Hello fellow Falconeers, it’s been a while. Again ?
After U2, we decided to take a longer release cycle for two reasons:
U2 was good enough in terms of stability;
Devs were all tired after several short release cycles.
And I’m glad we did that. Personally, I had the chance to go to Europe and meet in person some of my fellow coders and devs. I had a great week there and many thanks for my European friends who took some time to host me!
Personally, I took some time away from Falcon, didn’t code much and only worked on reviews during this time. Which was great to recharge my batteries. But now I’m back to coding as well.
So, where are we?
First, I will talk about the two points that I consider critical for the U3 release.
F15 dev keeps progressing, new radar modes, MFDs and HUD functionalities are all being worked on. From my side, I am working on the F15 radio, which is a bit different from the F16 one. There has also some nice additional work being done on the 3d cockpit.
Database format change (from LOD to BML). This was one of my main concerns towards New Terrain, so the sooner we do this transition, the better. As usual, there are some bugs: transparency issues and wrong polygon orientation we are working on. But the database is mostly working and is already playable.
Is that all?
No, there are some other unrelated changes which are not key for this release but will be included as well. Bug fixes, as usual, but some features as well:
fragmentation damage
improved models
campaign brain changes (this is a big one!)
xinput support
initial implementation of other aircrafts…
When?
I was expecting a release between June and July, but we still have some ground to cover. I think end of July is more reasonable, due to the F15 progress, but we will see. Again, no promises, this is a best effort estimate ?