With a dynamic campaign, a fully integrated ground war, and sporting the latest technology in radar (APG 68) and avionics, F4 will simulate the newer Block 52 model F16.

In a nutshell, Falcon 4.0 is a Windows 95, multiplayer air-combat simulator set in the Korean peninsula, with a real-time war in progress in which you take the role of a single pilot in an F-16C Block 52. Even Andy Hollis will have to scramble to top F4! Look for it in Q1, 1998. Here is a cockpit shot...

System Requirements

According to the design team, there is good news and bad news about system requirements. The bad news is that your old 486 just won't cut it. By the time you get Windows 95 and all its drivers running, there just isn't enough performance left for a serious simulation. SH has looked long and hard at the huge range of computer performance in the marketplace and decided that to meet people's expectations for F4, they had to take advantage of the state of the art.

The good news is that they DO take advantage of the state of the art. We've made every effort to build a scaleable engine, but to get things looking right, you'll need a 120MHz Pentium with a strong 3-D hardware accelerator or a 166MHz Pentium with a good conventional video card. Part of this requirement comes from the graphics, but F4 will also have the most complete campaign and simulation engines in the business, and they both take CPU power to run.

Both the terrain and objects for F4 are all new. The designers placed cutting-edge performance into the engine from the start. Both software-only and hardware-accelerated graphics are supported by the simulation. The one surprise might be that, although F4 is running under Windows 95, it will not use Direct3D. SH simply couldn't get the performance and quality needed out of the system. Instead they have built on previous work by Intel and come up with their own graphics engine which produces excellent image quality and performance. F4 will ship with support for 3-D cards including those with chips built by 3Dfx, Rendition, Cirrus Logic, ATI and S3. As more hardware is coming out all the time and discussions are ongoing, this list is likely to evolve and grow. SH is watching the online news groups, so let them know which boards you're interested in seeing supported.

This project has been a long time in coming, but it's all the little details that make F4 much more than just another knock off F-16 sim. So until you see the handiwork on the shelves, know that the team will be slaving away to get the finishing touches on the flight experience we've all been waiting for.

Networking Options

Falcon 4.0 will support at least four different kinds of networking. There will be modem support and direct connection for two players, as well as local area network support for multiple players. F4 will also be available on Total Entertainment Network (TEN) for multiplayer Internet play. Modem and direct connect will work for two people, but network play will be limited only by your network and computer speed. Based on our experiences with Top Gun: Fire at Will, over 30 people should be able to play over Thin-net. TEN could support hundreds of players in each world.

Networking is designed into the game play. For example, say you're in the middle of planning a critical campaign strike when your friend Bob calls and wants to fly with you. Easy! Just hit the Comms icon on the toolbar, select Bob's name from the dialog list (assuming you have already created a configuration entry for Bob) and hit "Connect." The chat box (with voice transmission capability if your sound card supports it) will pop up with Bob in it. Now drag "Bob" into an aircraft, and you're set to fly the mission together. You and Bob can choose to fly as wingmen, in different flights in the same package or on entirely different missions.

Mission Planning

All players in a mission can assist with the mission planning (or one player can be designated to do it all). Any changes will be updated on the mission planner as they occur. The planning system allows additional flights of aircraft to be requested for a package in case there aren't enough slots for everyone who wants to fly. (This is subject to available resources, of course, and any added aircraft won't be out performing other missions.) With the chat mechanism, the flight crews can discuss the mission and the plans until everything is just right or it's time to take off.

Tactical Engagement

In Tactical Engagement (Falcon 4.0's equivalent to Red Flag), players can create their own missions and fly them either cooperatively or competitively (since F-16s can be assigned to any team). In addition, Dogfight (head-to-head) allows players to quickly and easily set up multi-fighter dogfights. In Dogfight, up to four teams of four aircraft can duke it out. Setup options support limitations on the types and number of missiles, computer wingmen if desired and a reentry option which will keep the fight going for as long as you can take it. The results of a single or series of Dogfights can be saved as a text file for easy reporting back to the Dogfight ladder.

Air to Air Combat

For air-to-air combat, you will have at your disposal a gun, AIM-9s, AIM-120s and the radar to go with them. Radar modes include RWS, ACM (20x30, Vertical Search and boresight), VS and TWS. These are coupled to the HUD to provide the EEGS, LCOS and gun snake -- as well as missile dynamic launch zones. At the time of the E3 demo, two MFDs (multifunction displays) were available, with and without a cockpit display. This means that in the final product, if having just the MFD on the screen bothers you, you will be able to have a full working cockpit. But if you only want to see the MFDs, you can do it that way as well.

The MFDs were capable of displaying the radar, RWR (Radar Warning Receiver), Stores Management System or the HUD. The full cockpit view also included a working RWR. One system also had a Hercules monochrome graphics display attached, and you could put one of the MFDs there. Rounding out the system were ThrustMaster's F-16 FLCS and TQS, with full HOTAS support.

Padlock views

At E3 one possible padlock view was demoed. The view is based on a system developed for the U.S. Air Force back in 1992. While the system is not realistic in that you won't find it in any production aircraft, it has been tested in well over 1,000 sorties flown against a full-view domed simulator and has been proven to compensate for the tunnel vision a computer monitor gives you.

History aside, here is a description of the system. When a padlocked object is within your normal field of view (that is, on the screen), you see nothing unusual. As the object leaves your field of view, it is replaced by a boxed image of what you would see if you were actually looking at it. The position of the box around your screen gives you the maneuver plane that the object is in. The plane is defined by the center of the HUD and the box. The box also includes various cues to help you determine the actual position and orientation of the object.

Having that description out of the way, this is only one of the padlock views that will be available. F4 will also include the Falcon 3.0-type of padlock and a scrollable cockpit. F4 will be responsive to different preferences.

Other notable things about the E3 demo include three different hardware configurations. The first setup was a Pentium 166 with 32MB RAM and a Number Nine Motion 771 video card. There were two machines set up like this. People liked the display and the feel of flight. The second system was the same except that the computer had Intel's MMX extensions built in, which improved the frame rate about 30%.

The third setup used a 3DFX hardware accelerator board to draw the image. This system ran at over 20 frames per second, with bi-linear interpolation on the textures. It was truly impressive. Unfortunately, we were unable to show the cockpit on this system (3dfx has since defined a hardware function within their chipset specifically for the cockpit!) which is maybe how the rumors about having only pop-up windows got started.

To show the multiplayer capability of Falcon 4.0, all four systems were networked together. Typically there were two solo players, and a 1v1 (one-on-one) going on, but we did occasionally set up three- and four-way competitions.

The Sim Core and Avionics

For Falcon 4.0, the simulation core has been completely rewritten. Taking the best parts of the logic from Falcon 3.0 and extending it, we have come up with the new and improved simulation core. The simulation core includes air and ground AI for tactical engagements, avionics modeling, weapons modeling and other aircraft systems modeling.

A lot of work has gone into upgrading the avionics. As you may remember, Falcon 3.0 simulated a Block 15 A model F-16. Falcon 4.0 will simulate the newer Block 52 model. This includes the new APG-68 radar and the HARM Targeting System (HTS). The new radar will give you better detection capabilities and better cluster resolution, letting you know if that blip you are tracking is one aircraft or a whole flight. The HTS will let you take on the F-16's new Wild Weasel role.

The APG-68 simulation gives you complete control over the radar. You choose the azimuth and elevation scan, the number of bars, the search range and the Doppler notch size. This will be important as you try to sort out the new AI tactics which include altitude, elevation and azimuth splits. To help you maintain your situational awareness, you will be able to tell your wingmen which way to point their radars (scan commands) and the intraflight data modem will let you see what they see.

The Block 52 model is also simulated in DIs recent F16 Fighting Falcon. Not only does this model have color MFDs, it also has LANTIRN capabilities. For information on the F16 Block 52 go to F16FF.

Of course, your wingmen will also understand about new tactics, so the BVR (Beyond Visual Range) air battle should get interesting. The radar also includes air-to-ground modes including Ground Moving Target and Ground Map, with and without Doppler Beam Sharpening, for those mud-moving missions.

At your disposal, you will have a full complement of stores that you can load as you see fit (within weight, carriage and supply limits). The stores will include Sparrows, Sidewinders, AMRAAMs, Mavericks, HARMS, GBUs, CBUs, rockets, fuel tanks and ECM pods. The radar and HUD work together to give you all of the cues needed to properly deploy these weapons. For air-to-air, you get the standard seeker and DLZ (Dynamic Launch Zone) symbology or your choice of EEGS (funnel), LCOS (Lead Computing Optical Sight) or snake for gunnery. Air-to-ground includes CCIP (Continuously Computed Impact Point), CCRP (Continuously Computed Releas Point), Dive/Toss and Strafe.

A great deal of effort is going into "suspension of disbelief," to make one feel immersed in the simulation. You will be able to hear the radio calls of flights around you (provided you're on the right frequency). The CAPs and interceptor flights which you encounter launch from an air base and will be tracked by AWACS for you. Depending on the mission you select, you can depend on AWACS for threat vectors, target calls and steering to a tanker if you need one.

Graphics

The following was written by Scott Randolph, Senior Graphics Engineer for SH..

It is always an exhilarating experience to "slip the surly bonds" and soar over the countryside in my own plane. My biggest goal for the graphics in this game is to achieve that same sense of wonder. I've fooled myself a few times lately with the prototypes, so I think we're on the right track.

Falcon 4.0 has a lot to live up to, and we all know it. What we've got in store for you is nothing short of spectacular. We've posted some screen shots, and they're nice. The thing to remember, though, is that the real game's terrain will be flowing smoothly by as you fly one of the most realistic flight models available anywhere, and the scenes won't be JPEG compressed into oblivion.

When I started on this project, Flight Unlimited was just hitting the shelves. We were all impressed by its ground-breaking realism, but knew we had to do better. We needed to build a world 2,500 times larger with much greater visual variety and still retain the same level of realism and fit on one CD-ROM. A year and a half later, we've accomplished that and much more.

Falcon 4.0 will run in "high color" mode (that is, 65,000 simultaneous colors). In addition, both the setup screens and the flight simulation have been optimized for high-resolution display modes (800x600 and 640x480 respectively). This will allow us to provide unprecedented image quality and, just as importantly, variety. In the past, games have been limited to 256 colors for entire scenes. The result is often "cartoonish" looking environments. With thousands of colors to work with, our artists have been free to accomplish wonders.

We started out with satellite photographs and elevation data covering all of Korea. This gave us good-looking terrain, but we wanted more. The satellite images just weren't crisp enough. We went out and found hundreds of aerial photographs from all over the country. These we cut up, processed and rearranged to supplement the satellite data throughout the map. The result is a startlingly realistic pilot's-eye view of the world with excellent detail no matter where you fly on the map. Those of you who've flown NovaLogic's F-22 Lightning II game may worry that Falcon 4, with only one theater, won't have enough variety in our scenery. Not to fear.

Unlike F-22, Falcon 4.0 will have a full-sized realistic map so that you can fly from one end of Korea to the other and see all the variety of terrain you would expect as you pass over rivers, lakes, cities, forests, farmland and mountains. The scenery is good enough that it's fun to simply fly around and look.

We've put a great deal of effort into ensuring that you do get to see the terrain; and lots of it. Few things are more frustrating to me than flight simulations that seem to think the entire world is shrouded in dense fog all the time. We've certainly got haze and fog in Falcon 4, but on good days, you should be able to see major terrain features 50km or more into the distance.

Of course, nobody can see an airplane or a tank that far away, but you can certainly see the ground! We simply won't tolerate mountains "popping" up in front of you at the last minute. We've developed a "level of detail" system which reduces terrain detail in the distance smoothly so that important terrain features are preserved, while subtle details fade out to maintain performance.

Oh, and by the way, targets don't "pop" up either. If you can get a strong enough radar return, you can see targets out to the 80-mile limit of the F-16's radar scope. Since we've got a real campaign, we know what every vehicle in the game is doing all the time. If you decide to take an alternate route to your target or ignore your target entirely, that's fine. There will still be an interesting world with a war on out there.

As was mentioned previously, Falcon 4 has been designed from the beginning to be a multiplayer game with a real-time campaign running all the time. One consequence of this is that war goes on 24 hours a day (in game time, of course). We've put a lot of effort into making sure that the night-fighting experience is just as intense as the daylight missions.

A lot of little things go into making this happen. When the sun goes down, it stains the western sky crimson. The city lights begin to come on, and as night sets in, the stars emerge. If you're lucky, it isn't a moonless night, and you'll get some additional lighting in the target area when the moon rises. You'll have to keep an eye out for AAA and SAMs, but at night that job is a little easier thanks to the muzzle flash and rocket

I've talked a lot about the terrain now, but what about the 3-D objects in the world? We've gone all out in this department as well. We've got several hundred air, sea and land objects from the U.S., South Korean, North Korean, Russian and Chinese inventories in the game. Each object has had its own textures individually drawn to capture specific details. The objects are dynamically lit by the sun and are Gouraud-shaded for a smooth appearance.

We've built in hundreds of special behaviors like retractable landing gear, traversing and elevating turrets, rotating antennae and moving control surfaces to give each object a life of its own. We want to give you that deep-down feeling in your guts when you look out the window and see all the AAA guns tracking you.

Dynamic Campaign Engine

The following is by Kevin Klemmick, Dynamic Campaign Engineer

The Campaign is literally the heart of Falcon 4.0. It was the first code to be written for the project, and every aspect of Falcon 4.0 deals with the Campaign in some way. However, when people talk about Falcon 4.0's Campaign, they're generally referring to the "Dynamic Campaign" in which the player joins a squadron and engages in a virtual war.

Over the last few years, "Dynamic Campaign" has become such a buzzword in the flight sim community that the term has lost most of its meaning. Since Falcon 4.0's "Dynamic Campaign" surpasses the current flight sims, our in-house title, "Virtual Universe," is more appropriate. In Falcon 4.0, there are tens of thousands of tanks, APCs, aircraft, ships and military personnel attempting to carry out orders from all levels within the military's organizational system including their battalion, flight lead or task force commander, brigade or package lead, division or squadron commander, and commander-in-chief. All of this action is happening in real time, and you can jump into it at any time without experiencing abstracted troop movements and limited objects.

When designing the Campaign, my goal was to create a fully populated world that reacted not only to actions made by the player, but also reacted to chance occurrences made by the computer-operated pilots. I wanted a game that would run in real time like a real war and had the capacity to support dozens if not hundreds of players.

My first step was to determine a way to run artificial intelligence on tens of thousands of entities simultaneously on an average PC, while still allowing enough processor time to run the graphics at a reasonable frame rate. The obvious solution was to lower the amount of entities that required thinking. We decided to use aggregated units and installations.

An aggregated unit consists of a collection of vehicles or squads (between one and a few dozen) that operate together. Generally, Army units consist of battalions, Air Force units consist of flights and Navy units consist of task forces. These "units" receive orders as a whole, and they move and fight as a unit as long as no one is around to view them. When a player approaches an aggregated unit, the component vehicles are added to the sim and move and fight in view of the player. When a player moves away from these vehicles, the remaining pieces are placed back into the aggregated unit.

Similarly, installations (or "objectives" as I call them) refer to a collection of buildings that have a similar purpose (i.e., an air base has a runway, some hangers, fuel tanks, etc.). These buildings are placed when a player nears them and are placed back into their parent objective when the player moves away.

Since these objectives respond directly to a player's actions, a "player bubble" forms around any player in the Campaign as the aggregated units temporarily de-aggregate and interact with the player. At the same time, any and all damage inflicted by the player is recorded on the aggregated unit or objective; therefore, damage is permanent (or relatively permanent since the enemy can make repairs). So, if you decide to drop a 1,000-pound bomb on Seoul's Olympic Stadium, you'll get to view your handiwork whenever you fly by the bomb site in the future.

More importantly, the vehicles are all performing tasks given to them by a commander and are, therefore, part of a larger plan rather than randomly scattered encounters. For example, if you shot down several enemy SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) aircraft, the SAM (Surface to Air Missile) sites they were tasked to suppress would still be operational. Therefore, the enemy bombers that were tasked to fly over those SAMs may have to abort or take additional losses. Additionally, the enemy commander would probably end up having to task additional SEAD aircraft to do the task the first wave failed to do, creating a whole chain of effects.

Of course, your commander is working under similar constraints--attempting to prioritize targets, analyze threats and determine timing to build the best possible ATO (Air Tasking Order). Your commander assigns aircraft to strike packages, adds SEAD or escort aircraft if deemed necessary and even may add BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) aircraft to verify the target's status. Meanwhile, DCA (Defensive Counter Air) aircraft are assigned to keep the enemy out of the player's airspace; AWACS, JSTAR and tanker aircraft are assigned to support positions; FAC (Forward Air Control) and CAS (Combat Air Support) aircraft are assigned to the frontline's hot spots, and so on. As an F-16 pilot, you can view the entire ATO as well as your squadron's role within it and choose to fly any mission your squadron is tasked to fly.

Despite this ability, however, a game isn't quite a game if you are just "one" of hundreds of pilots and "one" of thousands of military personnel fighting in a virtual war. Sure, you can choose all the important missions and fly several more missions than a real pilot could, but even a successful player isn't going to have much effect on tens of thousands of enemy tanks. So, we decided to give your side a little "bonus" when you do well and a "penalty" when you do poorly. Basically, computer-controlled responses get a little better or worse depending on your performance. For example, if you successfully shoot up an armored column, additional strikes versus that column will be more effective, while the soldiers on the ground who fight that column will do better. This systemic response makes it possible for a player to turn around a potentially bad situation.

Since the Campaign is operating in real time and the timing of the player squadron's flights is critical to the outcome of the war, we ran into a problem deciding what to do with the downtime between flights. In a single-player game, it's easy enough to compress time, essentially advance time until the player's takeoff time. However, Falcon 4.0's Campaign was designed as a multiplayer Campaign, and it's just not possible to have one player advance time while another is lining up for a bombing run. To solve this problem, we've allowed you to jump into any aircraft in your squadron (that is, assuming another player isn't already controlling it). You have the option of waiting until a particular flight's takeoff time and, therefore, you are able to make changes to the flight's flight plan and weapon loadout. Or, you can jump into an airplane currently in flight and join the action immediately.

The multiplayer aspect of the Campaign is what truly fascinates me and is something MicroProse is dedicated to expand. Since the Campaign was not written around a single aircraft or vehicle, a player's ability to fly another aircraft, operate a tank or SAM battery is simply a matter of additional flight models, avionics and artwork. So, at first, you may only be able to fly F-16s cooperatively against a determined computer enemy, but you won't have to wait too long before there are player-controlled MiG-29s, Su-27s, F/A-18s and even more out there as well.

Ultimately, we hope to run an Internet server so that thousands of players from all over the world can jump into the cockpits of a wide variety of different vehicles and play in a single game, and maybe someday even have a "real" human plan one side's air strikes as well as ground offensives. If we are able to globalize Falcon 4.0, then suddenly this "Virtual Universe" will become a lot more real!