Falcon 4.0: Allied Force – Part 2 Page 20

By SimHQ on June 29, 2005 in _air5, hide

The TE “Death Match” is a great utility for both new F4 pilots and I’m guessing that multiplayer squadrons will have a blast with this capability.

One other thing I’d like to mention is that I missed the instrument lighting control in Part I of the review. The electro-luminescent lettering glows nicely in the night pit, but there is a second control that illuminates the analog gauges and I left that out and it really is a nice effect!

It’s also worth mentioning that the aircraft external lights have been reworked to show a soft glow as opposed to a point of light. This is true of the landing lights as well and they look really nice. Again, a ton of small improvements really make F4:AF something special.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given the veterans something to be excited about and given the new Falcon drivers some insight into why we love this series so much. You can see the campaign engine has incredible depth and I’ve only just touched on some of the bigger parts. Once you see all the independent actions going on around you it will be very hard to fly non-dynamic missions again without thinking about the F4 campaign design.

It isn’t all roses of course. There are still some problems. Although path finding and routing appears to have been addressed, there are still occasionally units fording oceans in some places. It appeared that this was only happening near small coastal islands where the AI didn’t detect water between the small gaps between the islands perhaps. I would also like to see a map-scale that zooms in and out with the map in the planning stages. There is a map scale at the bottom of the map, but trying to adjust the reference after zooming in is a bit difficult. I don’t know if it is possible to put one permanently on the screen that adjusts the scale according to zoom level, but it would be very nice for roughing out distances.

There is a little bit of jerkiness to AI pilot flying occasionally. Particularly when they look like they are changing modes from offensive to defensive, the maneuvers are sometimes not exactly smooth and I’ve seen occasions where nose bobbing occurs. Nothing dramatic and it only happens occasionally, but when you are eavesdropping on another flight it would be nice to see them bank and turn like normal pilots all the time.

I did have some trouble in one flight trying to figure out how to get AWACS communication. There was an AWACS up, and he was giving out calls to everyone else, but he wouldn’t answer my queries. The briefing stated he would be on Channel 1, but using the ICP I could switch to Channel 1, but I don’t think it was actually “entering” Channel 1. I’m a bit green on my radio usage though, so there is a very good chance it was user error, not a bug. There are many options for radioing packages, tankers, AWACS, etc., and it would be very easy to do this wrong.

In my many, many hours of testing F4:AF I’m pleased to report that I have only had one CTD. I was attempting to switch views via the CTRL-8 key to cycle through enemy aircraft and I got a bit quick on the key. After the hundreds of key presses I’ve made over the past few days one CTD is certainly forgivable and doesn’t imply any instability.

I am a bit curious about Lead Pursuit’s position on ALT-Tabbing out of the sim. As long as I’m in the planning menus I can task switch all day and not have a problem. Once in the sim and flying however, I CTD almost every time if I attempt to task switch while flying. I’ve tried every permutation possible to prevent the CTD (pausing first, matching screen resolutions, etc.,) but am convinced that task switching isn’t a good idea.

Other than these few things I’ve been enjoying F4:AF immensely and I do think it is a great step forward. And it does look good too. I’ve seen comments floating around about how F4:AF is such a drastic step backward in the graphics department, but honestly this sim looks very good. The atmospheres are very good, the terrain textures are very good and I think they have made the right decisions based on stability and preserving the best interests of the F4 community.

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Watch for Part 3 of our Falcon 4.0: Allied Force Review coming soon.

Read Part 1 of our Falcon 4.0: Allied Force Review here.

Read our Interview with Lead Pursuit’s Executive Producer, Joel Bierling here.

System Specs – BeachAV8R