[Skybird]

I always was at war - more or less - with the flight physics of EE, especially the hypersensitive collective, for which many workarounds were tried and suggested, but none ever worked acceptably well. The collective that the early developers once have confirmed to work eratically only and not working like they wished to design things, finally killed this sim for me. Else, it was a great thing, yes. I tried long and hard to love this, and I loved much in it, especially in EECH. But the collective finally grounded it for me, forever. Ruined an otherwise very good simulation that was round and polished around the edges.

Nippelspanner,

from the linked interview:

In our Apache you can spend 10 to 15 minutes prepping your ship or hit a key to get going, it’s your choice and we won’t judge you for it. There will be one initial load time and that’s it. No wait time between menus or “small” accidents. Doing a barrel roll will NEVER be an option (well you probably can pull it off but it’s tricky).

One of the features I tried to bring to Combat Helo was this notion that you can walk around in a limited way. Do inspections and arm the aircraft, interact with base objects. I know this is all been done with military games and we’re not trying to be those games either.

Later when we activate co-op play your friends will be able to act as a load-master, arming aircraft as they are ready. We have laptops in the command tent that act as interfaces to the mission engine. A player will be able to assign specific missions to any aircraft ready at the airbase. Everything is message based, we experimented with pulling out game information and updating a HTML 5 page in real-time. That worked quite well, when it’s time to implement a user-facing mission editor we might go the route of SOAP messages from a web page. I’ve got code stubs in there just in case. It depends what people want and how they fly with their friends.

What can users both novice and veteran expect from your game?

We’re creating a game for a generation that missed out on those simulations from Origin and Microprose, PC combat simulations were a genre of their own. Those games were jingoistic indulgencies, escapism with a fair amount of technical depth.

They can expect to install the game and get up and running fairly quickly. This is an authentic representation AH-64D. It’s an odd bird, you can think of it as a Block I that’s undergoing a rolling upgrade to Block II. We made deliberate design choices about readability and ease of use.

95% of the cockpit switches work, engine start-up, APU, lighting settings, store jettison etc. Even the wipers have two speeds and an intermittent wipe mode.Pilots should expect some confusion about how the weapon systems interact between the front and rear seats (I still get confused). My advice is not to keep jumping between seats if you can avoid it, learn to go through the steps you need for the task at hand but we don’t force you.

The real Longbow is a very complex aircraft and there is a lot we don’t cover. It simply isn’t practical or possible to do without touching on areas that are secret. In those areas that are sensitive I take my cues from other games and make a best educated guess. The feedback I get from pilots is along the lines of “good enough” which suits me.

The initial release will contain a typical representation of a live fire gunnery range, operating out of a local stage-point. Essentially you’re given the keys, an ethereal instructor pilot and exercises to complete. You get to try different gunnery techniques, operating the aircraft systems and then engaging in some dynamic (but totally fictional) survival missions in SAM infested hills moving from point A to point B.

The AH-64D is armed with a 30mm cannon, a selection of rockets (including illumination and smoke) and AGM-114 L and K Hellfires (Radar and Laser guided respectively). TrackIR head tracking support is included so you can slave the cannon to your physical head movement if you wish.
We’ll have a mode for pick-up and play with a 360 joypad so you can fly instant action missions Comanche style. We have some lively crew speech to keep things interesting.

Initially we won’t ship with multi-player, it’s logistically difficult to debug and test. The game has been designed around messaging for multi-player so I don’t anticipate major problems, just lots of little ones, we will be enabling co-op (font seat / back seat) play around the third major release on our published roadmap. The cross-coupling of the systems presents interesting play challenges. You can actually fight your co-pilotfor control of systems.
Also expect the occasional exploding cow (if you know which setting in the config.ini to tweak).



What can users who play hardcore flight sims expect from your game?

The best I can hope for is that they feel nostalgic for the games they played in the mid to late nineties and enjoy some of the attention to the flight model and cockpit experience. We have a really advanced flight-model thanks to Fred Naar who created the amazing free helicopter physics replacement add-on for FSX. There’s nothing else like it.