To: falcon3 (Falcon3 Mailing list) Reply-To: falcon3 (Falcon3 Mailing list) Errors-To: postmaster@onion.rain.com Precedence: bulk Bcc: falcon3-outgoing Subject: Falcon3 Digest V2 : I97 Falcon3 Digest Volume 2 : Issue 97 Thu Apr 15 20:55:45 PDT 1993 Compilation copyright (C) 1993 Jeff Beadles Send submissions to "falcon3@onion.rain.com" Send add/drop requests to "majordomo@onion.rain.com" Archives are available via ftp from onion.rain.com [147.28.0.161] Today's Topics: Re: Falcon3 Digest V2 : I95 tneff@mimiki.win.net (Tom Neff) 2-player allied Odd Terje Lundboe > If a plane is air worthy, why try to land at another base unless short >> on fuel? Maybe protection from bogeys by friendly SAM's, but in a tight >> situation planes are best off in the air, not on the ground. It sounds >> like a strange thing to code in. > >I think the only situation where they land at another base is when they >are low on fuel and can reach another friendly base. There may even be >other constraints such as current waypoint. Nevertheless, just try it. Shift-B until you hear "PIGEONS TO HOME PLATE" and then watch what your wingmen (and your own plane if you enable Autopilot) does. You will head for the NEAREST allied airfield, not the one you took off from. Note that this is one notch "past" just Shift-B'ing to your ordinary LAND waypoint, so maybe that's the diff. >> If a person is going to end the mission they might want to consider >> using Shft-H (return to base (if I recall)), then end the mission. > >Be VERY careful using this. My experience when using this and >bypassing waypoints 'til you get to the LAND waypoint is that the >pilots put blinders on and generally get beaten up pretty bad by >pursuing enemy pilots. Yes, this has nothing to do with Shift-H or Shift-B per se, it's just how computer controlled aircraft behave when the waypoint is LAND. The major problem with Shift-H is that it's permanent: you can't change your mind after issuing it. >I like to place one CAP or ESCORT waypoint on >top of my base to keep my wingmen on their toes on the way back. I like this too, except I prefer an INTERCEPT a few miles from the base. That helps clear away last minute 'randoms' who jump you at home plate. The most important thing, though, is to have the waypoint immediately before LAND (wherever it is) be a fighting one. That way, if a flight is cruising in to LAND and gets jumped, you can just hit Shift-V and goose everyone back into fighting trim. Then when the threat is dealt with, Shift-B again to resume landing. Oh, the tricks... - -- Tom Neff tneff@mimiki.win.net ------------------------------- From: Odd Terje Lundboe Subject: 2-player allied We've been playing 2-player allied for a couple of days and have run into some problems: 1) Falcon doesn't seem to save our campaign. If we exit the game during a mission the campaign restarts the next time. Surely we aren't supposed to play through a whole campaign in one go? 2) We're not allowed to return to the War Room once the campaign has started, short of exiting the game or rebooting the machine. 3) We're not able to change the other members of our flight(s). Has anybody else encountered these problems? We're playing v.3.01.1 on 386SX's with 2 MB RAM over ethernet. //// Odd Terje Lundboe // oddt@stud.cs.uit.no / /// Dept. of Comp. Science/IMR // // // University of Tromsoe // Phone: +47 83 44571 /// / N-9037 Tromsoe, NORWAY // Fax: +47 83 44580 //// ------------------------------- From: u9020438@athmail1.causeway.qub.ac.uk Subject: Re: Falcon3 Digest V2 : I89 RE : Misc Tips By Andrew Colfelt. What Jeff acurrately describes here, is in fact a 'Roll-Off-The-Top'. An Immelman is similar, except when passing through the vertical, you roll so that when you go over the top you are facing in another direction. You then 'Roll-Off-The-Top' as before, and evade &/or Kill as required. John. ------------------------------- From: sean.kerns@sdrc.com (Sean R. Kerns) Subject: Lousy Software =PC?? Gerry Roston states: "p.s. As I insinuated above, this failing is not unique to SH, but rather to the entire PC software industry." While it is true that Falcon has some bugs, as have a lot of games I have played, I don't think it's fair to imply that buggy software is endemic only to PC-based development. I've encountered plenty of bugs in software developed on and for work stations and mainframes, and in fact, the Sun Sparcstation release of a particular CAD software was buggier than the PC port of the same package. As someone who earns his living testing software, I can tell you that PC software is not the only software with bugs. If you had said that SH had lousy QA, I would have had no argument. But I don't think that the poor quality has anything to do with PC's. The blame rests on the company, not the platform. Sean Kerns (aka Snake) sean.kerns@sdrc.com ------------------------------- From: cisko@d0tokensun.fnal.gov (Greg Cisko) Subject: Re: Lousy software >From: Gerry Roston >Subject: Lousy software >I have been playing OFT regularly for a couple of weeks now, and you >know what... I am rather disappointed with the poor quality of >program. Not that it isn't fun, but it is a typical PC program - >quirky and buggy. If the code I wrote were as poorly written as this, >then our robots would have gone three steps then keeled over. IMHO, SH >should forget the fancy upgrades, forget the new, neato features, and >rewrite the entire game, from the ground up, using sound software >engineering principles, and produce a quality product. In one of your previous gripes you say "If any of you have expierenced any of these problems, lets let SH know about them." So I have to ask... "Hey Gerry, have you?" I would agree with your comments, if you were talking about the "origional" Falcon3.0. That was a year and a half ago. Since then, SH has completely bent over backwards to get the program right. Whenever people have problems now. I always suspect that they are trying to run Falcon with smartdrive/ramdrive/cache or something like that. Since you are obviously a "computer EXPERT", there is no advice that can be given. >p.s. As I insinuated above, this failing is not unique to SH, but >rather to the entire PC software industry. You have got to be YANK'in us! If more people understood the limitations of the equiptment, and software. Problems could be dealt with in a rational manner. But....Since you are obviously a "computer EXPERT", there is no advice that can be given. >2. I was landing with the auot-pilot (remember, I'm still playing >wimp-level). I hit the tab key to hurry things along and... >The #$#%*&$# autopilot crashed into the ground. Sigh, YAAB. >(Yet again another bug). Yet another memorable gripe! The bug was probably in the pilots' pants. Learning to land would help alot with this bug. Greg Cisko P.S. Have a nice day..... ------------------------------- From: MORGAN@WVUGEO.WVNET.EDU Subject: SH Technical Ability All, I think Faclon3 WITH OFT has no equal. It is easily the best, most realistic sim out there (IMO). On the other hand, I am not about to lay the glove of super technical superioroty (sp?) ant the feet of SH either. The orginal release of F3 should never have happened. From the details I have gotten from (for lack of better term) insiders the original release was a marketing decision. SH was in straights and the crumbling empire of Bob Maxwell (he is the floating naked body in F3 w/ OFT) threatened to take SH down with the. GL needed a release to recoup the investment. Thus the original release of F3 was as bug ridden as ever. The A patch fixxed a little, the C patch more, the D patch enemy AI was unreal (after people told Gary at SH it was to easy :-) ). It really wasn't till OFT that most all the bugs were ironed out. COMMS still remains a problem. Talking to Daron Stinnet (sp?) at the Fal Con held in Las Vegas last september he admitted they were unreliable and would have to be redone. I also get the hints that F3 would NOT be flyable w/ A10 for this reason. I am wondering if a comms fix is in the works for the Mig 29 add on. I guess the point is, the original post that F3 is/was quirky and buggy is probably justified to some extent, though I would disagree when saying this about F3 WITH OFT. SH has a superior product after .75 yrs of patchs. But SH is also just another company responding to market pressures within and beyond their control. As far as using sound principles, I don't know. I am not a programmer. But I did hear on SH rep (forget who) say something like...we will never use that method again. Whne F3 runs it opens many many files. This is awkward, this is also why when you reboot the machine with out exiting the program you frequently get the nedd to reinstall the whole thing.... Remember that is a paraphrase. BTW, I understand the decisions to release a product have been taken away from marketing and/or finance and returned to technical development at SH. Please excuse spelling errors!!!! Scott in WV ------------------------------- From: MORGAN@WVUGEO.WVNET.EDU Subject: Way Points and Undocumented features All, Boy, now I AM confused. The letter from Atlas at C$erve has got my head spinning. First of all, you have to love SH for their undocumented features. The Hit Shft-B once more after Neg. Pig. to HP. has been heard to get them to find another airbase is a REAL dandy. Heck, COMMS itself is an undocumented feature! :^) I'll have to try it out. The other thing Atlas said has seemed to contradict what I read in the OFT manual. Though it is not here to review (what person would have a game on his work machine! ) Perhaps the problem is lost in terms used. To expand.... I had always thought that the action designated at a waypoint will not be enacted till the plane reaches that way point. Not as it approaches that waypoint. However, I thought that this does not apply to altitude. Follows is a designed SEAD and explanation..tell me the logic used fits Way point 1 Atl 800, action nothing, speed 450 Plane will do nothing, climb to 1000 at 450 knts Way point 2 Alt 100, action nothing, speed 450 Plane will do nothing, fly level at 450 knts Way point 3 Alt 1000, action nothing, speed 450 !!!The alt at waypnt 2 should be 1000!! So far, my plane has taken off, climbed to 1000 ft (stay low to avoid radar) and proceded at 450 knts. Next I will pop up, go to SEAD, and attack the target. Waypnt 3 & 4 are REAL close together for rapid climb. Way point 4 Alt 4000, SEAD, speed 550 Plane climbing to 4000 feet, doing NOTHING, accelerating way point 5 alt 1000, nothing, speed 600 Plane is diving on target(s), executing SEAD, Accelerating The SEAD was invoked at the last waypoint. Way Point 6 alt 8000, nothing, speed 600 Plane is climbing to 8000, flying at 600 knts, egress. I had always thought that actions were invoked AT waypoints, not on approach to that way point. Atlas's post seemed to contradict that. I will have to recheck my manuals. Regardless, I have done real well with my own homebrewed method if nothing else! :-) Excuse spelling errors please!!!! Scott in WV ------------------------------- From: knutson@mcc.com (Jim Knutson) Subject: Re: 2-player allied The 2-player allied stuff in Falcon isn't meant to play a real campaign with. Either that, or it REALLY doesn't work right. In two player allied mode, the campaign is only played caller's perspective. In other words, whatever the answerer does will NOT be recorded in the campaign. You will see this in the debrief. There are other flaky things about it as well, so I just treat it as an interesting two player red flag mission generator. You mentioned that you're playing over ethernet. You want to tell us about your setup? Jim Knutson | | knutson@mcc.com --=oOo=-- cs.utexas.edu!milano!knutson + Wk: (512) 338-3362 Check Six! ------------------------------- From: Odd Terje Lundboe Subject: Re: 2-player allied Jim Knutson wrote: |>The 2-player allied stuff in Falcon isn't meant to play a real campaign |>with. Either that, or it REALLY doesn't work right. In two player |>allied mode, the campaign is only played caller's perspective. In |>other words, whatever the answerer does will NOT be recorded in the |>campaign. You will see this in the debrief. There are other flaky |>things about it as well, so I just treat it as an interesting two |>player red flag mission generator. Whenever we run a mission in 2-player allied mode both our results are shown in the debrief, and it seems like the answerers performance has an influence on whether the mission is successful or not. According to the sadly inadequate communication leaflet that came with the game, the results of the campaign are (should be) recorded in the callers squadron. This indicates that we should be able to run a normal campaign while running 2-player allied. |>You mentioned that you're playing over ethernet. You want to tell |>us about your setup? EMM386 refused to load my network drivers high, so I had to get QEMM. The machines have 3COM Etherlink II cards. This is my config.sys: device=a:\qemm\qemm386.sys ram dos=high files=30 buffers=30 and my autoexec.bat: a:\qemm\loadhi a:\lsl a:\qemm\loadhi a:\3c523 0x60 3 0x300 0xc000 a:\qemm\loadhi a:\ipxodi a:\qemm\loadhi a:\dos\mouse If you use the optimize program that comes with QEMM you should be left with over 630,000 bytes memory free. If someone wants further details about the setup, feel free to contact me. //// Odd Terje Lundboe // oddt@stud.cs.uit.no / /// Dept. of Comp. Science/IMR // // // University of Tromsoe // Phone: +47 83 44571 /// / N-9037 Tromsoe, NORWAY // Fax: +47 83 44580 //// ------------------------------- [[ End of digest Volume 2 : Issue 97 ]]