KA-52 Team Alligator: Interview - Page 1/1


Created on 2005-02-08

Title: KA-52 Team Alligator: Interview
By: Len 'Viking1' Hjalmarson
Date: 1999-06-07 2353
Flashback: Orig. Multipage Version
Hard Copy: Printer Friendly

Somewhere around late June, 1998, SIMIS and Mindscape/SSI released Team Apache (TA), a unique approach to a military helicopter simulation. The emphasis was on "team," and managing your team was a simulation in itself, much like the role-playing "simulations" that are popular with Japanese console gamers.

In TA each member of your team had a series of aptitudes and weaknesses. The challenge was to pair pilots and gunners with complimentary skills and personalities and use them to their maximum potential. This involves being sure that you can get them enough sack time, deal with the occasional crisis, and still be able to field enough able men and machines to accomplish your mission and hopefully win the war. The outcome of specific missions and the progress of the campaign in general has effects on not only the morale issues, but can have a great deal to do with the player's status as a commander.

Team management even extended to your resources and crew chief. Bringing back damaged birds every time you flew made the crew chief owly. And if you had seriously damaged choppers and no new supply, you were cannabilizing units to keep others in the air.

Unlike role-playing games, though - there were no sheets of statistics to tell you what each man was capable of or how they were feeling. You had to infer that from their personal files, how they responded to you, and how well they performed in battle. Balancing all those needs was tricky but offered a unique perspective in combat simulations.

Team Apache
Team Management in Team Apache

Team Apache also offered a dynamic and persistent environment. Destroyed vehicles from previous missions littered the battlefield as the unit progressed forward. Losing a pilot brought up a screen with the player/commander writing home to his family. Certain incidents were "remembered" by Operations personnel and came up to bite the player in the butt at a later date. The suspension of disbelief was achieved by appealing to the player from a personal side, as well as immersing him in a very dynamic environment of cause and effect.

Apache units themselves were viewed and employed as a "big stick", with a company of 6 aircraft possessing more than enough firepower to dispatch an armored battalion. As a result, they were typically used in 5 or 6-ship elements. However, many missions required the player to divide up the company in smaller elements to "fight fires" that crop up unexpectedly.

Team Apache

The graphics engine was state of the art at the time, and was impressive to say the least. Here are some notes from Neil Mouneimne's review:

Team Apache

Some aspects of that detail merit special attention. For example, when you hover just above the ground, rings of "dust" are blown across the ground. From an external view, when the cockpit isn't reflecting light back at you, you can see the Apache crew inside looking around for targets. The rotors, chain gun, and optics suite are all nicely animated.

There is a scattering of individual trees that you need to avoid, although they are more for show than for tactics. Entire downtown cities are modeled where you can play chicken between the skyscrapers, stalk down city streets, or land on the roof of a building and take a breather. (Fortunately, the collision detection is accurate enough that you can fly right in between buildings, lampposts, houses, and trees - as long as you don't actually hit anything)

The rocket motor glow in the back of a FFAR, Hellfire, or Stinger is a nice touch. Enemy tracer fire glows brightly, streams well, and looks positively dangerous. The infrared sights are also very impressive - not only do you get the "image halo" as in Longbow 2, but you get a very believable "washout" when an explosion blinds your sights temporarily. The effect is very similar to looking a little too close to a camera flash.

Does this mean the graphics are superior to Longbow 2? Yes and no. It's really apples and oranges. Team Apache boasts a much smoother framerate, has some nicer special effects, very impressive urban areas, and has that "workstation" look to it…

With that history in mind, we contacted the Team Alligator crew to discover where Team Alligator will build on the early product, and where it will seek to diverge or move beyond the standard previously set.

Q: Thanks for taking the time to connect with us. Team Apache was a great game and appealed to a broad cross section of sim fans. The greatest appeal was perhaps the graphics engine itself. Where will Team Alligator move beyond the earlier engine? What will we see that will tell us this is a new standard?

A: Thanks for the complements, though like any group of creatives we are probably our own harshest critics when it comes to previous products like Apache. In Team Alligator we've moved from our old Icarus graphics engine to our new Daedalus engine, which has opened up a whole new realm of graphics capability for us and allows us to do things no helicopter sim has done before.

The problem we had with the old engine was one common to most helicopter sims: that of adapting an engine originally designed for jet sims to a helicopter game. One of the biggest flaws was that the terrain resolution was simply too coarse. What works well for a jet sim, flying at ten kilometres a minute does not work for helicopter flying one kilometre in the same time.

Team Alligator

The terrain resolution, the environment, is crucial in a helicopter game. Helo players look for subtle wrinkles in the terrain to hide behind; they look for trees and buildings to use as cover. They are flying at less than treetop height, so you need to build a whole convincing world at ground level for them to fight in. In a helicopter sim you need a world about as detailed as that of a tank sim. But you also need it to cover a much larger area to allow for the helicopter's greater speed and range.

That's a demanding set of parameters. You want a large world, but you want it detailed. And that's what our new Daedalus engine delivers. It allows us to put a lot of polygons on the screen at any one time. In turn this has permitted us to create a detailed terrain system with very fine ground resolution, and let us populate the world with convincing trees, buildings, telegraph poles, you name it. Special effects too. We now have the tools to create an authentic working environment for helicopters to fly and fight in.

Team Alligator

Q: Tell us about environmental bump mapping? How is it employed and what does it accomplish?

A: Environmental bump mapping is currently only supported by the Matrox G400, and is an incredibly clever way of achieving greater detail in game graphics without using extra polygons. There are a variety of different bump mapping solutions Team Alligator will be using, and environmental bump mapping is only one of them.

Bump-mapping works by moving parts of a texture (a texel, which is one pixel in a texture) around in relation to lights. This simulates bumps with respect to lighting.

Emboss bump-mapping draws the polygon twice, once with the texture as normal and a second time it 'subtracts' the bump-map from the original, which darkens the texture in 'bumpy' areas- to simulate shadow. In addition, on this second 'pass' the bump-map texture is shifted a few texels in relation to the direction of a light, which means the shadowy areas can move as the light moves.

Team Alligator
Pre Bump Mapped Ka52

Environmental bump-mapping is performed by applying a texture on which the light is drawn (e.g. a white specular highlight) to the normal texture. This means the shiny highlights only brighten the bumpy areas of texels facing the light source. This is used to simulate ripples on water, heat hazes, etc.

Q: What APIs will be supported and what will be the maximum resolution?

A:We will be supporting only Direct 3D, and at the moment we are undecided as to the maximum resolution but we have run up to 1280x1024 without major problems. However, Ka52 looks gorgeous at 640x480, so there's no problem for players with lower end machines.

Q: How configurable will this engine be in terms of detail level and features?

A: The largest challenge for the team making Ka52 Team Alligator is one of technology scaling. We are making a product here which has to excel on both a P200 with a 4Mb 3D card as well as on a Pentium 3 600 or so, with a G400 or similar top end card.

As such we are designing the game with a whole raft of options and features which can be turned on or off depending on the power of the machine running the sim. Additionally, the graphics engine dynamically calculates the number of polygons to draw each frame based on the current performance of the PC Alligator is running on. This means that the poly-count will rise and fall to keep the frame rate at an acceptable level.

Team Alligator Vista
Vista in Team Alligator

Q: The Ka52 helicopter that I saw at E3 was graphically stunning, yet I was told it wasn't finished. What difference will I see next time?

A: You're too kind. The list of additions to the game between the E3 demo and the final product is almost endless. We are still pre-Alpha. The version you saw was the bare 'vanilla-flavoured' graphics engine and terrain system with very few special effects (no, honest!); we've hardly begun to add in all the neat lighting effects, dust 'brown out' effects, battlefield smoke and other goodies. You really ain't seen nothin' yet!

Q: How much detail will go into object animation? Will we see turrets moving, guns elevating, rocket flares, tracer fire, men popping out of hatches?

A: The answer to all of these is 'yes'. To which you can add animated infantrymen, moving cockpit crew and sensor turrets on the helicopters, aircraft undercarriage action and some pretty cool explosion animations. Our 3D cockpit alone has dozens of animations: levers; switches; control pedals, cyclic and collective; and a fully-animated weapons officer in the right-hand seat!

Team Alligator
Ka52 Alligator

Q: The "team" in Team Apache was the heart of the sim. How does Team Alligator compare?

A: We have quite a similar mechanism for Team Alligator, though we have rationalised many aspects of the team management. We've also expanded it; whereas in Team Apache the player only managed a team in the campaign, in Alligator you can create a 'crew file' and fly that team in the stand-alone combat missions too. The aircrew's improvement and advancement is much more visible than before. If you recruit a guy for your unit and fly him for long enough without dying, you will see him advance all the way up the ranks from a Mladshiy Leytenant (2nd Lieutenant) up to Polkovnik (Colonel).

Q: The "team" aspect, while a unique component of Team Apache, was also confusing to many players. Is there a way to compensate for this in gameplay for less interested weekend sim pilots?

A: Yup. As in Team Apache, there will be the facility to simply ignore the team management and fly missions or campaigns with a default aircrew.

Q: For those who took the time to learn the ropes, the "team" component provided a new level of immersion. I remember the first time I noticed that a particular team mate was NOT into formation flying while another had a habit of shooting at anything that moved. I paid more attention to my team the next time and had much better results. I felt like an actual commander! How has this aspect of the game been received by most of Team Apaches' fans?

A: A lot of people liked this and really got into the whole Company Commander deal. (Though there were a few for whom the crew voices and dialogues grated.) Some players were even picking up some of the more subtle features we had built into the mechanism, such as the compatibility between the various aircrew. That feature survives, by the way.

There will be some pilot/weapons officer combinations where the guys just click, and some where they don't work well together. It'll be up to players to find these out, though some time in the future we might publish a 'cheat sheet' giving away the combinations.

Oh yeah, and we're getting the voices right this time. We have a number of Russian speakers and a Russian intelligence expert helping us get the dialogue authentic. You will even be able to fly the missions in Russian!

Q: Let's talk about weapon systems and targeting. I remember my first flights in Team Apache. I was frustrated because it was much more difficult to retain a target lock than in Longbow II. Later I spoke to a military chopper pilot who told me that the modelling was more realistic in Team Apache. Will we see similar modelling in Team Alligator?

A: One of our eternal frustrations with other helicopter sims has been the poor or perfunctory battlefield modelling we keep on encountering. They have targets that are always easy to see and track; weapons with phenomenal accuracy and kill rates; almost no attempt to model passive or active target defences at all. They create worlds in which everything works perfectly and in which enemies line themselves up for death like ducks in a shooting gallery.

We have infantrymen in Team Alligator. Ever seen an infantryman in the field? With very little effort he can make himself invisible at 5 metres. So how can anyone, in a noisy rattling helicopter, expect to see him at 5 kilometres, or 500 metres, or even 50? It doesn't happen. In real life, finding targets, even something as large as a tank, is *hard*. Tracking them for a shot without mechanical aids is *hard*. It's why combat aviators get paid the big bucks.

Now, some of that difficulty we simply can't translate into Team Alligator; PC screen resolutions are just not high enough to let the player search for targets by eye. But even with the mechanical aids we provide, such as the 'silicon weapons officer', the radar and the Shkval tracker, you will find it tricky to find these guys and retain a firing solution on them when you do. And we apologise if that causes some petty frustrations, but that's life! If you want realism you are going to have to deal with it.

By the way, our bad guys won't take things lying down. Not only will they shoot back at you, but they will lay smokescreens that will make your laser missiles worthless, or they'll have radar-directed devices like Arena for shooting down missiles. They'll have reactive armour on the glacis plate that stops your HEAT warhead dead. And they won't just rollover and die because you say so.

Team Alligator
Note the vehicles top right.

Q: Even spotting targets was very different in Team Apache. If I flew over the jungle at 100 knots I missed everything, but when I slowed down I was more vulnerable but picked up many targets. These constant tradeoffs are challenging, but very realistic. Is this still the philosophy in Team Alligator?

A: Everything's a tradeoff isn't it? Speed for life; the vulnerability of a hover for the ability to search and track. A good combat aviator knows there's a time and a place for each of these. There's a lot of this sort of thinking behind Team Alligator and we hope players will pick up on it.

Team Alligator
Ka52 Alligator

Our job as modellers and designers is not to make the player's job easy, it's to make it *hard*. We want the player to use correct tactics and consider the tradeoffs they need to make for each tactic; to make them think *ahead* of time as to what's going to happen at that next ridge or the next tree line.

As in Team Apache, we've put the emphasis in the game on tactical difficulty. We want the players to *fight*, and fight smart; we didn't want Alligator to be a dry exercise in systems management, which so many sims seem to be moving toward these days.

Q: Team Apache introduced weather effects in a big way, including some incredible storms with lightning, fog and rain. How will Team Alligator follow on these advances?

A: With better effects, more convincing-looking weather, and modelling that impacts the battlefield, such as sensors. I can't really say much more that that. Wait until you've seen the demo, our weather effects speak for themselves.

Q: Since we are flying a Russian helicopter we are going to see some new weapons. What are they?

A: The Alligator carries weapons that are fairly familiar to helo sim fans: the cannon; the laser-guided anti-tank missile; the rocket pod; the lightweight infrared air-to-air missile. But one of the nice things about this bird is that, unlike the Apache, it also carries some 'big boys' toys'. These include the Kh-25ML laser-guided missile, capable of taking on bridges and bunkers; the 122 mm demolition rocket; and the 500 kilogram bomb.

Team Alligator

Q: Russian doctrine for helicopter combat must vary somewhat from NATO doctrine. Do the differences impact gameplay in Team Alligator?

A: They do, but in subtle ways. The Russians tend to mix their formations more than NATO forces do. They lack dedicated scout helicopters, so tend to use gunships in this role. They are also more likely to mass forces; they still regard the helicopter very much as a 'flying tank'.

However, the Ka-52 represents a new direction for the Russians, and they don't appear to have completely formulated a new doctrine to accommodate it. It is referred to as an 'intellectual support helicopter', and it's clear the aircraft is designed to operate in support of other aircraft, providing command as well as firepower support.

Q: Sound modelling in Team Apache was one area that could be improved. What sound APIs will be supported for Team Alligator and how will this impact game play?

A: Our biggest problem with Team Apache was that we simply had *too much* sound in it! Only the fastest machines could cope with the sheer quantity available, and that in turn affected quality. We will be using all the features of the latest Direct Sound, including the environmental filters where appropriate (eg echoes in canyons, muffled sounds in snow and rain, etc).

Q: We have recently seen some excellent flight modelling in Apache Havoc. Flight modelling was a sore point for the more serious sim pilots with Team Apache. Can you compare the characteristics modelled in Team Apache to those that are modelled in Team Alligator?

A: We were frankly surprised at the hostility we received from the hardcore fraternity for the flight model on Team Apache. We admit it: we built the FM for accessibility. With the agreement of our Apache advisors (including Desert Storm vets) a few compromises were made, but it was because we were trying to get Joe Public to pick up this game (something which we did with some success) and overcome the mystique that helicopters were hard to master.

But we admit, we were stung by the criticism, however unwarranted we felt it was. So earlier this year, we began a debate in the COMBATSIM.COM™ forums, talking to the hardcore about what they wanted. The subject of flight modelling came up repeatedly, and we listened. We made some contacts through that discussion that has resulted in some of your readers now actively helping us out with the development and testing of the flight model. We hope the results will show.

We will continue to retain the Team Apache 'simple' flight model in Alligator as a novice option. But we will also have a 'realistic' option which in turn will have selectable features so that players can choose effects such as phase lag, retreating blade stall and vortex ring state on or off.

Players will be able to decide precisely what level of realism they want. For example, if vortex ring state keeps on slamming them into the ground all the time, they can switch it off. We are quietly confident that our flight modelling will lead the field by the time the sim is released.

Q: Low level flight means that terrain is critical. What is the terrain resolution in Team Alligator and what kinds of terrain will we see?

A: As stated earlier, our new Daedalus engine allows us to throw a lot of polygons, objects and texture around. However, we've had to be careful, trying to find a good balance of elements to ensure the terrain not only looks good, but runs fast.

Team Alligator

Our terrain runs on an adaptive mesh that will alter itself to match the speed of your machine. On high spec machines, terrain polygon sizes are measured in centimetres! As you've already seen in the demo, our art team has done a marvellous job creating terrain textures with contrast and depth of field that provides a real feeling of low-level flight. (And they tell us they want to go back and make it even *better*!) The rivers and bodies of water in the sim have to be seen to be believed.

Q: Low level flight means that terrain is critical. What is the terrain resolution in Team Alligator and what kinds of terrain will we see?

A: As stated earlier, our new Daedalus engine allows us to throw a lot of polygons, objects and texture around. However, we've had to be careful, trying to find a good balance of elements to ensure the terrain not only looks good, but runs fast.

Our terrain runs on an adaptive mesh that will alter itself to match the speed of your machine. On high spec machines, terrain polygon sizes are measured in centimetres! As you've already seen in the demo, our art team has done a marvellous job creating terrain textures with contrast and depth of field that provides a real feeling of low-level flight. (And they tell us they want to go back and make it even *better*!) The rivers and bodies of water in the sim have to be seen to be believed.

Team Alligator
Team Alligator: Town

We are dressing the campaign areas with thousands upon thousands of objects, from buildings to trees to telegraph poles. Which reminds us: we have a bone to pick. Your correspondent at E3 who commented that we didn't have "tactically useful trees" in our demo obviously didn't stick around long enough to check out our huge forest objects, which are about as tactically useful as you can get!

We officially apologize and repent. I remember seeing the trees and they did look great, but obviously not all of us saw them- Ed.

One thing we are not doing, however, is creating any cities. We thought long and hard about this. The problem with cities is simply size; there are many good technical reasons why we can't create a full-scale city at high resolution with the technology currently available. Look at Apache Havoc or even our own Team Apache. These are the best anyone has yet achieved, but they are too small; a little piece of downtown with no suburb. They look phoney.

So we are boxing clever. We are not aiming to produce convincing cities. Instead we are facing up to the surprisingly more difficult challenge of building a convincing town. And believe us, that's a really tough task!

Q: The campaign in Team Apache was essentially a semi-dynamic one, with a persistent environment but branching mission structure. Is this also the case with Ka52?

A: It certainly is. There are tradeoffs involved with going for a scripted mission environment or a fully-dynamic one. Both have their adherents, but we are not convinced anyone can yet produce a genuinely accurate and satisfying dynamic campaign. We are convinced that there's nothing to beat a really well-crafted mission; for variety, breadth and balance it is the best. Until the shortcomings of the dynamic campaign can be overcome, scripting remains the way forward.

However, we have moved forward to a halfway house with our semi-dynamic campaign mechanism. We are able to employ features such as persistence of death and sophisticated flagging techniques to create a replayable campaign around a branching mission structure. We are creating literally hundreds of missions for the campaigns. Players should be able to get at least two or three playings out of each campaign, which by our reckoning is pretty good value for anyone's money!

Q: How many campaigns will be modelled and what is the setting?

A: We have two campaigns: Belarus and Tajikistan. Belarus is set against a background of the collapse of the Russo-Belarus Pact in the face of nationalist sentiment. Tajikistan deals with an uprising by the Islamist opposition against the regime in Dushanbe.

Team Alligator

The Belarus campaign is a high-intensity war set amid rolling European terrain against a competent Russian-equipped Belarusian army. The Tajikistan game takes place in the harsh hills and lush river valleys of southern Tajikistan. This will be a low-intensity campaign against hill-fighters every bit as tough as the old Afghan Mujahedin.

We will have a third area, Siberia, for the training missions and as a setting for many of the networked missions.

Q: Tell us about damage and physics modelling?

A: The full-force physics modelling will see the player get battered around the sky, as in Team Apache. We have a number of physical effects we hope will impress people. As for the damage, we are taking the sophisticated damage modelling of Team Apache a few steps further in resolution and detail.

Team Alligator

One thing to note is that we have expended quite an amount of effort on modelling the warhead/ armour interaction in this sim. In the absence of top attack weapons, attacking main battle tanks from the front may not be a tactically sound option; you'll need to scoot around to the sides or rear.

We distinguish between various grades of steel and composite armour, as well as first- and second-generation Explosive Reactive Armour. We also distinguish between types of warhead, from kinetic energy rounds such as HVAPFSDS and APDU to chemical energy ammunition such as HEAT and Tandem warheads.

Q: The AI in Team Apache sometimes appeared quirky. Tell us about AI modelling in Ka52, both for friendly pilots and enemies.

A: The helicopter AI has been one of the big areas of improvement and redesign in Alligator. We use a similar mechanism for both good guys and bad guys. When planning a mission you will have waypoints with a number of parameters, such as orders and actions on contact with the enemy. You will also have to specify Rally Points: fallback areas for the team.

In flight, the player will be able to override these standing orders with commands of their own. We learned a lot from Team Apache and now have quite a powerful set of orders which allows players to order their team easily into and out of the battle. We believe we've even cracked the difficult goal in AI design: the ability to have helicopters operate at true Nap-of-Earth heights.

Team Alligator

Q: The command structure in Team Apache was seen as too limited by some pilots. Tell us about the goals for Team Alligator.

A: You mean that the Team Apache player was limited to commanding their own Apache team? Let me put your mind at rest. The new AI system permits the player to command mixed formations and co-ordinate multiple flights in the mission. Up to 16 helicopters under player control, plus interaction with fixed wing assets and ground forces!

Team Alligator

Q: Tell us about the mission builder/planner for Team Alligator.

A: At the moment these exist purely as tools for our games designers. They are not convenient or stable enough to release with the game. We might release them separately at some future date, but there's no plans to do so at the moment.

Q: With the goal of more appeal to serious players, how will Ka52 remain accessible to the novice?

A: We have the ability to set a simple flight model, and most of the basic weapons functionality is automated enough for the novice to pick up the game very quickly. We have an instant action mission for the player who wants to get stuck in within moments of opening the box, but also a comprehensive set of training missions for the studious newcomer who wants to learn.

Q: Tell us about any changes to the view system compared to Team Apache?

A: We have a similar suite of views to Team Apache, and are adding a padlock view, since that seems to be desired by many people. One of the principal differences is that we no longer have a 2D cockpit; only a 3D option. That cockpit is hugely detailed, containing various instruments, multi-function displays, and even an animated weapons officer.

Q: The direction for sim design these days seems to be interoperability. Does SIMIS have any plans for connectable simulations?

A: Yes, but not with this product. It is something we are looking at seriously for future games.

Q: What are the goals for online play: number of players in which environment?

A: We are looking at six players for the co-operative missions, with up to eight players in the deathmatch missions. Siberia will be the setting for the death matches, with the other campaign areas available for co-operative combat missions and the campaign.

Q: What will be the minimum and recommended system for Ka52?

A: Minimum spec is a P200 with 32 Mb RAM and a 4 Mb accelerated graphics card. Recommended spec will be a 300 - 400 MHz machine, with 64 Mb RAM and an 8 Mb graphics card.

Team Alligator

Q: Tell us about any changes to the view system compared to Team Apache?

A: We have a similar suite of views to Team Apache, and are adding a padlock view, since that seems to be desired by many people. One of the principal differences is that we no longer have a 2D cockpit; only a 3D option. That cockpit is hugely detailed, containing various instruments, multi-function displays, and even an animated weapons officer.

Q: The direction for sim design these days seems to be interoperability. Does SIMIS have any plans for connectable simulations?

A: Yes, but not with this product. It is something we are looking at seriously for future games.

Team Alligator

Q: What are the goals for online play: number of players in which environment?

A: We are looking at six players for the co-operative missions, with up to eight players in the deathmatch missions. Siberia will be the setting for the death matches, with the other campaign areas available for co-operative combat missions and the campaign.

Q: What will be the minimum and recommended system for Ka52?

A: Minimum spec is a P200 with 32 Mb RAM and a 4 Mb accelerated graphics card. Recommended spec will be a 300 - 400 MHz machine, with 64 Mb RAM and an 8 Mb graphics card.

Q: Thanks. Team Alligator is looking and sounding great and we're sure it will be a new landmark for helo sims in '99!



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