Falcon 4.0 LAN Report II by Dan "Crash" Crenshaw and Jeff "Rhino" Babineau
	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!!! Click to continue		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. Go to Page Four
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