New User of Falcon 4

[Mac1 0]

Hi,

 

I'm a new user (again) of Falcon 4.0 by Micro Prose. I'll explain. I have had the game since it came out, but only played it in passing. That was over a decade ago. I now have that "itch" to fly again and have loaded it onto a PC. I wondered about updates, so I got online and did a search for F4 updates. Wow was I surprised! Patch after patch after patch. I was able to figure out to install patch 1.08, but that is as far as I have gotten.

 

I would appreciate any guidance as to what patch I should install next or a list of patches/installs that I need to have to get my program up to the most current version. I'm not looking so much for aircraft mods or new terrain (not yet anyway), just basic core updates.

 

Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered.

 

Mac1

[Hag 0]

I'd recommend shelving the old 4.0 and head over to these guys: http://www.lead-pursuit.com/. Saying that they have significantly improved the sim is an understatement. If you do a little googling you can pick it up for about $10US. Download the 1.013 exe patch and install and off you go. If you are looking for some friendly guys to fly with check over at the http://www.72ndvfw.org/forums/ . I'd also recommend googling as there are many active wings flying today, find a group that you feel good with and start joining the pickup flights.

 

Good luck and welcome back, Falcon missed you.

 

Hag

[Mac1 0]

I'd recommend shelving the old 4.0 and head over to these guys: http://www.lead-pursuit.com/. Saying that they have significantly improved the sim is an understatement. If you do a little googling you can pick it up for about $10US. Download the 1.013 exe patch and install and off you go. If you are looking for some friendly guys to fly with check over at the http://www.72ndvfw.org/forums/ . I'd also recommend googling as there are many active wings flying today, find a group that you feel good with and start joining the pickup flights.

 

Good luck and welcome back, Falcon missed you.

 

Hag

 

Thanks

[GwynO 16]

Hi there. Indeed a lot of things happened with Falcon! My gosh! Where to start?? Well cut a very long story short, the main developments in the Falcon world can be split into 3 major overhauls. First there was the BMS (Bench Mark Sims) group of modders, absolute perfectionists that strove to fix all the bugs of Falcon and make it as realistic as humanly possible.. they modded the game so much they even made their own exe for the game, BMS.exe.. unfortunately, some of the testers for that decided they didn't want to respect the group's perfectionist approach.,. so they released the alpha version of the mod and called themselves and it Open Falcon. Currently their boards are located here: http://www.f4support...Open-Falcon-4.7

 

The Open Falcon team, although very talented and dedicated in their own right, can't do jack with the BMS.exe (their words not mine, I'm merely paraphrasing) so no major developments are likely to happen in that camp. However, it has long been rumored that the BMS team carried on, but so furious about the release of Open Falcon out of their Alpha work, they basically keep it restricted to a core group of friends and hard core enthusiasts.. some people find this a little hard to take and get pissy at the the thought of people doing something for free, in their own time, and not sharing it with the world and their uncle.. personally I'd say that's their choice but that's just me. Whether or not BMS will one day release their finished mod is a topic that generates a lot of fractious and generally pointless debates seeing as no one from the BMS team itself is actually saying anything.. it's all "friend of a friend" type info at the moment, but you can follow that saga here: http://forums.eagle....0&highlight=bms

 

Ok, so that's the first camp, the second is the Free Falcon team, who have taken the engine way beyond what it was originally, implemented a whole range of other aircraft, from the Tornado to the B-2 Spirit, terrains, campaigns, you name it. It's all for free, and best thing, you don't need any Falcon disc or install. If you do have Falcon installed already, it won't mess with it because it uses different registry entries iirc. The installer and patches (last time I checked they were up to 5.57) can be downloaded from various sites, veterangamers for example, all the information for that group can be found here: http://www.freefalco...rum/content.php

 

The third major group is Allied Force. Allied Force is basically a commercial (for profit) collection of previous patches, mods and so on that were available in the community already, nicely packaged and tweaked. There has been some bad blood that a group would basically make money off incorporating free products, but they have done a lot of the work themselves to be fair.. so rather than presenting it as a bag of stolen groceries, it would be perhaps more honest to describe it as a really well cooked meal.. just the chefs didn't pay for the onions.. or the pepper etc.. What they did buy though, is the right to sell the game for profit and as such you can buy it on disc second hand on Amazon. Don't be expecting any patches though.. all seems very quiet on that front, although it has long been rumored that they may or may not be working on a sequel. More information to be found here: http://www.lead-pursuit.com/news.htm

 

So on to pros and cons, no way intended to be comprehensive, my views only and not representative of anyone else's views here.. I'm sure some will disagree.

 

Current level BMS:

Strengths - Hard core, anally retentive, perfectionist in its attempts at realism.

Weaknesses - May or may not exist. If it does exist, you have about as much chance of finding it as getting to Master Mason level.. not that impossible, but hardly a case of registering your details on a forum or purchasing a disc.

 

Open Falcon:

Strengths - Probably the most realistic of all the freely available mods.

Weaknesses - No major updates expected, may not work outside of XP, the most system intensive of all the freely available mods.

 

Free Falcon:

Strengths - The prettiest graphically of all the 3 camps, free, loads of user mods, active community, plenty of ongoing developments (patches, new installers etc), and multiple aircraft types included (including backseat cockpits for some)

Weaknesses - Not as realistic or hard core in mind as either BMS or Open Falcon, avionics for the other aircraft are all based around the engine that was designed for the F-16 so a bit of a fudge to say the least, if you don't mind F-16 type hud symboligy and radar in an F-4, F-117, F-15 etc then it's not such an issue.

 

Allied Force:

Strengths - Allegedly the most stable of the three (although I have both Allied Force and Free Falcon, and honestly can't put a cigarette paper between them both on stability.. more on that below), peace of mind that you have purchased a product that doesn't infringe any copyright issues and so on. Many user mods and an active fanbase.

Weaknesses - No major updates forthcoming from the developers at this time (e.g. patches etc) Allied Force hasn't gone for the hard core realism angle of the BMS team either, graphically it is the worst of the lot from stock although much prettier with some after market mods it doesn't quite match Free Falcon or Open Falcon graphically.

 

Now, in general, I think we need to address some common weaknesses that are common to any and all mods or products based on Falcon 4.... which is stability. As mentioned above, despite the claims often made that Allied Force is the most stable of the three, it has not been possible on my end to see much difference in stability between the latest versions of Free Falcon and Allied Force so that is a non argument as far as I'm concerned. What I have seen, with every single Falcon 4 based mod, is that at some point you will inevitably encounter stability issues such as graphics "freezing" while the in game action continues on without you and things of that nature.. annoying yes, frequent even, annoyingly so sometimes.. a deal breaker.. well not really, especially if you haven't paid anything, or not very much in the case of a second hand disc. I found the original Falcon 4 disc in box, with the manual and all the little bits and pieces for £8.. bargain for the manual alone, and if you have the manual, your life will be all the easier when learning the ropes in any flavour of Falcon because none other than the original offer an actual printed manual that you can have open on your lap while following through the training missions. Falcon as anyone who has played it in the past will know, is not a game you play casually, it requires hours of practice, getting to know how to do stuff and why, so yep, if you have any version of the current mods, I would still say you need to either find yourself the original manual or print out the pdf manuals which could run to a lot more than the price of a brand new sim like DCS..

 

And a final weakness of any flavour of Falcon... the very subject breeds internecine and pointless division.. fans of each flavour can be quick to pounce on any statement they see as unfavourable to their flavour of choice, sniping, bitching and mud slinging is all too common and no one camp can truly say they don't have fanboys like that, my advice.. stay away from the fanboys.. take everything with a pinch of salt, and stay grounded.. it's ok to install and enjoy multiple iterations on their own merits and see for yourself, to that end I'd recommend you try them all if you can. After all, it's not like any other sim on Earth right now, offers everything that Falcon based stuff still does.. DCS is getting there.. but they don't do Vipers.. yet

Edited February 12, 2011 by GwynO

[draken 4]

GwynO has pretty much rounded up in a nutshell. And i would stick to the recommendation of shelving your original falcon 4 for Falcon4 allied force. They have got all bugs so it runs smoothly as never before. i think the last patch is 1.0.13 after this who knows. If you still feeling nostalgic head over to you tube and type in falcon 4 and enjoy.

[Siddley 9]

OF - Unstable, delivers terrible FPS considering the graphics displayed on screen, avionics require a thorough understanding of the Block 50\52 MLU manual. Not a good choice if you want to just kick ass and take names without reading 400 pages of real world flight manual first.

I did - I actually like that hardcore stuff but even I got bored with it after a while due to CTD's

 

FF - Delivers mediocre FPS, campaign mode very unstable. It's still Falcon 4.0. The extra aircraft included all have awful looking cockpits ( and lets face it, that's the view we see most of the time - instead of making 20 crap cockpits, why not concentrate on doing just a few that look right ? ) - the manual is quite funny though. It's full of clip art images of corny cartoons. A lot of it is written by some arrogant dick who refers to himself as " Aragorn " and thinks the sun shines out of his arse.

 

AF - I don't know, I gave up with the first two. It's rumoured to be the most stable, but quite frankly I can't be bothered to find out.