Falcon 4.0 Europe Theater
Background of Europe.
The good old cold war scenario, NATO versus Warsaw Pact forces. Red Storm
type of warfare right in the middle of European landscape. This theater
is build by the PMC team by it has really been effort of the falcon 4
community/scene to start to create this. First we created small 64 seg
Europe theater for tutorial purposes and then Javanree informed us that
he's creating Europe also. So we supported him with forum at the time.
Some time later Javanree informed that he cannot continue developing Europe
- so basically we took it under our wings. Right now you're watching the
effort of information input from lot of guys which we are very grateful,
the theater files are created by single by PMC team so if you got flames
you know who to yell at. First unofficial Europe release was small 64
segment map, which got pretty nice welcome from the scene. In the discussions
in our forum it was obvious that to fully enjoy EURO theater we need to
go with 128 theater size. At the beginning of 128 theater selection there
was some problems, current DEM data converter did not work fully with
the coordinates we selected, we had to make small compromise with the
theater coordinates and still got some distortion in the upper corners
of the terrain/objectives. We then released unofficially again it in 128
size. It was not until great f4 guru named Julian Onions brought he's
mighty coding skills into the area and provided the theater geeks with
extremely cool dem2terrain util, that we got to build the theater which
you now see on the image above. There again we had to think twice about
the location, in the north is the Nordic
Theater and in the south is the mother of all theaters, big bad Balkans
so we made slight compromise and took some of the Balkans landscape into
this theater.
Size and Coordinates
These are the technical details of European theater. First of all
its an 128 segment theater which means its four times the size of original
Microprose Korean theater. Here are the specifications...
(Nautical Miles): 1104.75 x 1104.75
Resolution: 0.134858 Nautical Miles
Centered on: Lat 53 Long 9
NW: Lat 62.2063 Long -10.7437
NE: Lat 62.2063 Long 28.7437
SW: Lat 43.7937 Long -3.75398
SE: Lat 43.7937 Long 21.754
Highest point: 14658ft.
Textures
Currently textures (tiles) are the default Korean as we don't have
texture artists to make new tiles for this theater. We have tried to create
the terrain not to have same patterns as Korea but yes it still looks
much like Korea because the textures are identical. If anyone is willing
to contribute by doing textures, just let us know.
Campaign
It has so far the most objectives in any falcon theater to date, so
far the amount is about 16500 targets for you to hit (well of course you
don't hit civilian cities but anyways). Theater objectives includes all
important civilian and military airbases, all capital cities and tons
of village types. Army bases, depots, radar stations, sam sites, headquarters
can be expected to be found on the landscape. The campaign that comes
with the theater package is basic East versus West type with all the hardware
that can be found on SP3 database.
FLOT
(battle line) in the default campaign will concentrate on the Germany
and Poland border where NATO and East forces clash. Infantry and armor
are present in the border but so far we haven't get to test who's going
to be get their butts kicked around. There is large support aircrafts
and bomber aircrafts coming from England and U.S. carrier group is patrolling
northwest of Netherlands coast. As there are so much factories to go around,
there is going to be lot of targets to choose from besides the ground
forces in the front lines and remains to be seen what is the overall effect
in the war scenario. This object placement is totally in the beginning
stage (May 5, 2002), so it will be personalized much in the future. Also
two other (at least) campaigns will be created with different flavor of
the war so we have full three campaigns available when this theaters closes
to its completion. All suggestions for additional campaigns and unit placements
are welcome! (Click the campaign image to get larger screenshot).
As this theater has so much objectives, it seems that time acceleration of the campaign will "lag" it a bit, meaning when you run it at 64x speed there are pauses and the aircrafts then jump great deal when they move the next time. This can be avoided... simply by not using so fast time acceleration. There is NO lag effect on normal 1x time and even 4x seems to run smooth on 1.3ghz and 512mb ram equipped test machine here. The 3D worlds framerates are currently BETTER than Korean campaign.
Version and Download
Europe v0.6 has been released. Check it out from this topic in our forum.