homepage Forums Read Only Forums Read Only Forums Typhoon (Read Only) Hello from Rage.....

One more note:

Maybe in the future, if the sim becomes extremely popular, maybe, how about modeling a plane that hasn't been modeled all too much...as an add-on.

Maybe another Euro-jet (JAS39 Gripen or Dassault Rafale)...





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Ron aka NipponDSM http://members.tripod.com/~WIGGLIT/EECH.html

Allright!! Enough of this! We started this Typhoon forum as a way to pass along info on the existing game...not to provide an outlet for arguments on features not included in the game!

As for the question on resolution...the game includes a utility that allows you to select up to a 1024X768X32 capability. I run a P3 866, 256 PC-133 RAM, and a V5 5500 with everything maxed out and it looks and runs great.

These discussions about mission editors are missing the point. You DON'T select missions to fly in this game! You fly a war! What you (and your six pilots) do, determines what happens next. Are there scripted missions? Yes...in a sense. They exist because the AI has to have something to oppose your decisions with. You employ your pilots in a given manner, and the AI has a selection of responese to oppose that move...these can be thought of as missions, I suppose.

Think of a chess game. There are a multitude of individual moves, but these only make any sense when seen with respect to the opponent's moves. So it is with Typhoon. Yes, there are strike missions and CAP missions. There are also Wild Weasel and intercept missions...but these all arise depending on how the war is playing out...and you must use your forces in the best possible way depending on the changing battlefield.

I say again...this is not EF-2000v3...it is not F4...or JF-18. It is a whole new approach to air combat simulation. You must be able to fly a high tech aircraft against some very high tech bad guys...AND...you must plan and employ your limited forces to beat back a numerically superior invading enemy.

Those of you who choose to spend your money on this game had better also plan on spending a few brain cells in the bargain. It's not going to be easy to beat the Rooskies...but if you do, I think you're going to be grinning from now to Sunday.

Andy

Right on Andy, put your foot down with a firm hand, i'm just looking forward to a new jet sim, i don't care if it comes with a meter i gota feed coins into, pity about the specs i was hoping for a excuse to upgrade again.
Reminds me of the first moon shot, the engineers kept sticking new wigets and gizzmo's into the command module, all the drawings and specs had to be constantly updated, one of the astronauts had to say stop! freeze the bugger right now or we'll never get to the moon.

Agreed. Thanx Andy for your input. You have the game, so I trust your judgement..and opinion.

Now if only I could get my hands on the game.

[This message has been edited by Uroboros (edited February 05, 2001).]

Andy, the voice of reason, as usually, and this is meant without any sarcasm!

I want to ask the following question: for those of you who have them all, be honest with yourselves: was buying Jane's F/A-18 as exhilarating as it was buying, say Longbow 2 or Falcon 4.0? Even though it's arguably the best of its kind, the concept it stuck to was done so often already that even the hardest of die hards might not be as enthusiastic about it as they wish they would be. I think I am not wrong when I say that JF/A-18 got less flight hours with an average hardcore sim player than, say, JF-15, even though it's a vastly superior product.

Making Typhoon conform to the artificial norms the simming community set on itself would mean getting yet another resource draining sim that will perhaps polish a few things here and there but lack some features (all sims do) for which it would be criticized hard an long. Distancing itself from this approach and perhaps alienating a, let's face it, small, although vocal part of community is probably it's best chance of success and actually providing us with a new and exciting way of enjoying the by now rather stale simming genre.

-Gecko

[This message has been edited by Gecko (edited February 05, 2001).]

Gecko

Excellent point. I had exactly that response to JF-18...and Flanker2 before it. Both are outstanding sims...but are much like 'peas in a pod' after F4 established the benchmark for 'hardcore' sims. I don't mean this as a critical remark...only as a way of saying that the very remarkable hardcore sims of the last couple of years have boxed themselves into a very tight package (as they come out of the box...add-ons can change this, of course!).

Rage feels that there are players out there that will value sim play that goes outside the 'hardcore' boundaries. Typhoon offers this in spades. Will it be successful? I hope so...'fun' should extend to all players, not just the interests of one segment of the hobby.

Andy

In regards to the idea of "thousands of people will pay for a patch":

Suppose all 17,000 of those people agreed to pay $10 for a patch. At today's rates that'll pay a year's salary for two, maybe three programmers, tops, leaving no money for facilities, equipment, managers, PR, or profit.

Now factor in the fact that in reality you'll have a significant fraction of that 17,000 that will say "I shouldn't have to pay for something that adds something that was missing in the original game."

This is worse than a shoestring budget, it's a sewing thread budget, and I doubt it's going to go anywhere.

Oh, and in re: talking all about eFalcon to the print media: I doubt that'll make simmers look too good in general, hmm? "Fans create great flight sim - using stolen source code as a base."

Hiya Erich.

Yes, you could say that fans create eFalcon using stolen source code, but no one officially claims that eFalcon is based on the source code. And the second thing is the impetus for the hacking effort came from the iBeta mods...which did not use the sourcecode.

Indeed, if any PC Gamer writer took the time, he would have a fascinating article to write about the strange evolution to the current sim I have on my hard drive. And I seriously doubt that the magazine reading public will be quite so judgemental.

The fact remains that eFalcon plays pretty much as F4 should have played, out of the box... 2 years after F4.0 came out.

Where did you get the figure of 17,000 from? EF2000 sold waaaaaaaaaaaaay more than that. F-15 sold waaaaaaaaaay more than that. As did F4. It sold in the region of 125K copies.

If the gods are just, Typhoon should sell lots.

Gavin

I got the 17,000 figure from Troffmeister's statements that that many people had downloaded the eRazor patch and his "think if all those people paid a few dollars to Hasbro when they got it" statement.

I realized after my post that I left out the overhead costs for programmers (health benefits, taxes, etc.), which makes it unlikely that that amount of money would pay for any more than one programmer for a year.

Typhoon will sell good when it ports over to the ps2. lol..

I hate consoles.

That's 17k people downloading a patch which is not supported by the original publisher, and is known about only by the flight sim community itself.

125k copies of F4 were sold. If there was proper marketing of the existence of the eFalcon patch, then a significant number of those 125 thousand Falcon 4 owners would download the patch. And if they were willing to pay a small amount for that patch, then the revenue would be somewhat higher.

Gavin

Hi guys,

First of all Andy is correct in what he says...

He's is my take on the matter......

Typhoon is designed to be a sim which you play NOT a flight sim constuction kit. I could understand people wanting to mod Typhoon after they have finished it, but not before they've even see it!

I'm not going to get bogged down in the arguments about sim editing or your perceptions (which are mostly wrong) about Rage's product and maketing strategy. The main point is that you will have to judge Typhoon for what it is (and I have been very honest with you about that) not for what you want it to be. If it doesn't meet your requirments as a product or you don't consider it value for money then that is unfortunate - but you can't blame Rage for not making you your own personal sim.

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Anyway, on to the TAW code base. The code won't be released. F4 is out there somewhere, so if you really want to have a pop at some sim dev, then I'd start there.

Cheers,

Steve

Steve,

Does the same apply to the EF2000 codebase?

Mike.

Thanks Andy,

I'll be upgrading soon after release of Typhoon so no prob whith what I hope to get.

Steve or Andy , any chance of pic at high res
in 32bit? We've seen so few from this sim.
The one's I have seen though with the external's showing the cockpit,hmmm real almost. If you can some one's with terrain
and combat.
Many thanks.
Paul.

Having read all of the above posts , taken in and disgested the info , i have only one final question before departing this thread -

To Steve Hunt direction question please ,
assuming later in the year once Typhoon is out and a few players will have finished beating the war engine , if an approach is made to you guys at Rage by a web based modding group , wanting to add new items / features or terrain areas into the Typhoon game engine , what will be the attitude to such a request please ?

Will you stamp on such an idea , or will you guys be flattered and offer info / help or maybe some helpful modding tools to facilitate such an effort ?

This has been my point all along , i think alot of us want Typhoon to be great out of the box , and also we would like the product to have a long life via free WWW moding if possible in the future !

If you can answer this point for me , i will be more than happy to let this subject rest , and leave this forum , until such time as the product is actual released to us all to buy and fly .

Thankyou

Troff

I think the final thing is this:
If Typhoon sells well, and has a strong following..then Rage will produce Add-On campaigns for it which they will sell.

And if this is their strategy, then it would be undermined by providing a tool allowing you to create campaigns of the same style and quality, no?

As for AGE etc. I believe GTT was making money by SELLING the editor..they weren't providing it for free like most "enthusiasts" do..they were attempting to make a profit off it, possibly violating several copyrights/the EULA in the process.

That said..I still believe it would increase the life of the sim, or at least be useful from the perspective of an Internet Squadron, to allow single/multiplayer missions to be created.




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-Gel214th
CO 214th Annihilators

http://www.214th.com/flanker2

No.

That wasn't the problem with AGE. The problem with AGE is that it conflicted with the release of the Red Sea Missions mission set, which although the missions were of a decent quality, and the pack was worth buying, I think DID were worried that AGE would steal sales away from Red Sea Missions - or so the assumption went.

GTT didn't get involved until much later.

Gavin

Put some of the above comments on the box as sort of reviewer quotes and watch the game fly from the shelves!

I know that guns were rushed back in when everyone realised what a turkey the AIM-7 was but hasn't the slammer and new sidewinders more than made up for it?

Save the weight for more AIM-120s!

I am still waiting patiently for an answer to my previous question , i will continue to wait further for a statement before drawing any conclusions !

Troff

I put my foot into this debate with some trepidation (for obvious reasons...) Maybe I am rehashing old ground aswell.
IMHO there are two issues
1. will I buy it?
2. Will I enjoy it/will it stay on the HD?
To most simmers the answer to 1 will of course be yes,for no other reason than its a flight sim (How many copies of underplayed games are there on your shelf? Lots I suspect...)
2. Is amore complex issue,but i suspect that the "mid-core" realism approach will be a turn off for most of the existing sim community
There`s no call for an "unrealism" patch for F4 nor will Flanker 2.5 by simplifying the FM etcetc...
Putting gameplay over realistic avionics,real world force levels etcetc will only pay off if they are able to attract a significant number of "non-simmers" to purchase the game,which they obviously feel they can.
Fair play to them,Software publishers exist to make money and the current state of the Hardcore Sim Market (particularly complex Jet Simms indicates how difficult that currently is.
However by targeting that segment of the market they are assuming that a significant portion of existing simmers-that`s us by the way :-) will purchase it anyway regardless,which to me smacks a little of arrogance...
Sales figures will show in the long run whether it was a succesful approach,but in terms of poularity you only haveto look at the number of posts on the forum for different sims:- Wheres USAF of FA compared to Flanker/F4/JF18?
Being english,when I first heard about Typhoon i was excited,hoping for an RAF plane in an F4 type package mixed with the hi-tech weaponry of JF18 & more...
The truth is dissapointing,will I buy? Yes even if only to read the manual,will it become a "legend" like F4 I doubt it but then only one of thos puts bread on the table for the developers....
Ho-hum