OT: A fine example of community fan based mod: Open Falcon

[Castout]

I finally found a new life to my old game Falcon 4.0 which I bought about 10 years ago. Even then it was considered an old game. This community mod for Falcon 4.0 called Open falcon seems to be irresistible to resist.

Check this youtube clip made from Open Falcon gameplay. Forget the Navy and submarines for a moment. And ride in one of these instead.

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=w71cewphTdw


This Falcon 4.0 game has proved too hard to die :D

Man I should get a new joystick for this Open Falcon alone.

[goldorak]

OpenFalcon only works on the original 1998 game Falcon 4 which is no longer sold.
So from an economical standpoint Atari (or whoever has the brand today) don't loose any money because of it. Nonetheless the mod is pretty illegal (as are all the mods of the old Falcon 4), and even on very liberal forums such as Frugalworld it is frowned upon (if you give an explicit link to download it).
The real difference between Falcon and DW is that after an almost 10 year limbo, people actually continued and improved development on Falcon 4 with the official Falcon 4 Allied Force release.
Release that for all intents and purposes was done to "gauge" the interest in future high fidelity sims (with dynamic campaigns, something that ED has never been able to deliver but thats another can of worms...). The sales were pretty interesting that an F-18 sim built upon the Falcon 4 code is in the making. Dynamic Campaign and Naval Operations in one sim ? Hell yeah. :rock:
SCS has no interest in continuing development of the "game version", and is even less willing (I suppose) to licence the code to someone else because of "classified aspects".
So in our case we are sitting between the hammer and the anvil. And it hurts. :88)

[Molon Labe]

OF seems pretty nice, never tried it since it installs over F4 and not F4AF (I have the latter, not the former). Also, no one can really get OF... what is available to the public is a leak of an early version of OF that has been taken over by the general community and built up. It's not supported by the authors because of the leak fiasco.

So, I'm looking forward to FreeFalcon5 because it installs over AF and is supported.

[Castout]

Finally I've finished downloading Open falcon 4.5+patch and my first impression could be summarized into one word: WOW :up:.

I'm using the high resolution parameter and it suprisingly supports widescreen monitor. My a little over a year rig cannot even try to lay it at maximum setting. Well I could but the 3D viewing woud sometimes make the fps drop to its knees becoming slideshow.

I can't believe this is free! It really brings a new life to my once thought dead game CD. There are quite a number documentation to read. I do not know whether to read from original falcon 4.0 manual which is quite thick or to go straight away to read OF documentations. I've forgotten pretty mcuh almost everything on how to play this game. It's by far the most sophisticated and realistic combat flight sim ever to grace any gaming platform. And I think it will stay that way for a very long time.

From youtube I read rumors of airforce wanting to use this Open Falcon as their simulator. Wow. I'm glad I found this gem.