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By Rapier@Zone
IT'S HERE NOW! FOR YOU!
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Getting Started in Fighter Ace II, a Primer
After months of anticipation it's finally here for you, the Fighter Ace player to test and play!
Thanks to the massive amount of work done by all our Beta 0 Testers, and by an equally immense amount of work done by the Microsoft Fighter Ace team and VR-1, we are opening the Beta of Fighter Ace II to the general public in Beta 1.
Thanks to the Beta 0 Testers!
All of us at MS and VR-1 would like to thank the Beta 0 testers for the exceptional work, feedback and cooperation that they have exemplified during this tough but critical phase of Fighter Ace II's development. These guys have done a terrific quantity of work that will make the life of the Beta 1 participants much easier and it has helped immeasurably to make Fighter Ace II a force to be reckoned with in the online air combat game world.
What is Fighter Ace II?
You've heard lots of rumors about Fighter Ace II, but now is the time to experience the reality.
Quite frankly we think the reality is pretty impressive. We have raised the bar for an online air combat game to a high standard with Fighter Ace 1.5 and now we are going to raise it through the roof.
Fighter Ace II features:
New 3D acceleration
What this means to you: You have planes and terrains unequalled by any online air combat game. Unlike the competition we have fully articulated controls (moving elevators, ailerons, rudders and flaps), visible 3d scoops, radiators and wheels.
We have landscape with majestic 20,000 foot mountains, canyons, ravines, sea shores, hills, lakes and oceans.
You gotta see it to believe it.
New Physics Model
What this means to you: VR-1 went back to a clean sheet of paper and designed completely new force based model. Unlike the old models that used tables for performance referents, the new Fighter Ace II model creates the planes as actual 3d objects with very definite aerodynamic shapes. The air is actually modeled as particles that are denser at sea level than at 20,000 feet. We add in the engine's power and even model the thrust of the propeller at different pitches.
What you get is a more realistic experience of flying. But for those who have Realisticaphobia, no worries! We've also built in ways stepping down the realistic effects to create different levels of difficulty from Arcade to Full Real.
New Planes and a New Country - Japan
What this means to you: Fighter Ace II is not a tired retread of Fighter Ace 1.5 but a bold step into new territory. We've created new planes with realistically modeled weaponry and performance. You have new planes to try out, new planes to master.
Rockets and Bombs
What this means to you: Did we mention rockets? Bombs? Player flyable bombers? Now you can punish your online enemies in whole new ways. You are not limited to guns, but now you can rocket them, dive bomb them, high altitude bomb them, formation bomb them and level their countries to the ground. Sound cool? We thought you'd agree.
Territorial Combat
What this means to you: This is the ultimate of Fighter Ace II, the arena that separates the flyers from the wanna bees. Perhaps we should have called it Territorial Conquest.
You and your mates can not only bomb your opponents but you can take their country. Afraid of the tedious pace of ground combat? You don't want to drone along in a 35 mph tank while your friends are flying overhead at 400 mph? No worries! This is Fighter Ace!
Players trigger attacks on opposing airfields and factories by striking them from the air. AI controlled tanks roll to attack and defend these contested areas. The entire arena is supported by a strategic supply model that produces tanks and planes and the resources are moved around by trains. Cripple the train network and you cripple your opponent. As participants of Beta 0 can tell you, this flat out ROCKS!
What does Beta Testing mean?
So what does Open Beta mean? It means that we have got a major number of the program performance bugs behind us (that is stuff that crashes your computer). Not all, but enough. At this point most people should be able to play for considerable lengths of time without a crash.
For you, the player, Open Beta is to peer into and experience the future.
The purpose of Beta 1 (Open Beta), from a programming standpoint, is to up the number of people playing the game and discover what problems that may be encountered with truly massively multiplayer arenas. We will undoubtedly encounter some additional bugs but most of those should be due to the larger numbers of players that will be online at one time and not to the basic game programming. As the veterans of Beta 0 can tell you, the key to fixing these problems is BUG REPORTS. We need your help to get the raw material for these fixes. If you encounter a bug, please send a report to Bug Reports, with a description of what happened, what was going on around you when it happened and your computer's configuration (CPU, RAM, video card w/Ram, sound card, joystick and peripherals, etc.).
We will also be launching into plane balancing in a major way. For those of you unfamiliar with this concept, its basically plane tweaking, or how plane A performs against plane B. In marked contrast to our competitors, Fighter Ace has developed different plane sets per country instead of letting everyone fly everything. This makes our job much tougher, but we believe it makes our game unique and different in very valuable ways. But to make it successful, we need YOUR help. We have taken our first few swings at plane balancing in Beta 0, but even more will have to be done during Beta 1. We are relying on YOU to provide the balanced feedback that will be critical in this period. Please remember that the object is to make a balanced series of country plane SETS. Not every plane the same or even equivalent plane roles within the sets but plane sets that overall balance each other in each type of game, FFA, Team Combat and Territorial Combat. Keep sending in your impressions and suggestions on this topic and try to be specific as possible. Don't say, “It's just not right,” as this gives us no idea of what to change. A better bit of feedback would be, “the turn rate is not good enough, it's better than a Mustang but inferior to a Yak.” With this we can make comparisons and tweaks that will make this a better game to play overall.
The Fighter Ace community is a very special place, forged in the fire of a sometimes fierce competition but tempered by spirit of cooperation and community that cannot be found anywhere else. We are looking forward to working with you to make this ROCK the online world!
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