the game seriously when cooperating, but in a deathmatch your opponent really wants to blast you and thus is automatically more serious.

Bill's response was rather interesting, and if you've had difficulties organizing co-op games yourself you might find it quite helpful. Basically the idea is this: Somebody has to be the leader, and the others must be willing to follow the leader. To avoid conflict, players switch being commander each game. Merely going into the game as a team without some kind of hierarchy results in chaos much too easily. If the players can agree to this arrangement, it tends to work out well. Personally, I can hardly wait for the first good excuse to try it out!