Just as I finish my reviews of the ATF games Raging Tiger and The Falklands War 1982, word comes that ProSIM is done with the engine. Their new games will use the Air Assault Task Force (AATF) engine. Their Arab-Israeli Wars game The Star and the Crescent uses a modified ATF, but their Afghanistan game will be remade to work with the new engine.
The ATF engine was good for what it was. It takes a while to learn, and I have less time to learn really complicated things these days, but once I got my head around it, the power of ATF was immediately obvious.
Like many engines, it tries to be all things to all people. By focusing on smaller engagements at a platoon level it can fool the eye better than, say, Norm Koger’s stuff, where every combat feels identical after a while. There aren’t really a lot of user created scenarios for the ATF games in spite of the editor, which is no more cumbersome than many other editors out there.
So, a fond farewell to the ATF. Here’s hoping that ProSIM keeps making hardcore wargames, but also that they find a way to make them more accessible to a wider audience.
There is a demo of Star and Crescent available at the Shrapnel site.
I saw this blog post and just wanted to make clear that we are not abandoning the ATF Engine.
1. We have built Air Assault Task Force to be fully backwards compatible with the ATF Engine scenarios (user made and release). You can even install the new game over our older games and instantly upgrade them to the newer version.
2. We have just released new patches for all our older titles. see http://www.shrapnelgames.com to download them.
3. Our design goal with AATF was to make the interface easier to learn and use. Combined with the backwards compatibility we described above, we think this breathesnew life into the older series.
PAT PROCTOR
President, ProSIM Company
http://www.prosimco.com