An interview with Gilman Louie, Chairman of Microprose.

GL: It was really funny because we have a great deal of respect for the Su27 guys. In fact the president of Mindscape is a very good friend of mine who used to work for the Maxwells, who was basically the person responsible for buying my company a long time ago so that we could do the original Falcon. And you know, we laugh and we kid and talk a lot about Falcon and Su27. And it's always interesting to watch the debates online about who is the best.

But the guys on Falcon felt like, "Gee you know, we make very realistic flight models and we never get any credit for that. So they made an extra effort to make sure that all the flight model curves fit all the flight model curves of the declassified data we have for the F16.

And then they gave me a list of stuff!I thought when I was going up for the check ride that I was going to have some fun, but you know my workload was so heavy... I had to do all these things for the programmers. I had to see how fast the accelerations were, take a look at the flight performance curves, the deceleration curves, look at the rudder impact. Poor Pete was going, "God! I take you up for this great ride and all you're doing in the back of the plane is working!" (laughs)

Let's talk about the weapons systems. Any surprises there for us?

GL: Surprises, no, but we've made a great effort to model the systems and tactics realistically. And you won't see any nukes because that would have too strong an effect on the campaign.

But in terms of general issues we also took great care to model the workload accurately. We wanted to model the workload of the pilot in the real F16.

For example, if you try to launch a Maverick in realistic settings you will spend most of your time looking down in your cockpit. And it will require you to spend a lot of time practicing so that you can use it in the campaign. The same with the LGB. Especially when there are MiGs and the whole world trying to stop you from hitting your target!

What online capabilities does F4 offer the guy with the normal 28.8 connection?

GL : Dogfight will be straightforward. He can go in there with three or four players with no trouble. He will have a problem in campaign, and that's the thing we want to work on with the patches, F4 requires a lot of bandwidth for the campaign. If he gets two player up he'll be lucky in the current version, without having ISDN or some kind of LAN.

But my goal over the next thirty days is to solve that problem so that people can play 2 to 4 players in campaign. Not making any promises right now but I think we have a good hold on what we need to get done. But there are so many entities going back and forth in the world, and we have to tune that.

Will that include kali?

GL: No, because we don't support IPX. But we have a team and all they are doing is multiplayer, so you will see leaps of improvement over the next sixty to ninety days.

Has F4 been tried with Roger Wilco or Battlefield Communicator for online voice?

GL: No, we ran out of testing time.

Tell us about the online war as it relates to joining and leaving. Is there still transparent joining and leaving of players in the war?

GL: Yes, if you come in you beam into an AI. And when you leave the AI takes over. We did implement a kind of invulnerability shield as you were beaming in so that people couldn't shoot you, before you have fully arrived in the world. But we want to do a bit of work on this, we may put a bit of a force field around you so that everybody knows that's what's happening. But the debate has been that with this approach everybody knows where to look for the new guys! (laughs) So.. we will test out the social problem here first.

On our forum you wrote that "campaign actions are different than instant action or tactical engagement sorties in which AI pilots never bug out." I assume that that means that AI pilots in short tactical engagements that we create with the TE module have more limited AI abilities. Does that also refer to mini campaigns created with Tactical Engagement?

GL: A couple of things. What you don't get access to in Tactical Engagement is some of Kevin's more sophisticated AI stuff, particularly on the ground. The tool is very hard to use that he uses to create the world. You can tell.. for example, two army units to run and take that city over there, and they will go off and do that. But they won't have the same sort of options that the dynamic generating unit in the campaign has access to.

So it doesn't understand the multiple strategic values of things other than what the player applies to it. There is no overarching doctrine for them to follow other than "you go here and take that." So Tactical Engagement will be relatively simplistic.. from OUR point of view. The average user will say, "wow, this is better than anything else out there in the market place." But what you won't get is the level of sophistication of 100,000 lines of code that is behind the war.

Click to continue . . .

Shots from the ground war.

At the AI level, Tactical Engagement which is multiple missions uses the same AI for the aircraft. If you do sorties, which is to design a single mission, then the AI "bug-out" code is turned off, because what a lot of players wanted to do is create a MiG 29 with guns only up against an F16. Well the AI in the campaign would go, "I've only got a gun, there is an F16 with a radar lock on me, I'm outa here!" The problem with that in the sortie design missions is that everyone would complain there is a bug in the game.

So what we did in sortie is say, "You never bug out til you die, or til you kill the enemy." We put that into the brain. It's kind of funny, even in dogfight… multiplayer dogfight or single player dogfight… and have like fifty planes in the air at one time. And make them guns only. So you hear these calls… "I'm outa here," or "RTB," that's the AI pilot wanting to go home. But the code says, "No, you can't go home," so the pilots stay in the fight. It's fun to watch in action view.

That reminds me, will we hear radio calls in action view?

GL: Yes, you'll hear the same calls you'll hear in the real aircraft. We also do distance cuing on the radio calls. So the farther away the call is from you, it will degrade in quality. This is pretty important when you hear fifty radio calls and you can't tell which one is talking to you because everyone is at the same volume level.

Yeh I've heard that. Excellent! All this contributes very nicely to situational awareness. One of the strengths of F4 is that this kind of attention to detail contributes to immersion.. the sense that you are in a real physical world.

GL: Yes. It's a very big product. And again, one of those things we said online…. I know there will be issues with this product, and that's one of the reasons we did the binders. We kept saying to ourselves, "Our most loyal fans are the ones who run out and buy the first version. But the first version is always, despite your best work, has the most issues.

So the marketing department and the development were sitting around and saying, "Can't we create a situation where we reward people for buying the first version?" And that's where the binder concept came out. Let's give them a binder, just like the real air force has, in which people can hot sheet in a new sheet, and they can download changes and additions. It's a cool feature, expensive for us to do, but it's our way of rewarding those who buy early. That led to a 200,000 run on the binders.

A very cool idea. Wouldn't be surprised to see it copied. Then again, if it's very expensive maybe not! But awesome idea for the loyal fans to be sure, to actually have an upgradeable manual. These guys are in for the long haul and I'm sure this is going to be greatly appreciated.

Kind of interesting, as I read the wish lists in our forum I find myself smiling. Many of the atmospheric type features people are asking for are already in F4, we just haven't had time to mention them all.

GL: I know! It's really satisfying to the engineers. They go, "Aha! I already got that!"

heheh! Thanks for your time Gilman. Are there any final comments you would like to make?

GL: Two things I'd like to say. One, players can go to combatsim.com as well as Falcon4.com. Falcon4.com will grow and will be a fully supported site. It's not set up so much for marketing as support and for people who need more information.

But they can get just as much information on your site because combatsim.com is one of the sites that we are going to fully support. We want to get people into places where we can get them all the information. Combatsim.com is the unofficial Falcon4 site, and falcon4.com will be the place for instructional information and patches.

Pete Bonnani writes a lot of columns, and other F16 pilots will contribute columns on Falcon4.com as well. This information will be interesting but also very useful to get the most out of Falcon 4, especially for campaign type missions.

The last thing is, I hope the users will be patient with us, it's a huge product, and we're going to be as responsive as humanly possible.

Yeah, I appreciate that. You guys have set a new standard for support, and Pete's writing is excellent. I've read the first piece and it's helpful. All the best, look forward to the growth of the F4 world.

Falcon 4.0 is produced by Gilman Louie and Steve Blackenship.

For more on F4 see our F4 Index