SH3, SH4 and Lead Pursuit
 

Has anyone thought of contacting Lead Pursuit to see if they might be interested in talking with UBISoft to buy these titles and do with them what they did with the Falcon franchise? It seems to me a solution like this is the only way a "finished" product will ever be realized. I know they did a lot with the modding community to make Falcon what it is today. It would be wonderful if they would be interested in doing submarine simulation as well.

Seems like a lot of money to risk (I bet UBI has very deep pockets and is not going to let the SH brand go for a song and a dance) for a project that may not even turn a profit. Any projects would be better of just starting their own simulator label. It would also suggest to gamers that have had disappointment with the SH series that this new hypothetical label is more than just a rehash of the same old.

I doubt UBI is finished with SH4

Not going to happen. Nice thought, but not going to happen.

PD

I rather see them take over some of the old Janes titles, mainly F/A-18

Would someone care to explain this to me? I'm not well versed with Falcon :-?

It's a long story but here are the high points....

Falcon 4.0 (F-16 simulation branded as a Microprose product with Hasbro as the parent company) was released and suffered major bugs. The devs were able to release one major patch 1.0 and a second, smaller patch just before Christmas of 1997. Then, Hasbro laid off the entire staff just before Christmas (nice company).

Meanwhile, another company that mainly did code management (I think) began modifying what they could and releasing it for free under a tacit agreement with Hasbro. This is a little foggy but the gist of it is correct. That went on for several months. Then, mysteriously the source code for Falcon got leaked to the Internet (if we could only be so lucky with Silent Hunter).

After a few weeks, someone named "eRazor" started releasing new executables with major tweaks to the program code. He also discovered that although Falcon was released as a 16-bit product, it was in fact written to support 32-bit with many 32-bit features turned off. He started turning them back on.

At some point, through gradual and careful trust, he was contacted by some other modders and together they started releasing periodic patches to Falcon. At some point after that, Hasbro began searching for these folks and had some legal warnings flying about as to the consequences of what was going on.

In the end (and I don't know the facts here) a group of people approached Hasbro to buy Falcon and the illegal patching halted prior to negotiations for the sale. Once it was a done deal, all the work that modders both legal and illegal had done was reviewed and incorporated into a re-release of Falcon which is now known as Falcon 4.0/Allied Force and owned and maintained by Lead Pursuit.

I'm sure some of my information is not exactly correct but that's the general story.

So you can see at least some similarities here. Many of us take SH much more seriously than the average gamer and would like to see it honed to a higher degree of realism with all the bugs fixed. But the company will only invest so much to this end which is short of what we want. So it would be great if a company was able to take it over (buy it) and give it the polish it deserves.

The illegal patchings still continue. And are better than AF in many respects. It would be great if they (LP) took up the old Jane's titles. But I don't think that's going to happen. LP will continue using the F4 code as a base, IMO. And all the legal warnings that fly about are BS IMO. LP lacks the financial resources and the will to prosecute, while Atari/Hasbro just don't have the interest. Both parties will threaten to the end, but I seriously doubt either will take the F4 code to court. It would have happened by now.

PD

I wasn't aware there were other patches still ongoing. Is there a link to these that's no secret as I have lost track of any links since I bought the Lead Pursuit version? I still have several of eRazor's early stuff.

OpenFalcon and Red Viper are the two I know of. Which one of the three (Allied Force, Open Falcon, Red Viper) is the "best" is always a big and ongoing discussion inside the community in my experience. You could also say they bash each other.

I bet the membes who are deeper into the subject will lead this discussion now. PeriscopeDepth already made his point of view clear and I bet he was referring to Open Falcon.

I actually prefer RV, I've tried all of them (AF, OF, RV). But that's all from me, if you want to hear endless bickering of the Falcon versions you can head to that unnamed F4 forum. :)

PD

Thanks for the explanation :hmm: But as was already said, its highly doubtful Ubi is ready to drop the series yet, and they dont exactly have a history of giving other kids a bite of their cookie. It would be interesting to see what would be possible, though, considering Falcon 4 is pretty much the combat flightsim.

LOL! Falcon 4 AF happened because some people who liked modding F4 wanted to do more about it, turn it at least partly into a business, etc. Not because they wanted a business and just turned to F4 by accident. They were very familiar with it and active within that game's modding scene.

I don't think there's anyone in Lead Pursuit interested/familiar with SH modding, but I could be wrong. But that's a big step to take, and of course SH is different in that it is an active product, unlike F4 was at that time.

As far as I know Red Viper / Open Falcon offer some significant advances (6DOF cockpits, for one) over Allied Force, probably at the expense of some stability.

You're probably much more likely to see GW team or a SH4 modding group try something similar to LP, but its hardly going to happen.

It's more likely that some guys in oh i don't know say...Bucharest, Romaina frustrated with the tight project times and lack of creative vision of their masters would setup their own independent studio and develop a new sub game selling it to Sid Meier's Firaxis, by then owned by EA or the new Microprose under the title "Silent Service 3" Hypothetically speaking of course!

"A little revolution once in a while is a good thing.. don't you think Mr Ryan?"
Marco Ramius ..Mutiny Rocks!

Most of the time, people that want to do stuff don't really want to do business ;)

And people that want to do business look at it as an opportunity ... for business.