Yesterday we spoke to Dana Henry, PR representative for
Microprose products at Hasbro. Dana was confident that F4 would go gold
yesterday.
However, at an early morning IRC chat session, Gilman Louie
and others on the F4 team confirmed that Falcon did not go gold on
Friday. But they were only a whisker away, looking at potential
candidates even while the chat continued. As a result, we're pretty
confident that F4 will indeed go gold this weekend for a shipment late
next week.
In the meantime, here are a few shots from the last beta within the Tactical Engagement module.
Mission Builder from the last beta. Blue menu is a graphics glitch.
The TACTICAL ENGAGEMENT module will allow us to build our own
full campaigns. I've had a chance to spend a few moments in the module
the last couple of days, and it looks like Microprose is giving us what
will be the most advanced tool ever released to the public for mission
design! Here are some of Dan Crenshaw's previous comments:
The Tactical Engagement module allows players to set up a mission,
with full direction of the ground forces, orders, routes etc. It allows
the players to set up the opposition’s forces similarly. Once the
mission begins, the AI takes over and the war begins. Anything you are
not flying will get run by the AI. Even if you set up successive
missions and don't get home in time to fly the next one, it will take
off and fly the mission.
Of course you can always hop out of your current flight, and into
the new one whenever you like (except during egress or landing, though
you can leave these flights if you wish and the AI will take over). Now
you and your AI or human cooperative multi-player pilots must perform
your tasks to help ensure victory. If you are very bold, you can fly
low and watch what the forces are doing and even witness a land battle.
Mission Builder from the last beta..
Furthermore, as is becoming an industry standard, you will be able
to make your mission and send it to your friends to see how well they
do. Or make an ACMI tape and let them watch the action (tapes are 100K
per minute).
The flexibility of this module will allow you to do anything from
create quick and easy training missions or short sorties, to developing
a whole campaign setting. You can also work off the base of established
missions to create your own. The AI will work with or against you in an
intelligent manner.
While I'm fairly sure that you can't alter the position of cities and
airfields, etc. in Korea, you can actually develop an entire campaign
setting. If you design larger scale objectives that take many missions
to complete, you have a new campaign. If the goals are substantial
enough and the forces pitted against one another well matched, you have
created an entirely new F4 campaign which you can fly on your own or
cooperatively with your friends.
Success in the engagement you create will depend on meeting the
objectives you assign. Like the campaigns supplied by MPS on release of
F4, the missions run in real time and will continue to play out even
when you are not in an aircraft.
Add Battalion
In the Campaign
Once you watch a campaign and start to play with the Tactical
Engagement section, you will quickly realize you can create a war of
the same magnitude as the campaign if you were so inclined. You can use
TE to set up competitions with Win Conditions. You can use it to train,
or just learn or test tactics (both air and ground). You can make the
missions as easy or as difficult as you like, as cut and dried or
complex as you want. Solo or multi-player, cooperative or H2H, the
possibilities are virtually endless.
