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Falcon 4.0 - The Game Which Refuses to Die
jonerik writes "Today's Boston Globe has this article on the worldwide cult following behind Falcon 4.0, a 1998 flight simulator program which was discontinued by its manufacturer (Hasbro Interactive) the following year. Shortly after it was dropped, someone leaked the game's source code and before you could say 'open source' Falcon 4.0 buffs around the world began fixing bugs in the game and adding new features. Enter Claude Cavanaugh, who approached the current owners of Falcon 4.0 (Atari, which is currently owned by a French company formerly known as Infogrames) with the idea of incorporating the hackers' improvements into Falcon 5.0. Although Falcon 5.0 won't be appearing anytime soon due to financing issues, happily Xicat Interactive will be releasing Falcon 4.0 Gold: Operation Infinite Resolve in April, which will include all of the upgrades originally intended for 5.0."
...did you check the CD?
My version came with the book that was only about 1/3 there, rest were stored on the CD in PDF format I think.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
its called Unreal Annihilation
and just fyi, Atari/Infogrames sold/leased the TA license to Phantagram Interactive, so the sequel in name is coming very soon.
Chris Taylor (the original designer) is also working on a spiritual successor, but that will come after Dungeon Siege 2 is released.
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
Wrong, the authors, despite having violated your copyright, still have copyright over their modifications. Without some sort of negotiation nobody can legally distribute the merged work.
I have a 1.33GHz Athlon, an nVidia GeForceFX 5600, and the bare essentials (crappy joystick) to run Falcon 4.0 (which I bought the week it was first released). I can tell you that my computer STILL struggles with the graphics engine if I crank everything all the way up. This game was completely ground-breaking in terms of realism when it first came out, and it is still an amazingly detailed game. It has a pretty steep learning curve (expect to do about 40 hours of flight training just to fly the plane properly in easy combat situations), but it has a truly robust combat 'theatre' mode where your missions directly affects (or indirectly affects, depending on the situation) the overall campaign to neutralize the enemy forces. The 'net connection code still remains a rather pathetic process of finding players online, but I haven't played with that in a couple years so the hackers may have made a lot of improvements over the years.
The AI is pretty advanced too. Former and then-current F-16 fighter pilots test flew the crap out of the game engine before it was released as well as acted as a big part of the development process, so you know this sim is realistic.
I should reload this game and play with it on WinXP (if I can) again. If you want to see your fancy video card put out some amazing in-game 3D graphics, load up Falcon 4.0.
If only they could release a ground war FPS game on par with Falcon 4.0, I'd be in gaming heaven.