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Wings Over Flanders Fields - the CombatAce Review, part 2
By 33LIMA,
Wings Over Flanders Fields - the CombatAce Review, part 2
The Planeset
WOFF comes with an impressive planeset - fifty-five aircraft, albeit this includes some close variants. All of them are flyable. The two-seaters come with an observer's cockpit to which you can jump to man the defensive gun or guns carried there, leaving an AI pilot to fly the aircraft. Here's the list of planes, grouped by the maker's nationality. The British and US flew many French types, while the French flew the British Sopwith Strutter. WOFF includes all the flyables from OFF and its 'Hat in the Ring' expansion, plus eight new aircraft, which have been marked below with an asterisk. German (C- and CL-types=2-seaters, D- & E-types='scouts'/fighters): Albatros D II; Albatros D III (early), D III, D III (OAW); Albatros D V (early), D V (later), D Va, D Va (200hp); Fokker E III 'eindekker'; Fokker Dr I 'dreidekker'; Fokker D VII, D VII (OAW), D VIIF; Fokker E V/D VIII; Halberstadt D III; Pfalz D IIIa, Aviatik C I *; DFW C V; Hannover CL III; LFG Roland C II; Rumpler C IV * French: Morane L 'parasol' *; Nieuport 11; Nieuport 16; Nieuport 17 (two versions); Nieuport 17 bis; Nieuport 23; Nieuport 24 (two versions); Nieuport 24 bis (two versions); Nieuport 28; SPAD VII; SPAD XIII British (RAF=Royal Aircraft FACTORY): Bristol Scout D; Bristol F2B Fighter (2-seat); DH2 (early), DH2; RAF FE2b; RAF BE2c (early) *, BE2c (trainer) *, BE2c (Lewis); RAF BE12 *; RAF SE5 *, SE5a, SE5a Wolesley Viper; RAF RE8; Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter (single- & 2-seaters); Sopwith Pup; Sopwith Triplane, 2-gun Triplane; Sopwith Camel; Sopwith Snipe * The most significant addition here is a pair of two-seaters which help fill out the early-war planeset. First, there's a Morane type L 'parasol' used by both the RFC and the French Aéronautique Militaire in 1914-15 and which is a passable stand-in for the later LA, LAS and P models, into 1916. An unlicensed copy served with the Germans in small numbers at the Pfalz AI! Then there's the German Aviatik C I. This is a slightly unusual aeroplane. The C-type machines were the first German planes built (in any numbers) to carry a machine gun, sensibly moving the pilot from the previously-universal rear position to the front seat. This left the observer to his rear with a good field of fire. Evidently, nobody told Aviatik, for their C-type machine kept the observer in front, between the wings. Not only that, but instead of a ring mount, he had only a pair or rails, one each side of his cockpit, between which he had to shift his 'Parabellum' machine gun. Crews of later C-types will have been relieved that this feature was not repeated in subsequent designs! The WOFF Aviatik C I gives the observer a non-standard gun each side, likely because animating gun-switching would have been problematic. I think it would be fair to say that - excluding the first ten months or so of WW1, before air combat as such really got under way - the main gaps in the WOFF planeset are the British DH4 day bomber; a representative 1916-17 French 2-seater, like the Farman F.40 'pusher' or the Nieuport 12; and a 1918 French two-seater like the Breguet 14 or Salmson 2A2. Hopefully, these - and perhaps a Belgian air force mod - will be the subject of an expansion pack, although the sexier but less useful Gotha bomber has apparently pushed its way to the front of that line! Graphics & Sound This is where some of the biggest improvements have been made, compared to Over Flanders Fields. As a study of the screenshots in this review and elsewhere will show, ground textures and scenery would do any flightsim proud, even at the low detail settings I had to use. Terrain textures include effective seasonal variations. My only minor gripe would be that the tonal contrast in summer between the dark, grassy fields and the much paler corn or wheat fields is rather too great. Different weather states are effectively conveyed and you can set things in the 'Workshops' so that, when you fly in a campaign, you get the weather they had on the actual day. The First World War seems to have had many periods of bad weather, all in all. So if you use the 'Historical weather' setting, you can expect to be told that flying has been cancelled for the day, from time to time! Railways and major roads still have angular bends, but many rivers are now more realistically depicted, even though their water textures are still pretty basic. Apparently, compared to OFF, there are fewer little villages dotted around, though it's not especially noticeable. Clouds are not volumetric but are often still impressive. A cloud mod by Arisfuser offers significant improvements; it's available on the WOFF site's 'Third-party mods' page, here. The aircraft textures have been given a comprehensive overhaul, and like the ground textures, are now generally exquisite. Gone are the rather bland cockpits of OFF; instead, here's the sort of representation you get in WOFF: in this case, the Albatros D V. To my eye, it's well up to the high standards set by Rise of Flight: Externally, too, the WOFF aircraft textures are a great improvement. There's still the CFS3-style 'wide-angle lens' effect in the 'spot' (external) view, but the planes now look fantastic. A must-have mod is Ankor's DX9 mod which adds dynamic self-shadowing to WOFF's planes, inside and out. Some have this working in OFF and CFS3 but it crashes these, for me! Monoplanes can live without self-shadowing but biplanes really need it. Ankor's mod makes such a big improvement that OBD plans to incorporate it officially. For now, you can get it here. Screenshots alone can't do this mod justice, and even my sub-par system can cope with it. Another nice touch is that rotary engines now have a 'blip' switch, used to cut the ignition momentarily as a form of throttle control. 'Blip' your engine and you get a little puff of smoke or simulated unburnt fuel, followed - when you release the switch and the engine fires again - by a little flash of fire as the excess fuel burns off. Clever and rather brilliant! In the pic below, the puff of smoke has disappeared astern but you can just see the flames, below the Clerget rotary engine of my Camel. Aircraft and aircrew animation is really limited compared to Rise of Flight or First Eagles 2. Rotary engines and wheels rotate and control surfaces deflect, of course. And the pilots' heads all now seem to move slightly but noticeably, in harmony with elevator and aileron deflection. Aircrew don't look around and you won't see MG belts or cocking handles move. There are no animations (nor, I believe, reloading delays) for Lewis Guns or 'Parabellums', either. WOFF's observers are now better posed, though. Some of the 3d aircraft models have seen improvements over their OFF counterparts. For example the Pfalz D IIIa used to have an incorrectly drooping tailskid, but this has now been tucked up underneath. However, there is still some room for improvement, here and there. The SE5a's wings still look rather plank-like to me, seemingly bereft of adequate upper-surface camber and I think the wingtip profiles should be a little squarer. The SPAD VII still has the more rounded SPAD XIII rudder and elevators. The RE8 is missing some prominent rigging, between the wings. The BE2c's interplane struts are too far inboard. It is missing some flying and landing wires in between these struts, has imaginary inverted V struts on the upper wings, and a web of rigging between the base of the outer interplane struts and the upper wingtip which also did not exist. Mostly minor stuff but an update would be nice, especially for the BE2c as this features prominently in the Fokker Scourge Expansion Pack. EDIT, 23 April - Patch 1.24 has introduced improved BE2c and 2c 'early' models and textures, which I think take care of all the issues mentioned above! Here she is, now: Another move in the right direction - important for effective patrol-leading and air combat - is that while planes still appear to be rendered only up to about a mile and a half - twice that might be more realistic - you can now activate a new 'dot mode' (similar to distant aircraft rendering I've seen in IL-2) to make planes visible out to a distance you can select in the 'Workshops'. And the Level Of Detail models seem improved: too often in OFF (on my rig, anyway) the 'LOD' transitions could be fairly brutal, with aircraft visibly sprouting or losing detail like undercarriage, as they came closer or receded. Now, in WOFF, I'm hard put to notice transitions; planes look as they should at longer ranges. This in itself is a big improvement. You can turn on or off aircraft labels, as well as controlling their display range in the 'Workshops'. These labels now have white backgrounds, making them more readable, but also more obtrusive. They are perhaps most useful for such purposes as establishing the identity of the hot pilot who has just sent you plunging to your virtual doom. As WOFF campaigns feature historical aces, you may end up 'Under the Guns of the Red Baron', to borrow the title of the book of that name and indeed, flying or fighting with other aces from all sides, whose identities the labels can reveal - neat! As far as sounds are concerned, these really are much improved. In particular, engines not only vary from type to type but all now sound like real light aircraft. To get the best from them, I'd recommend upping the engines sound level in the 'Workshops' from the default 20% to 80% or so. As for machine guns, these now have a realistic, chunky report, which reminds me of the sound effect used in the Red Baron movie (which I thought did this very well, even though the movie's portrayal of the Rittmeister's life was a travesty!). Only RoF makes your rate of fire vary with propeller RPM but overall, to my ear, WOFF's engine and MG sounds are much the best of any WW1 sim. Amongst my favourites is the deep mechanical grumble of the Albatros D V's Mercedes which, when you cut loose, is complemented nicely by the batter of its twin Spandaus. When you pull the trigger, it sounds at first like one weapon is firing, then the second quickly cuts in, giving a nice high combined rate of fire. These sounds really help invest WOFF's beautiful planes with both life and character. The 'buffeting' sound which indicates an imminent stall was inaudible in OFF but can now be clearly heard. This is actually very important. For the first time, you get an indication that you are flying on the edge of the envelope, without having to clutter your screen with immersion-killing text messages. This little detail is a big plus during what they now call 'Air Combat Maneuvering' as it warns you not to pull that turn any tighter, and perhaps even to back it off and/or push your nose down a bit, lest you 'depart the envelope'! You don't get the additional, visible shudder that FE2 provides but WOFF's stall buffet sound does the job well enough. The main on-screen aid in CFS3, OFF and now WOFF is the Tactical Display or TAC, wryly referred to by folks like me as 'the radar' as that is - sort of - how it operates. Its appearance and function have been changed in WOFF - mostly for the better in my opinion. Its default range has been reduced to discourage the 'AWACS effect'. I tend to turn it on only as a navigation aid or - for combat - only when I really need it - to select a target, either to padlock it or to tell my flight to attack. The 'Attack!' command now requires you to select a target in the TAC before giving the order, at which point your flight, if you're the leader, will attack enemies near your target (but not your own). But we'll cover this a bit further on, when discussing the WOFF Artificial Intelligence, next in this review. The Air Combat Experience - Artificial Intelligence, Flight and Damage Models One of WOFF's most prominently-promoted features is 'brand new AI'. This is much-needed. Of the 'big three' sims, I always thought FE2 had much the best AI, with OFF lagging some way behind. For example, in an OFF dogfight at low level, it was as if terrain avoidance and air combat routines were fighting each other: near the deck, AI planes often made repetitive 'rollercoaster' moves, reminiscent of Red Baron 3d. And two-seater recce aircraft seemed to be a one-trick pony - fly level and shoot back. From fixed, widely-spaced formations, too, just like bombers in CFS3. And speaking of formations, if you were leading one, make the slightest turn and your AI flight-mates invariably slipped hopelessly wide, struggling to catch you up. So just how good is WOFF's new Artificial Intelligence? The answer, thank goodness, seems to be 'a whole lot better!' I haven't been playing WOFF that long but it's obvious we've got a whole new ball game here. Here's what I have seen, so far. If a dogfight goes low, it does so realistically - not right away, but with the underdogs tending to be forced down as they lose altitude, trying to escape or to regain the initiative. If and when a fight hits low levels, there is little or none of the old rollercoaster manoeuvring. Now, aircraft dip and turn like you'd expect to see from real planes flown by real pilots. Perhaps there are rather many barrel-rolls, but otherwise, it's much, much better. If you are on an enemy's tail, or are watching one under attack from a flight-mate, you will see much human-like behaviour. The enemy may seem to hesitate momentarily in a turn, then carry on. He may level off, as if he has lost sight of his attacker, only to break hard, if attacked again. He may try to escape back across the Lines, if damaged or finding himself outnumbered. I believe they can even just loose their nerve and run. Two-seater AI is also improved. Their formations definitely seem closer and more varied - for example, echelon instead of always in 'vic'. They may now break formation to evade or escape when pressed hard, instead of just flying on monolithically & returning fire. In the picture below, taken in a Quick Combat mission, my flight of Pfalz D IIIa aircraft - which type, incidentally, now has a much improved flight model, compared to OFF - is getting stuck into a formation of RE8s. Under attack, the RFC formation gradually broke up. One two-seater was shot down out of formation, early on. The left-hand RE8 then turned left, out of formation - you can see him above my left wingtip (I'm flying the Pfalz in the foreground). The flight leader - roughly above my nose - started weaving after he too was attacked, with the other RE flying stolidly ahead, just to his right. In OFF, this would have played out like 109s attacking B17s. Now, I don't see that it could look or feel much more realistic. It was a joy to behold, a WW1 air battle unfolding right in front of me, just as I imagine it should. Straight from the pages of the classic pilot autobiographies like 'No Parachute' or 'Wings of War'. Observers in two-seaters still seem to have a rather limited depression to their guns, leaving quite a large blind spot below. But if you change to the gunner's seat you will find that where before, your bullets would 'ghost' through any part of you plane's structure you could reach, your fire will now damage it, as it should. Formation-keeping - one of the real bug-bears of OFF - is like night and day. Now, in WOFF, your flight can keep up nicely in turns. Two-seaters and scouts/fighters do equally well here. Pull too tight a turn and you will lose them but that is entirely realistic. It's hard to exaggerate the improvement to the patrol-leading experience which this better formation-keeping delivers. I invariably fly with 'Always lead' selected in 'Workshops' to avoid the chore of formation-keeping and to give myself the additional tactical element of patrol-leading. So I can't say much about how the AI operates as flight leader. Forum feedback indicates some find this can sometimes produce strange situations, although these may just be attributable to the new AI being more human and not simply operating on that 'Attack EVERYTHING!' principle. As for wingman commands, these have been revised somewhat. You still have the same basic CFS3 set - A=attack, H=help me, S=split, R-rejoin (which you can re-assign, eg to joystick or HOTAS buttons), but some now work differently, as follows; 'A' key - this is still 'attack' but you must first turn on the TAC (if not already on) then tab to highlight/select a target, then hit 'A'. Your flight - and you have to be the leader, to issue this - will now attack enemies near your selected target but not your own. I think this also works with other target types besides aircraft, notably ground objects; 'S' key - instead of ordering your flight to split/extend formation, this tells them 'I'm going home (or off on my own); if I'm the leader, don't follow me, but carry on with the mission, under a new leader'. This is useful since before, if you were going down to a forced landing with a dud engine, your flight was liable to follow you down; 'R' key - this is no longer 'rejoin formation - which is default behaviour, anyway - it now means 'break off attacking ground targets'. There is also one new command - and it's a biggie. Ctrl+R orders a 'washout' as the RFC called it - in effect 'Mission is scrubbed, return to base, individually if necessary'. All very clever and a big improvement! Anti-aircraft fire - or 'Archie' in the RFC vernacular - may be said to have Artificial Intelligence, of a sort. This is a much better target indicator than it was in OFF. As before, black bursts denote German fire, whitish ones Entente. But now, while still not especially deadly, AA bursts track targets better and spread less around their mean point of aim. This makes it a lot easier to pick up and track targets from AA fire, much as it appears to have been in real life. In the screenshot below, from the Quick Combat Pfalz -vs- RE8 mission mentioned earlier, after shooting down one of the Englishmen I have picked up the remaining pair of retreating RE8s visually, just from the receding flak-bursts.This would have been much more difficult in OFF, due to the scatter of the bursts. The picture also illustrates the set of on-screen gauges available via the F5 command, which you can drag around individually, as well as turning on a 'no cockpit' view. This F5 view also comes with a (blue) text status read-out which you can drag about separately. You can also see the TAC in use here - the Tactical Display. This feature will be familiar to all players of the CFS series. It's a sort of situational awareness tool, which compensates in some respects for the limits of 'MonitorVision', where you have no peripheral vision, regardless of how you move your point of view around (hat-switch, in my case). Here, I have mouse-dragged the TAC to the top left of my screen - I usually keep it bottom left, to push off the lower screen the new text that now comes with the TAC. In this case, the text below the TAC describes my selected target, which is an RE8 which has just been shot down by a flight-mate (hence the text is in black). This text will also provide navigational and mission prompts, should you need them. A lot of work has obviously been put into making the TAC much more useful, should you feel the need for it. The only apparent negative as regards AA fire is that it still appears to be pretty vigorous and indiscriminate at lower levels. I can't confirm it but I suspect that many balloons burned on balloon-busting missions may - as in OFF - be busted by the defending flak! Not this one though - it was one of my own side's balloons and I collided with the b***er in my SE5, trying to give the boys in the basket a bit of excitement. I expect that I succeeded! A couple of other points are worth mentioning here. First, in 'Workshops', you can turn on an option 'AI always attacks'. This is useful if, flying as a wingman, you find the more realistic (but sometimes cautious) new AI seems insufficiently aggressive for your tastes. RFC ace Harry Hawker would doubtless have enabled this option, having enjoined his fellow DH2 pilots in the pioneer RFC No.24 fighter squadron to 'Attack EVERYTHING!' And though not strictly an AI issue, you can also enable random failures, so some of your flight may drop out eg with a dud engine. This was a VERY frequent occurrence in WW1 and though potentially frustrating, it's a highly realistic new option in WOFF. As for Flight Models, I'm no expert - my real-life stick time is limited to just under nine hours, all dual, in the Cessna 150/152/172. What I've found in WOFF so far is that many planes are (I believe realistically) tail-heavy, reminiscent of those in RoF. They can be trimmed with CFS3 controls, if you find this a strain or that it makes it too hard to control your aircraft. I fly with 'Wind - on' (as opposed to 'the wind up', which in RFC jargon meant something completely different!) and I assume this accounts for planes swaying gently, which is a nice effect, not overdone. There are a few things I find odd. For example I practiced stalls in a Nieuport 17, chopping the throttle and pulling back on the stick to keep the nose from dropping. When the stall came, the nose went down and the plane rolled right to about 40 degrees - then stopped rolling, quite sharply. Then my aircraft began to roll back level, and as the speed built up in the descent, the nose rose again. The aircraft seemingly unstalled itself, without a spin developing, in this rather odd-looking fashion. I could cause a spin, by applying right rudder as she stalled, in the classic fashion; recovery was easy enough, with some opposite rudder. Here are some more observations. Realistic or not, significantly more rudder is needed to balance turns than in either RoF or FE2 (modded). Without rudder, you often get pronounced tailslides, which can be hard to detect unless flying from the external view. When applied 'just right', rudder can produce some surprisingly tight turns. This is much as it was in OFF. However, it seems no longer possible to fly in many planes with my fuselage at 45 degrees to my direction of travel, by 'crossing' ailerons and rudder. In WOFF, this now realistically produces an inefficient, flat, skidding turn, in planes that could 'helicopter/windvane' before. The Camel, I found, turned better to the right, as she should. As in RoF, I didn't find her the vicious ride that I was half-expecting. Back in the Nieuport 17, I experienced a nice, not excessive implementation of what I took to be the phenomenon known as 'adverse yaw': in a left-hand turn, if I held the nose up too much maintaining too high an angle of attack, the plane rolled itself around, out of the turn. The Albatros D V flight model seems be be proving controversial but I've not found it objectionable; perhaps a bit more sluggish than I was used to in RoF or FE2. Reports are that it is rather slow, perhaps based on sources which report it as having an inferior performance to the heavier Albatros D III, which I have always found strange. Overall, my impression is that - plane for plane - WOFF's aircraft feel rather less tractable or responsive and somewhat harder to fly (and aim!) with precision, than their counterparts in either RoF or FE2 (modded). That may or may not be realistic - after all, difficulty does not necessarily equate to realism - but so far, I find the WOFF FMs to be perfectly acceptable and regard them as better than those of its predecessor in several respects. I would definitely agree with those who have said that rudder pedals would make life easier, though I'm plodding on with the 'twisty joystick/wrist strain' combination. Gunnery is obviously an important part of the air combat experience. On the negative side, I believe that WOFF still just gives you the full continuous ammo load for drum or spindle-fed weapons - the Lewis Gun and the German 'Parabellum'. There is no representation of reloading, I'm fairly sure: neither a time delay as in RoF and FE2, nor an animation as in RoF. On the plus side, you can now clear stoppages. In OFF, if you had these enabled in the 'Workshops', a jam would stop both weapons in a twin gun fighter and was impossible to clear. Now, stoppages affect individual weapons and there is a chance you can clear them in flight. So far, I have avoided stoppages by keeping bursts short. As for the results obtainable from air-to-air gunnery, perhaps it's down to my flying with unfamiliar FMs and no rudder pedals, but I find hits harder to get than in RoF or FE2. Either that, or the hits I get, do less damage! There is a 'Workshops' option to increase the player's gun lethality or accuracy, if you find this unsatisfactory. I must admit I'm tempted to try this, after an Albatros D V campaign mission which saw me pumping round after round into (or at!) a plucky Frenchman who flew his single-seat Sopwith Strutter like a fighter, only to end up colliding with him, after breaking off a firing pass too late! I did manage to nail one of his amis first, though: As for damage modelling, this was good in OFF but is now better again. You will still see minor airframe damage (like bulletholes) only if you don't have 'hi-res skins' enabled but there appear to be no more 'flying flamers' - aircraft set on fire which would fly on in that condition, seemingly endlessly. In the screenshot below, my Rumpler C IV has just had a lower wing shot off by attacking SE5s, showing the exposed ribs at the wing root...it's a long way down, from eighteen thousand feet! I followed her down to see if the Rumpler would break up under the strain of the long dive, as she probably should have done, but no joy there. Another positive is the aircraft wrecks, which are much improved. Remember that campaign I started in part 1, flying Bristol Fighters with 48 Squadron? Well, here's how that one ended up, thanks to some rather unfriendly Huns in V-strutted Albatrosses: The view system is also worth mentioning here, because WOFF has made some tweaks to the CFS3 approach. You still have to cycle through views to get to some of them and overall, it still doesn't seem to have the flexibility of FE2 or RoF. I'm not sure yet whether these tweaks represent anything more than changes from the stock key assignments, or whether there's something really new here, but I expect I'll work it out, in time. EDIT - I see there is now an 'experimental' free-roaming camera, accessed with the 'J' key and controlled via joystick and numpad (added with a patch, I believe). Gameplay Modes Ok, you've set up WOFF to your taste, in the "Workshops". You've created a pilot or two, and have selected your squadron, escadrille or staffel and thereby your aircraft. Now, it's time to get a slice of the action and find out how WOFF flies and fights! If you opted for 'Campaign Auto Deployment' (in the 'Enlistment Options' screen, seen in part 1 of the review) then you had the option of going through some initial training, first. This is new to WOFF, so how does it work? Well, let's take a look at that later, when considering campaign gameplay. Whether or not you took the training, you'd be well advised to start by getting some 'stick time' in your chosen aircraft using the 'Quick Combat' option. Only one of your pilots can be 'active' at any one time and it's his nationality's planes that you'll be able to fly here. French pilot active, and want to fly a Hannover? Go back to 'Pilot Dossiers' from the main menu, and activate a German pilot, instead. When you select Quick Combat from the main menu screen, here's what you'll be offered. This is for one of my British pilots, flying for the Royal Flying Corps (which became the RAF only on 1 April 1918). As you can see, it's possible to select free flight or different types of combat mission from a drop-down list. Options include attacks on balloons and different ground targets, as well as air combats. You can also select your flight's aircraft type and your foe's, as well as choose 'skins' for them. Many of the parameters here are new to WOFF, including the facility to specify a 'top cover' flight for you and/or your immediate opposition. In short, WOFF 'QC' is a heavily-featured instant mission generator: not only useful to hone your flying and shooting skills before you really go to war on campaign, but a great way to experience air combat in WOFF and check out its many flyable aircraft. Don't forget to tick the box 'Pilot never dies', centre left, as you likely won't want your precious pilots killed off, when you're just practicing! Usefully, WOFF has the option to save a Quick Combat mission you have created here, for future use ('Save as Scenario'). Another option available from the main menu screen is Quick Scenarios. This comprises a set of pre-defined missions, and is presumably where you can also pick up any mission set-ups you have saved from Quick Combat (and possibly, any third party missions). On a quick count, there are seven Quick Scenarios by default: balloon busting, bombing an airfield, intercepting DFW 2-seaters, Morane parasol recce, an interception, and two different dogfights. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself at the front, on campaign, flying over or near the famous trench-lines. Campaign mode is the beating heart of the WOFF experience. Probably, you'll know the form. If you're flying a fighting aeroplane for France, Britain or the USA, you'll expect to operate mostly over the Lines or in enemy airspace, patrolling in indirect support of your own side's 'working aeroplanes' - the two-seaters. Later in the war, ground attack missions may become a regular feature. If flying for Germany as a fighter/scout pilot, you'll expect to fly defensively, over your own territory. In a two-seater with any side, you can expect to fly reconnaisance or artillery observation missions; the latter near the Lines, the former over them or deeper into enemy territory. You might also draw bombing missions, or perhaps some infantry co-operation work. In a nutshell, that's how the WW1 air war played out, at least from about 1915-16 when it really got into gear. So...just how well does Wings Over Flanders Fields deliver this experience to your PC? Coming in part 3 - campaigns, pros & cons and the verdict.
WOFF comes with an impressive planeset - fifty-five aircraft, albeit this includes some close variants. All of them are flyable. The two-seaters come with an observer's cockpit to which you can jump to man the defensive gun or guns carried there, leaving an AI pilot to fly the aircraft. Here's the list of planes, grouped by the maker's nationality. The British and US flew many French types, while the French flew the British Sopwith Strutter. WOFF includes all the flyables from OFF and its 'Hat in the Ring' expansion, plus eight new aircraft, which have been marked below with an asterisk. German (C- and CL-types=2-seaters, D- & E-types='scouts'/fighters): Albatros D II; Albatros D III (early), D III, D III (OAW); Albatros D V (early), D V (later), D Va, D Va (200hp); Fokker E III 'eindekker'; Fokker Dr I 'dreidekker'; Fokker D VII, D VII (OAW), D VIIF; Fokker E V/D VIII; Halberstadt D III; Pfalz D IIIa, Aviatik C I *; DFW C V; Hannover CL III; LFG Roland C II; Rumpler C IV * French: Morane L 'parasol' *; Nieuport 11; Nieuport 16; Nieuport 17 (two versions); Nieuport 17 bis; Nieuport 23; Nieuport 24 (two versions); Nieuport 24 bis (two versions); Nieuport 28; SPAD VII; SPAD XIII British (RAF=Royal Aircraft FACTORY): Bristol Scout D; Bristol F2B Fighter (2-seat); DH2 (early), DH2; RAF FE2b; RAF BE2c (early) *, BE2c (trainer) *, BE2c (Lewis); RAF BE12 *; RAF SE5 *, SE5a, SE5a Wolesley Viper; RAF RE8; Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter (single- & 2-seaters); Sopwith Pup; Sopwith Triplane, 2-gun Triplane; Sopwith Camel; Sopwith Snipe * The most significant addition here is a pair of two-seaters which help fill out the early-war planeset. First, there's a Morane type L 'parasol' used by both the RFC and the French Aéronautique Militaire in 1914-15 and which is a passable stand-in for the later LA, LAS and P models, into 1916. An unlicensed copy served with the Germans in small numbers at the Pfalz AI! Then there's the German Aviatik C I. This is a slightly unusual aeroplane. The C-type machines were the first German planes built (in any numbers) to carry a machine gun, sensibly moving the pilot from the previously-universal rear position to the front seat. This left the observer to his rear with a good field of fire. Evidently, nobody told Aviatik, for their C-type machine kept the observer in front, between the wings. Not only that, but instead of a ring mount, he had only a pair or rails, one each side of his cockpit, between which he had to shift his 'Parabellum' machine gun. Crews of later C-types will have been relieved that this feature was not repeated in subsequent designs! The WOFF Aviatik C I gives the observer a non-standard gun each side, likely because animating gun-switching would have been problematic. I think it would be fair to say that - excluding the first ten months or so of WW1, before air combat as such really got under way - the main gaps in the WOFF planeset are the British DH4 day bomber; a representative 1916-17 French 2-seater, like the Farman F.40 'pusher' or the Nieuport 12; and a 1918 French two-seater like the Breguet 14 or Salmson 2A2. Hopefully, these - and perhaps a Belgian air force mod - will be the subject of an expansion pack, although the sexier but less useful Gotha bomber has apparently pushed its way to the front of that line! Graphics & Sound This is where some of the biggest improvements have been made, compared to Over Flanders Fields. As a study of the screenshots in this review and elsewhere will show, ground textures and scenery would do any flightsim proud, even at the low detail settings I had to use. Terrain textures include effective seasonal variations. My only minor gripe would be that the tonal contrast in summer between the dark, grassy fields and the much paler corn or wheat fields is rather too great. Different weather states are effectively conveyed and you can set things in the 'Workshops' so that, when you fly in a campaign, you get the weather they had on the actual day. The First World War seems to have had many periods of bad weather, all in all. So if you use the 'Historical weather' setting, you can expect to be told that flying has been cancelled for the day, from time to time! Railways and major roads still have angular bends, but many rivers are now more realistically depicted, even though their water textures are still pretty basic. Apparently, compared to OFF, there are fewer little villages dotted around, though it's not especially noticeable. Clouds are not volumetric but are often still impressive. A cloud mod by Arisfuser offers significant improvements; it's available on the WOFF site's 'Third-party mods' page, here. The aircraft textures have been given a comprehensive overhaul, and like the ground textures, are now generally exquisite. Gone are the rather bland cockpits of OFF; instead, here's the sort of representation you get in WOFF: in this case, the Albatros D V. To my eye, it's well up to the high standards set by Rise of Flight: Externally, too, the WOFF aircraft textures are a great improvement. There's still the CFS3-style 'wide-angle lens' effect in the 'spot' (external) view, but the planes now look fantastic. A must-have mod is Ankor's DX9 mod which adds dynamic self-shadowing to WOFF's planes, inside and out. Some have this working in OFF and CFS3 but it crashes these, for me! Monoplanes can live without self-shadowing but biplanes really need it. Ankor's mod makes such a big improvement that OBD plans to incorporate it officially. For now, you can get it here. Screenshots alone can't do this mod justice, and even my sub-par system can cope with it. Another nice touch is that rotary engines now have a 'blip' switch, used to cut the ignition momentarily as a form of throttle control. 'Blip' your engine and you get a little puff of smoke or simulated unburnt fuel, followed - when you release the switch and the engine fires again - by a little flash of fire as the excess fuel burns off. Clever and rather brilliant! In the pic below, the puff of smoke has disappeared astern but you can just see the flames, below the Clerget rotary engine of my Camel. Aircraft and aircrew animation is really limited compared to Rise of Flight or First Eagles 2. Rotary engines and wheels rotate and control surfaces deflect, of course. And the pilots' heads all now seem to move slightly but noticeably, in harmony with elevator and aileron deflection. Aircrew don't look around and you won't see MG belts or cocking handles move. There are no animations (nor, I believe, reloading delays) for Lewis Guns or 'Parabellums', either. WOFF's observers are now better posed, though. Some of the 3d aircraft models have seen improvements over their OFF counterparts. For example the Pfalz D IIIa used to have an incorrectly drooping tailskid, but this has now been tucked up underneath. However, there is still some room for improvement, here and there. The SE5a's wings still look rather plank-like to me, seemingly bereft of adequate upper-surface camber and I think the wingtip profiles should be a little squarer. The SPAD VII still has the more rounded SPAD XIII rudder and elevators. The RE8 is missing some prominent rigging, between the wings. The BE2c's interplane struts are too far inboard. It is missing some flying and landing wires in between these struts, has imaginary inverted V struts on the upper wings, and a web of rigging between the base of the outer interplane struts and the upper wingtip which also did not exist. Mostly minor stuff but an update would be nice, especially for the BE2c as this features prominently in the Fokker Scourge Expansion Pack. EDIT, 23 April - Patch 1.24 has introduced improved BE2c and 2c 'early' models and textures, which I think take care of all the issues mentioned above! Here she is, now: Another move in the right direction - important for effective patrol-leading and air combat - is that while planes still appear to be rendered only up to about a mile and a half - twice that might be more realistic - you can now activate a new 'dot mode' (similar to distant aircraft rendering I've seen in IL-2) to make planes visible out to a distance you can select in the 'Workshops'. And the Level Of Detail models seem improved: too often in OFF (on my rig, anyway) the 'LOD' transitions could be fairly brutal, with aircraft visibly sprouting or losing detail like undercarriage, as they came closer or receded. Now, in WOFF, I'm hard put to notice transitions; planes look as they should at longer ranges. This in itself is a big improvement. You can turn on or off aircraft labels, as well as controlling their display range in the 'Workshops'. These labels now have white backgrounds, making them more readable, but also more obtrusive. They are perhaps most useful for such purposes as establishing the identity of the hot pilot who has just sent you plunging to your virtual doom. As WOFF campaigns feature historical aces, you may end up 'Under the Guns of the Red Baron', to borrow the title of the book of that name and indeed, flying or fighting with other aces from all sides, whose identities the labels can reveal - neat! As far as sounds are concerned, these really are much improved. In particular, engines not only vary from type to type but all now sound like real light aircraft. To get the best from them, I'd recommend upping the engines sound level in the 'Workshops' from the default 20% to 80% or so. As for machine guns, these now have a realistic, chunky report, which reminds me of the sound effect used in the Red Baron movie (which I thought did this very well, even though the movie's portrayal of the Rittmeister's life was a travesty!). Only RoF makes your rate of fire vary with propeller RPM but overall, to my ear, WOFF's engine and MG sounds are much the best of any WW1 sim. Amongst my favourites is the deep mechanical grumble of the Albatros D V's Mercedes which, when you cut loose, is complemented nicely by the batter of its twin Spandaus. When you pull the trigger, it sounds at first like one weapon is firing, then the second quickly cuts in, giving a nice high combined rate of fire. These sounds really help invest WOFF's beautiful planes with both life and character. The 'buffeting' sound which indicates an imminent stall was inaudible in OFF but can now be clearly heard. This is actually very important. For the first time, you get an indication that you are flying on the edge of the envelope, without having to clutter your screen with immersion-killing text messages. This little detail is a big plus during what they now call 'Air Combat Maneuvering' as it warns you not to pull that turn any tighter, and perhaps even to back it off and/or push your nose down a bit, lest you 'depart the envelope'! You don't get the additional, visible shudder that FE2 provides but WOFF's stall buffet sound does the job well enough. The main on-screen aid in CFS3, OFF and now WOFF is the Tactical Display or TAC, wryly referred to by folks like me as 'the radar' as that is - sort of - how it operates. Its appearance and function have been changed in WOFF - mostly for the better in my opinion. Its default range has been reduced to discourage the 'AWACS effect'. I tend to turn it on only as a navigation aid or - for combat - only when I really need it - to select a target, either to padlock it or to tell my flight to attack. The 'Attack!' command now requires you to select a target in the TAC before giving the order, at which point your flight, if you're the leader, will attack enemies near your target (but not your own). But we'll cover this a bit further on, when discussing the WOFF Artificial Intelligence, next in this review. The Air Combat Experience - Artificial Intelligence, Flight and Damage Models One of WOFF's most prominently-promoted features is 'brand new AI'. This is much-needed. Of the 'big three' sims, I always thought FE2 had much the best AI, with OFF lagging some way behind. For example, in an OFF dogfight at low level, it was as if terrain avoidance and air combat routines were fighting each other: near the deck, AI planes often made repetitive 'rollercoaster' moves, reminiscent of Red Baron 3d. And two-seater recce aircraft seemed to be a one-trick pony - fly level and shoot back. From fixed, widely-spaced formations, too, just like bombers in CFS3. And speaking of formations, if you were leading one, make the slightest turn and your AI flight-mates invariably slipped hopelessly wide, struggling to catch you up. So just how good is WOFF's new Artificial Intelligence? The answer, thank goodness, seems to be 'a whole lot better!' I haven't been playing WOFF that long but it's obvious we've got a whole new ball game here. Here's what I have seen, so far. If a dogfight goes low, it does so realistically - not right away, but with the underdogs tending to be forced down as they lose altitude, trying to escape or to regain the initiative. If and when a fight hits low levels, there is little or none of the old rollercoaster manoeuvring. Now, aircraft dip and turn like you'd expect to see from real planes flown by real pilots. Perhaps there are rather many barrel-rolls, but otherwise, it's much, much better. If you are on an enemy's tail, or are watching one under attack from a flight-mate, you will see much human-like behaviour. The enemy may seem to hesitate momentarily in a turn, then carry on. He may level off, as if he has lost sight of his attacker, only to break hard, if attacked again. He may try to escape back across the Lines, if damaged or finding himself outnumbered. I believe they can even just loose their nerve and run. Two-seater AI is also improved. Their formations definitely seem closer and more varied - for example, echelon instead of always in 'vic'. They may now break formation to evade or escape when pressed hard, instead of just flying on monolithically & returning fire. In the picture below, taken in a Quick Combat mission, my flight of Pfalz D IIIa aircraft - which type, incidentally, now has a much improved flight model, compared to OFF - is getting stuck into a formation of RE8s. Under attack, the RFC formation gradually broke up. One two-seater was shot down out of formation, early on. The left-hand RE8 then turned left, out of formation - you can see him above my left wingtip (I'm flying the Pfalz in the foreground). The flight leader - roughly above my nose - started weaving after he too was attacked, with the other RE flying stolidly ahead, just to his right. In OFF, this would have played out like 109s attacking B17s. Now, I don't see that it could look or feel much more realistic. It was a joy to behold, a WW1 air battle unfolding right in front of me, just as I imagine it should. Straight from the pages of the classic pilot autobiographies like 'No Parachute' or 'Wings of War'. Observers in two-seaters still seem to have a rather limited depression to their guns, leaving quite a large blind spot below. But if you change to the gunner's seat you will find that where before, your bullets would 'ghost' through any part of you plane's structure you could reach, your fire will now damage it, as it should. Formation-keeping - one of the real bug-bears of OFF - is like night and day. Now, in WOFF, your flight can keep up nicely in turns. Two-seaters and scouts/fighters do equally well here. Pull too tight a turn and you will lose them but that is entirely realistic. It's hard to exaggerate the improvement to the patrol-leading experience which this better formation-keeping delivers. I invariably fly with 'Always lead' selected in 'Workshops' to avoid the chore of formation-keeping and to give myself the additional tactical element of patrol-leading. So I can't say much about how the AI operates as flight leader. Forum feedback indicates some find this can sometimes produce strange situations, although these may just be attributable to the new AI being more human and not simply operating on that 'Attack EVERYTHING!' principle. As for wingman commands, these have been revised somewhat. You still have the same basic CFS3 set - A=attack, H=help me, S=split, R-rejoin (which you can re-assign, eg to joystick or HOTAS buttons), but some now work differently, as follows; 'A' key - this is still 'attack' but you must first turn on the TAC (if not already on) then tab to highlight/select a target, then hit 'A'. Your flight - and you have to be the leader, to issue this - will now attack enemies near your selected target but not your own. I think this also works with other target types besides aircraft, notably ground objects; 'S' key - instead of ordering your flight to split/extend formation, this tells them 'I'm going home (or off on my own); if I'm the leader, don't follow me, but carry on with the mission, under a new leader'. This is useful since before, if you were going down to a forced landing with a dud engine, your flight was liable to follow you down; 'R' key - this is no longer 'rejoin formation - which is default behaviour, anyway - it now means 'break off attacking ground targets'. There is also one new command - and it's a biggie. Ctrl+R orders a 'washout' as the RFC called it - in effect 'Mission is scrubbed, return to base, individually if necessary'. All very clever and a big improvement! Anti-aircraft fire - or 'Archie' in the RFC vernacular - may be said to have Artificial Intelligence, of a sort. This is a much better target indicator than it was in OFF. As before, black bursts denote German fire, whitish ones Entente. But now, while still not especially deadly, AA bursts track targets better and spread less around their mean point of aim. This makes it a lot easier to pick up and track targets from AA fire, much as it appears to have been in real life. In the screenshot below, from the Quick Combat Pfalz -vs- RE8 mission mentioned earlier, after shooting down one of the Englishmen I have picked up the remaining pair of retreating RE8s visually, just from the receding flak-bursts.This would have been much more difficult in OFF, due to the scatter of the bursts. The picture also illustrates the set of on-screen gauges available via the F5 command, which you can drag around individually, as well as turning on a 'no cockpit' view. This F5 view also comes with a (blue) text status read-out which you can drag about separately. You can also see the TAC in use here - the Tactical Display. This feature will be familiar to all players of the CFS series. It's a sort of situational awareness tool, which compensates in some respects for the limits of 'MonitorVision', where you have no peripheral vision, regardless of how you move your point of view around (hat-switch, in my case). Here, I have mouse-dragged the TAC to the top left of my screen - I usually keep it bottom left, to push off the lower screen the new text that now comes with the TAC. In this case, the text below the TAC describes my selected target, which is an RE8 which has just been shot down by a flight-mate (hence the text is in black). This text will also provide navigational and mission prompts, should you need them. A lot of work has obviously been put into making the TAC much more useful, should you feel the need for it. The only apparent negative as regards AA fire is that it still appears to be pretty vigorous and indiscriminate at lower levels. I can't confirm it but I suspect that many balloons burned on balloon-busting missions may - as in OFF - be busted by the defending flak! Not this one though - it was one of my own side's balloons and I collided with the b***er in my SE5, trying to give the boys in the basket a bit of excitement. I expect that I succeeded! A couple of other points are worth mentioning here. First, in 'Workshops', you can turn on an option 'AI always attacks'. This is useful if, flying as a wingman, you find the more realistic (but sometimes cautious) new AI seems insufficiently aggressive for your tastes. RFC ace Harry Hawker would doubtless have enabled this option, having enjoined his fellow DH2 pilots in the pioneer RFC No.24 fighter squadron to 'Attack EVERYTHING!' And though not strictly an AI issue, you can also enable random failures, so some of your flight may drop out eg with a dud engine. This was a VERY frequent occurrence in WW1 and though potentially frustrating, it's a highly realistic new option in WOFF. As for Flight Models, I'm no expert - my real-life stick time is limited to just under nine hours, all dual, in the Cessna 150/152/172. What I've found in WOFF so far is that many planes are (I believe realistically) tail-heavy, reminiscent of those in RoF. They can be trimmed with CFS3 controls, if you find this a strain or that it makes it too hard to control your aircraft. I fly with 'Wind - on' (as opposed to 'the wind up', which in RFC jargon meant something completely different!) and I assume this accounts for planes swaying gently, which is a nice effect, not overdone. There are a few things I find odd. For example I practiced stalls in a Nieuport 17, chopping the throttle and pulling back on the stick to keep the nose from dropping. When the stall came, the nose went down and the plane rolled right to about 40 degrees - then stopped rolling, quite sharply. Then my aircraft began to roll back level, and as the speed built up in the descent, the nose rose again. The aircraft seemingly unstalled itself, without a spin developing, in this rather odd-looking fashion. I could cause a spin, by applying right rudder as she stalled, in the classic fashion; recovery was easy enough, with some opposite rudder. Here are some more observations. Realistic or not, significantly more rudder is needed to balance turns than in either RoF or FE2 (modded). Without rudder, you often get pronounced tailslides, which can be hard to detect unless flying from the external view. When applied 'just right', rudder can produce some surprisingly tight turns. This is much as it was in OFF. However, it seems no longer possible to fly in many planes with my fuselage at 45 degrees to my direction of travel, by 'crossing' ailerons and rudder. In WOFF, this now realistically produces an inefficient, flat, skidding turn, in planes that could 'helicopter/windvane' before. The Camel, I found, turned better to the right, as she should. As in RoF, I didn't find her the vicious ride that I was half-expecting. Back in the Nieuport 17, I experienced a nice, not excessive implementation of what I took to be the phenomenon known as 'adverse yaw': in a left-hand turn, if I held the nose up too much maintaining too high an angle of attack, the plane rolled itself around, out of the turn. The Albatros D V flight model seems be be proving controversial but I've not found it objectionable; perhaps a bit more sluggish than I was used to in RoF or FE2. Reports are that it is rather slow, perhaps based on sources which report it as having an inferior performance to the heavier Albatros D III, which I have always found strange. Overall, my impression is that - plane for plane - WOFF's aircraft feel rather less tractable or responsive and somewhat harder to fly (and aim!) with precision, than their counterparts in either RoF or FE2 (modded). That may or may not be realistic - after all, difficulty does not necessarily equate to realism - but so far, I find the WOFF FMs to be perfectly acceptable and regard them as better than those of its predecessor in several respects. I would definitely agree with those who have said that rudder pedals would make life easier, though I'm plodding on with the 'twisty joystick/wrist strain' combination. Gunnery is obviously an important part of the air combat experience. On the negative side, I believe that WOFF still just gives you the full continuous ammo load for drum or spindle-fed weapons - the Lewis Gun and the German 'Parabellum'. There is no representation of reloading, I'm fairly sure: neither a time delay as in RoF and FE2, nor an animation as in RoF. On the plus side, you can now clear stoppages. In OFF, if you had these enabled in the 'Workshops', a jam would stop both weapons in a twin gun fighter and was impossible to clear. Now, stoppages affect individual weapons and there is a chance you can clear them in flight. So far, I have avoided stoppages by keeping bursts short. As for the results obtainable from air-to-air gunnery, perhaps it's down to my flying with unfamiliar FMs and no rudder pedals, but I find hits harder to get than in RoF or FE2. Either that, or the hits I get, do less damage! There is a 'Workshops' option to increase the player's gun lethality or accuracy, if you find this unsatisfactory. I must admit I'm tempted to try this, after an Albatros D V campaign mission which saw me pumping round after round into (or at!) a plucky Frenchman who flew his single-seat Sopwith Strutter like a fighter, only to end up colliding with him, after breaking off a firing pass too late! I did manage to nail one of his amis first, though: As for damage modelling, this was good in OFF but is now better again. You will still see minor airframe damage (like bulletholes) only if you don't have 'hi-res skins' enabled but there appear to be no more 'flying flamers' - aircraft set on fire which would fly on in that condition, seemingly endlessly. In the screenshot below, my Rumpler C IV has just had a lower wing shot off by attacking SE5s, showing the exposed ribs at the wing root...it's a long way down, from eighteen thousand feet! I followed her down to see if the Rumpler would break up under the strain of the long dive, as she probably should have done, but no joy there. Another positive is the aircraft wrecks, which are much improved. Remember that campaign I started in part 1, flying Bristol Fighters with 48 Squadron? Well, here's how that one ended up, thanks to some rather unfriendly Huns in V-strutted Albatrosses: The view system is also worth mentioning here, because WOFF has made some tweaks to the CFS3 approach. You still have to cycle through views to get to some of them and overall, it still doesn't seem to have the flexibility of FE2 or RoF. I'm not sure yet whether these tweaks represent anything more than changes from the stock key assignments, or whether there's something really new here, but I expect I'll work it out, in time. EDIT - I see there is now an 'experimental' free-roaming camera, accessed with the 'J' key and controlled via joystick and numpad (added with a patch, I believe). Gameplay Modes Ok, you've set up WOFF to your taste, in the "Workshops". You've created a pilot or two, and have selected your squadron, escadrille or staffel and thereby your aircraft. Now, it's time to get a slice of the action and find out how WOFF flies and fights! If you opted for 'Campaign Auto Deployment' (in the 'Enlistment Options' screen, seen in part 1 of the review) then you had the option of going through some initial training, first. This is new to WOFF, so how does it work? Well, let's take a look at that later, when considering campaign gameplay. Whether or not you took the training, you'd be well advised to start by getting some 'stick time' in your chosen aircraft using the 'Quick Combat' option. Only one of your pilots can be 'active' at any one time and it's his nationality's planes that you'll be able to fly here. French pilot active, and want to fly a Hannover? Go back to 'Pilot Dossiers' from the main menu, and activate a German pilot, instead. When you select Quick Combat from the main menu screen, here's what you'll be offered. This is for one of my British pilots, flying for the Royal Flying Corps (which became the RAF only on 1 April 1918). As you can see, it's possible to select free flight or different types of combat mission from a drop-down list. Options include attacks on balloons and different ground targets, as well as air combats. You can also select your flight's aircraft type and your foe's, as well as choose 'skins' for them. Many of the parameters here are new to WOFF, including the facility to specify a 'top cover' flight for you and/or your immediate opposition. In short, WOFF 'QC' is a heavily-featured instant mission generator: not only useful to hone your flying and shooting skills before you really go to war on campaign, but a great way to experience air combat in WOFF and check out its many flyable aircraft. Don't forget to tick the box 'Pilot never dies', centre left, as you likely won't want your precious pilots killed off, when you're just practicing! Usefully, WOFF has the option to save a Quick Combat mission you have created here, for future use ('Save as Scenario'). Another option available from the main menu screen is Quick Scenarios. This comprises a set of pre-defined missions, and is presumably where you can also pick up any mission set-ups you have saved from Quick Combat (and possibly, any third party missions). On a quick count, there are seven Quick Scenarios by default: balloon busting, bombing an airfield, intercepting DFW 2-seaters, Morane parasol recce, an interception, and two different dogfights. Sooner or later, you'll find yourself at the front, on campaign, flying over or near the famous trench-lines. Campaign mode is the beating heart of the WOFF experience. Probably, you'll know the form. If you're flying a fighting aeroplane for France, Britain or the USA, you'll expect to operate mostly over the Lines or in enemy airspace, patrolling in indirect support of your own side's 'working aeroplanes' - the two-seaters. Later in the war, ground attack missions may become a regular feature. If flying for Germany as a fighter/scout pilot, you'll expect to fly defensively, over your own territory. In a two-seater with any side, you can expect to fly reconnaisance or artillery observation missions; the latter near the Lines, the former over them or deeper into enemy territory. You might also draw bombing missions, or perhaps some infantry co-operation work. In a nutshell, that's how the WW1 air war played out, at least from about 1915-16 when it really got into gear. So...just how well does Wings Over Flanders Fields deliver this experience to your PC? Coming in part 3 - campaigns, pros & cons and the verdict.
Wings Over Flanders Fields - the CombatAce Review
By 33LIMA,
OBD Software Raises The Bar for WWI Air Combat Simulation!
What can players expect?
Wings Over Flanders Fields - 'WOFF' - is the latest in a line of World War 1 air war sims that started with a modest but promising freeware mod for Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3. The first commercial installment, Over Flanders Fields - Between Heaven and Hell (a.k.a. 'OFF Phase 3'), quickly made a name for itself. Features included much the best out-of-the-box, all-flyable planeset of any WW1 sim, complemented by thousands of meticulously-researched colour schemes for its planes and authentic orders of battle featuring the British, French, German and later (with the aptly-named 'Hat in the Ring' Expansion Pack) the US Air Services. Above all else, OFF wove together all of these elements to deliver an immersive and absorbing single-player campaign that enabled you to fly and fight for you chosen side, changing bases and aircraft as the war around you progressed, from 1915 through to the end of the war - if your pilots survived that long!
So what's different about WOFF? Well, it's a long list, but in short, it does all of what OFF did, but bigger and better, with some brand-new stuff to boot. Notably, WOFF features: A re-worked, more polished 'WOFF Manager' interface with a great new musical score; Much improved maps, both in-flight and for briefing/debriefing; Optional pre-deployment training missions for your virtual pilots; More realistic missions, flight strengths and briefings; Improved terrain graphics - the terrain textures and scenery objects are transformed, with (amongst other things) better treelines, more natural-looking rivers and new airfields and objects, while No-man's Land looks more convincing than ever; Improved aircraft graphics - OFF's rather bland cockpits now have absolutely exquisite textures matched by new external 'skins', while there are tweaks to some of the 3d models and a DX9 mod by Ankor adds dynamic self-shadowing, which really gilds the lily; Some new aircraft, including a BE2c with - at last! - a flexible Lewis Gun; its predictably-unsuccessful single-seat fighter derivative, the BE12; the very widely-used Morane parasol; and the superb high-flying Rumpler CIV recce two-seater; Totally new and much superior Artificial Intelligence - not only is air combat more convincing, the AI can now keep formation much better; A host of other improvements, not least the ability to (try to!) clear stoppages ('jams') and much-needed enhancements to the view and wingman command systems. System requirements, ordering and installation
The system requirements for WOFF are substantially higher than its predecessor and are listed here. Supported Operating Systems are Windows 7 (64 bit) or 8/8.1 (also 64 bit). The minimum recommended specs are an Intel 2.6GHz CPU; 560GTX/640GTX (or equivalents) GPU with 1GB of video RAM; and at least 4GB of system RAM. I am actually running WOFF in Vista 64 on a 2.33GHz multi-core CPU with some background processes turned off. I have 6 GB of RAM but believe it or not, only a 512MB 8800GT video card. On this system I can't rack up the anti-aliasing as far as I'd like and the terrain and detail settings are set low. But though the FPS is often down to about 30 and can get a little choppy at times; and while panning can be sluggish; WOFF is playable, for me - just. And that's with both high-resolution aircraft textures and Ankor's self-shadowing mod (of which more later). The planes look great - even the dialled-down terrain and scenery looks wonderful. I could probably improve performance by turning off the high-res aircraft textures and most of all, by reducing the size of the scenery texture (.dds) files in a suitable file editor (as Pat Pattle has reported doing with good results, over at SimHQ). So...if you have been holding off because you have a slightly 'sub-spec' system and are on a budget, you may at your own risk still want to give WOFF a try now, certainly if you are prepared to upgrade should you find you really must and can do so without having to wait too long. WOFF is available only by online order from OBD's WOFF website and at time of writing, is priced at $59.99 US (plus any local taxes like VAT in the EU). Options are digital download or DVD by post. Also available, by digital download only, are: a pack of over 4500(!) historical 'skins' for your planes; Matt Milne's atmospheric musical score; and the first official expansion pack, 'The Fokker Scourge'. If opting for digital download, once you've purchased and got the email with the link, you can kick off your 4.4Gb download. You must have CFS3 for WOFF. When installing, you can either use your CFS3 CD/DVD or as I did, point the install wizard to an existing patched cfs3.exe on your PC. After that you can burn your download to DVD; it fits on a normal DVD-R. Simple! To their credit, the developers have issued patches to add features or address such issues as have emerged, post-release. At time of writing, the current patch is to version 1.19, available here. Happily, this installs over any previous version, so installation is a breeze. The new interface The previous 'OFF Manager' was a pretty comprehensive interface to the sim's many settings and gameplay modes; but it had some rough edges. One of WOFF's main achievements has been to knock off the rough edges and provide a more polished interface. I make no apologies for covering this in some (mostly visual) detail because it's a crucial component of WOFF - both functionally and in terms of the immersion it contributes - and because it's one of the things that has been considerably improved, over OFF. The first thing you'll notice is Matt Milne's new menu music. His score for OFF was a hard act to follow and at least one theme has been rolled forward into WOFF. Nearly all is new and it's a worthy successor to the original score, notably the main menu theme which is suitably dark, dramatic and foreboding. Here's the OFF main menu screen. The background picture - a row of Fokker triplanes, here - will change with successive visits. Looking at the menu options, 'Leave' exits the sim and 'Credits' does 'what it says on the tin'. 'Workshops', bottom right, is the place to start, as this is where you select graphics and realism settings - it's not tabbed, but all in one screen, which has changed somewhat since OFF. The latest version of the 'Workshops' screen looks like this, which shows you just how many settings you can change here: Gone is the 'CFS3config' tool that OFF users will know, replaced by the ability to set the main display settings here in the 'Workshops'. As before, you can turn off gun jams (stoppages) but now, if you leave them on, stoppages can affect individual guns and you have a chance of being able to clear them, in flight - which was impossible, in OFF. As in the latter, you can elect to have confirmation of your kills dependent on acceptance of your claims in combat reports you write after the mission. New stuff includes the fact that injuries to your pilot can be displayed in-game - options are blood spatter (in red, or in black for the squeamish) or tunnel vision. There really is a lot of stuff you can adjust here, to improve looks, tweak performance or increase/relax realism or difficulty. While we're talking 'setup' it's worth mentioning that - while there's no manual as such, that I can find anyway - there is some neat stuff installed into a 'Toolbox' folder - specifically a 'WOFF Toolbox' program whose most useful feature is a great little keyboard and joystick control assignment utility. There's also some helpful guides online, here. EDIT - the same documents can be found in the game folder OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields/documentation. Moving on from the 'Workshops' and returning to the main menu screen, the next place to go is 'Pilot Dossiers'. Before you fly in any mode, you must create at least one pilot, and this is where you do it - the Enlistment Options screen: You choose your nationality and can then go for 'Campaign Auto Deployment', top of the screen, with or without preliminary flight training missions. Alternatively, if you want to pick a specific unit and starting period, you can instead use 'Manual Squad Deployment', button bottom right. If you choose the latter, you get an improved version of the old OFF squadron selection screen, like this one, which I used here to start a career with the pioneer Bristol Fighter squadron, No. 48, starting in March 1917: If you're familiar with OFF, you'll notice at once that the map has been vastly improved from the original, which was rather poor. And you can click on tabs which bring up helpful additional information, before finalising your selection - for example, here's the 'Craft' tab for the 'Biff' or 'Brisfit' (represented in WOFF, as in OFF, by the F2B version rather than the original F2A) - with a nice rendition of the squadron's mount in a wooden hangar, though the accompanying text mistakenly says it's a 'bomber': When you've made your choice of unit, you can enter a name for your pilot, in your 'dossier' or logbook. Here, WOFF will record your flights and campaign achievements. The representation of this document is another big improvement over the OFF version. Your squadron marking (two white bars in this case) is displayed top left and you can cycle through a selection of different authentic period photographs for the logbook itself. In this career, I've opted to be a brother of the CO, William Leefe Robinson VC, posted to France after shooting down a Zeppelin over England! At this point, having set up the sim to your taste and created your first pilot, you are now ready to take to the skies over war-torn Europe! Coming in part 2 - the planeset; graphics/sound; the air-to-air experience; and gameplay modes
Wings Over Flanders Fields - 'WOFF' - is the latest in a line of World War 1 air war sims that started with a modest but promising freeware mod for Microsoft's Combat Flight Simulator 3. The first commercial installment, Over Flanders Fields - Between Heaven and Hell (a.k.a. 'OFF Phase 3'), quickly made a name for itself. Features included much the best out-of-the-box, all-flyable planeset of any WW1 sim, complemented by thousands of meticulously-researched colour schemes for its planes and authentic orders of battle featuring the British, French, German and later (with the aptly-named 'Hat in the Ring' Expansion Pack) the US Air Services. Above all else, OFF wove together all of these elements to deliver an immersive and absorbing single-player campaign that enabled you to fly and fight for you chosen side, changing bases and aircraft as the war around you progressed, from 1915 through to the end of the war - if your pilots survived that long!
So what's different about WOFF? Well, it's a long list, but in short, it does all of what OFF did, but bigger and better, with some brand-new stuff to boot. Notably, WOFF features: A re-worked, more polished 'WOFF Manager' interface with a great new musical score; Much improved maps, both in-flight and for briefing/debriefing; Optional pre-deployment training missions for your virtual pilots; More realistic missions, flight strengths and briefings; Improved terrain graphics - the terrain textures and scenery objects are transformed, with (amongst other things) better treelines, more natural-looking rivers and new airfields and objects, while No-man's Land looks more convincing than ever; Improved aircraft graphics - OFF's rather bland cockpits now have absolutely exquisite textures matched by new external 'skins', while there are tweaks to some of the 3d models and a DX9 mod by Ankor adds dynamic self-shadowing, which really gilds the lily; Some new aircraft, including a BE2c with - at last! - a flexible Lewis Gun; its predictably-unsuccessful single-seat fighter derivative, the BE12; the very widely-used Morane parasol; and the superb high-flying Rumpler CIV recce two-seater; Totally new and much superior Artificial Intelligence - not only is air combat more convincing, the AI can now keep formation much better; A host of other improvements, not least the ability to (try to!) clear stoppages ('jams') and much-needed enhancements to the view and wingman command systems. System requirements, ordering and installation
The system requirements for WOFF are substantially higher than its predecessor and are listed here. Supported Operating Systems are Windows 7 (64 bit) or 8/8.1 (also 64 bit). The minimum recommended specs are an Intel 2.6GHz CPU; 560GTX/640GTX (or equivalents) GPU with 1GB of video RAM; and at least 4GB of system RAM. I am actually running WOFF in Vista 64 on a 2.33GHz multi-core CPU with some background processes turned off. I have 6 GB of RAM but believe it or not, only a 512MB 8800GT video card. On this system I can't rack up the anti-aliasing as far as I'd like and the terrain and detail settings are set low. But though the FPS is often down to about 30 and can get a little choppy at times; and while panning can be sluggish; WOFF is playable, for me - just. And that's with both high-resolution aircraft textures and Ankor's self-shadowing mod (of which more later). The planes look great - even the dialled-down terrain and scenery looks wonderful. I could probably improve performance by turning off the high-res aircraft textures and most of all, by reducing the size of the scenery texture (.dds) files in a suitable file editor (as Pat Pattle has reported doing with good results, over at SimHQ). So...if you have been holding off because you have a slightly 'sub-spec' system and are on a budget, you may at your own risk still want to give WOFF a try now, certainly if you are prepared to upgrade should you find you really must and can do so without having to wait too long. WOFF is available only by online order from OBD's WOFF website and at time of writing, is priced at $59.99 US (plus any local taxes like VAT in the EU). Options are digital download or DVD by post. Also available, by digital download only, are: a pack of over 4500(!) historical 'skins' for your planes; Matt Milne's atmospheric musical score; and the first official expansion pack, 'The Fokker Scourge'. If opting for digital download, once you've purchased and got the email with the link, you can kick off your 4.4Gb download. You must have CFS3 for WOFF. When installing, you can either use your CFS3 CD/DVD or as I did, point the install wizard to an existing patched cfs3.exe on your PC. After that you can burn your download to DVD; it fits on a normal DVD-R. Simple! To their credit, the developers have issued patches to add features or address such issues as have emerged, post-release. At time of writing, the current patch is to version 1.19, available here. Happily, this installs over any previous version, so installation is a breeze. The new interface The previous 'OFF Manager' was a pretty comprehensive interface to the sim's many settings and gameplay modes; but it had some rough edges. One of WOFF's main achievements has been to knock off the rough edges and provide a more polished interface. I make no apologies for covering this in some (mostly visual) detail because it's a crucial component of WOFF - both functionally and in terms of the immersion it contributes - and because it's one of the things that has been considerably improved, over OFF. The first thing you'll notice is Matt Milne's new menu music. His score for OFF was a hard act to follow and at least one theme has been rolled forward into WOFF. Nearly all is new and it's a worthy successor to the original score, notably the main menu theme which is suitably dark, dramatic and foreboding. Here's the OFF main menu screen. The background picture - a row of Fokker triplanes, here - will change with successive visits. Looking at the menu options, 'Leave' exits the sim and 'Credits' does 'what it says on the tin'. 'Workshops', bottom right, is the place to start, as this is where you select graphics and realism settings - it's not tabbed, but all in one screen, which has changed somewhat since OFF. The latest version of the 'Workshops' screen looks like this, which shows you just how many settings you can change here: Gone is the 'CFS3config' tool that OFF users will know, replaced by the ability to set the main display settings here in the 'Workshops'. As before, you can turn off gun jams (stoppages) but now, if you leave them on, stoppages can affect individual guns and you have a chance of being able to clear them, in flight - which was impossible, in OFF. As in the latter, you can elect to have confirmation of your kills dependent on acceptance of your claims in combat reports you write after the mission. New stuff includes the fact that injuries to your pilot can be displayed in-game - options are blood spatter (in red, or in black for the squeamish) or tunnel vision. There really is a lot of stuff you can adjust here, to improve looks, tweak performance or increase/relax realism or difficulty. While we're talking 'setup' it's worth mentioning that - while there's no manual as such, that I can find anyway - there is some neat stuff installed into a 'Toolbox' folder - specifically a 'WOFF Toolbox' program whose most useful feature is a great little keyboard and joystick control assignment utility. There's also some helpful guides online, here. EDIT - the same documents can be found in the game folder OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields/documentation. Moving on from the 'Workshops' and returning to the main menu screen, the next place to go is 'Pilot Dossiers'. Before you fly in any mode, you must create at least one pilot, and this is where you do it - the Enlistment Options screen: You choose your nationality and can then go for 'Campaign Auto Deployment', top of the screen, with or without preliminary flight training missions. Alternatively, if you want to pick a specific unit and starting period, you can instead use 'Manual Squad Deployment', button bottom right. If you choose the latter, you get an improved version of the old OFF squadron selection screen, like this one, which I used here to start a career with the pioneer Bristol Fighter squadron, No. 48, starting in March 1917: If you're familiar with OFF, you'll notice at once that the map has been vastly improved from the original, which was rather poor. And you can click on tabs which bring up helpful additional information, before finalising your selection - for example, here's the 'Craft' tab for the 'Biff' or 'Brisfit' (represented in WOFF, as in OFF, by the F2B version rather than the original F2A) - with a nice rendition of the squadron's mount in a wooden hangar, though the accompanying text mistakenly says it's a 'bomber': When you've made your choice of unit, you can enter a name for your pilot, in your 'dossier' or logbook. Here, WOFF will record your flights and campaign achievements. The representation of this document is another big improvement over the OFF version. Your squadron marking (two white bars in this case) is displayed top left and you can cycle through a selection of different authentic period photographs for the logbook itself. In this career, I've opted to be a brother of the CO, William Leefe Robinson VC, posted to France after shooting down a Zeppelin over England! At this point, having set up the sim to your taste and created your first pilot, you are now ready to take to the skies over war-torn Europe! Coming in part 2 - the planeset; graphics/sound; the air-to-air experience; and gameplay modes
Hell on Wheels - SF '42
By 33LIMA,
Fighting in the M4 Sherman in Steel Fury - Kharkov 1942!
Until recently, I didn't realise that Graviteam's Eastern Front WW2 tanksim lets you sign up as a US Army tanker and fight in the famous M4 Sherman tank. It doesn't of course...at least, not out-of-the-box. But SF '42 is one of those sims which has been much enhanced by the work of that intrepid and talented group of people we call 'modders'. And the 'New Tank Add-on' (NTA) mod - current version, NTA 1.8 - includes a Sherman and missions for it. Keen to go to virtual war in an M4 - and to fight some battles in places whose names I could actually pronounce - this was one tank I had to try out.
The mod
Jonesoft Generic Mod Enabler is a must for SF '42 and I have it set up so I can play with either the Steel Panzer Mod (SPM) version 2.0 or NTA 1.8. Each has its own install order for the main mod and some recommended or essential extra components. It's not-at-all complicated to get set up; main thing is, use JSGME and enable or disable the mods, after installing them into JSGME's 'Mods' folder, in the right sequence. It's all here: http://graviteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=10944.0 (NTA) ...and here: http://graviteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=11026.0 (SPM).
NTA 1.8 is apparently the most recent and complete mod and that's what I'm using for this mission, along with the associated sound mod, mission packs and update. Edit, August 2014 - the NTA mod has been discontinued but its successor, the STA Mod, is now available: http://stasf2008.eph...d-on-steel-fury
The tank
Like the Tiger featured in my last SF '42 mission report, the M4 General Sherman needs little introduction. Nicknamed rather derisively the 'Tommy Cooker' or the 'Ronson' (after the cigarette lighter's slogan, 'lights first time'), the M4 may have earned an unenviable reputation for burning when penetrated and it mighn't have been a match for some of the later German tanks in a straight fight. But when it appeared in action with the British Eighth Army in North Africa in 1942, it was one of the best tanks in the world. Even in 1944-45, it could do many of the things a tank had to do, as well or better than its opponents. Strong points included a decent dual-purpose gun, reliability and fast turret traverse
The NTA Sherman is a late WW2 model M4A3, with the 47 degree, single piece upper hull front with larger driver and radio operator hatches; the T23-type turret with 'vision' cupola for the commander; 76mm gun; and internally, wet ammo stowage to reduce the fire risk. The 76 is of course a better AT weapon than the earlier 75mm, comparable to the German long-barrelled 7.5cm KwK 40 tank and Pak 40 anti-tank guns and able to fire APCR tungsten-cored rounds. The latter gave the Sherman 76 a better chance against the later German tanks at shorter ranges but was reportedly in short supply in tank units, being reserved mainly for the Tank Destroyer force, whose towed and self-propelled 76mm guns were supposed to be the main counter to enemy tanks, in US doctrine. The SF '42 M4A3(76) is a really nice rendition, with a just a hint of the 'gypsy caravan' look from external stowage and extra track sections on the hull front for extra protection. There are no interiors; these are of limited use anyway, as you can play just fine from the third person external view or (in the first-person view) from either the hatch-open view or the gunsight/periscope/vision port view.
The mission
From the list of available single missions, I chose 'Everything, but the Bridge!' by prolific Ukranian mission-maker Lockie. This is part of mission pack 2.1, which I think is designed for the NTA mod. Like Lockie's other missions, this comes with a neat loading screen, which includes a tantalising excerpt from a report of an engagement during the Battle of the Bulge, the historical setting for this mission. The German Ardennes Offensive in December 1944 is probably familiar to most of us, if only from the well-known Hollywood movie which featured grey-painted Spanish Army M47s acting as King Tigers, M24 Chaffees acting as Shermans, and that famous rendition of the Panzerlied with Robert Shaw. As that French General said on observing the charge of the Light Brigade, 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre!'
I haven't played much SF '42 until dusting it off recently but in my experience, the typical mission is a deliberate but rather chaotic attack by a combined arms company-based combat team. This one was clearly going to be very different, as I could see from the briefing. Here it is; the mission map anyway. I have minimised the text briefing as it hides a lot of the map and in this case, it told me nothing much, except to defend the bridge:
My little outfit is the trio of red diamonds, bottom centre-left. The bridge is in the middle. From the tactical symbols, the defenders - on the left bank apart from one AT gun - comprise some dismounted infantry, some soft-skimmed vehicles, a single tank, and a handful of anti-tank guns, likely the 57mm ones derived from the British 6-pounder, used by US Infantry Divisions. I believe the map is a re-labelled version of one of the Ukranian ones that come with the sim. The terrain itself is fairly level, not what you'd expect for the Ardennes. It might have been a good idea if I had enabled the winter weather mod to produce snowscapes appropriate for at least the later stages of the Battle of the Bulge but I don't know if it's compatible and I stuck with the original.
Even though this mission is evidently an ad hoc operation, I'd have preferred a fuller, more immersive 'battle picture' and more scene-setting, in the mission briefing. Here’s how I ended up picturing the briefing, in my own mind:
You're a lieutenant in the US Army commanding a platoon of three 76mm-armed M4 tanks from the 66th Tank Regiment, Second Armoured Division, the famous 'Hell on Wheels'. In the confusion following the Division's sudden redeployment to deal with the German Ardennes Offensive, your platoon has become separated from your unit. As you motor uncertainly along a track beside a river, an infantry major and his radio operator step out of the trees to your left and wave you down. The major looks tired but business-like, waving his '45 like he means to use it.
'I'm the Officer Commanding, Company B, First Battalion, 145th Infantry. I don't care who you are or where you're going, but starting right now, you're working for me.
Look at this map. There's a bridge over the Roer River here. It's on your right, just a few hundred yards ahead of you. See it?
There's also a whole bunch of Kraut tanks and infantry heading straight for it, coming from way over there, on your far left - see those blue arrows on the map?
Company B - what's left of us - is in a defensive perimeter, on the near side of the bridge, with a few 57mm AT guns.
The Krauts musn't get that bridge. We've to hold it, at all costs. No more bug-outs.
Take your three M4s up there and keep the Krauts away from the bridge. Their tanks are your priority targets. Your choice, where you set up. But do it quick. Move out NOW!'
They say 'Time spent in reconnaisance is never wasted'. For this mission, as usual in sims and often in real life, my recce would have to be a map one. First job before starting the mission was to take the map and my orders and make a quick Combat Appreciation. For this sort of thing, I used an abbreviated format we were taught by a captain in the RM Commandos - good enough for the booties, good enough for me. It's 'Aim - Enemy - Ground - Plan' and here goes my quick effort for this mission.
Aim - the easy bit, to destroy any Germans making for the bridge.
Enemy - tanks and infantry in unknown, but possibly company group, strength, shortly likely to cross my front from left to right, headed for the bridge.
Ground - looking towards the enemy from the bridge: on the left, a treeline with good cover and some room to manoeuvre; in the centre, a large open space with little cover, which the enemy will likely have to cross, a good killing ground; to the right, a narrow treeline backed by a bend in the river which severely limits mobility that way. Contour lines are few and gentle so the terrain looks rather flat, apart from the rather shallow river banks and a very low hillock to my immediate left. Basically, I'm looking for covered, preferably hull-down firing positions on the enemy's lighter-armoured flanks.
Plan - move to positions in the tree line to the left of Company B's defended locality. Fire into the flanks of the enemy as he crosses my front from left to right, heading for the bridge. My tanks to be in a line, set back from the treeline, sacrificing wider arcs of fire for better concealment. Change firing positions every few rounds, as one does. Cover from fire would be nice but accept cover from view if that's all I can get up there, as seems likely.
Plan made, I loaded the mission and roared off down the track towards the bridge, trying hard not to veer off and fall into the river, conventional Sherman gun tanks not being noted for being amphibious, notwithstanding the abilities of DD versions.
Looking behind me only to see my other two tanks immobile, I realised I'd forgotten to brief them. The F8 key brought up the map again and from its command and control icons, I ordered single file/column formation and 'do as I do'. As they caught up, I pressed on. About 50 meters before the trees on my left petered out, I turned 90 degrees left and rumbled through the woods, some distance inside and parallel to the treeline from which I intended to catch the enemy with flanking fire.
As I motored on, the trees thinned out but I was still screened from the killing ground to my right by a decent line of smaller trees. From that direction, the cacophony of sound I could hear above my engine noise indicated that the battle was already in full swing. I'm using the recommended NTA sound mod, which I assume was responsible for the US tanker voices I could hear on the intercom. This mod changes many of the other sound effects too; hard to say from one usage whether or not I prefer it to stock, which is pretty good too. Anyway, I pressed on, more cautiously now. The woods thickened up around me and I swung 90 degrees right, to face the edge of the treeline. Beyond, the enemy seemed already to be advancing, heard but not yet seen through the screen of foliage in front of my tank. I began to edge slowly forward, to the point where I would acquire a narrow line of sight out into the killing ground. As I did so, I ordered my tanks into line abreast, anxiously looking around to see how well my AI Tank Commanders would cope with my series of manoeuvres. The answer, alas, was 'none too well!' ...to be continued!
The mod
Jonesoft Generic Mod Enabler is a must for SF '42 and I have it set up so I can play with either the Steel Panzer Mod (SPM) version 2.0 or NTA 1.8. Each has its own install order for the main mod and some recommended or essential extra components. It's not-at-all complicated to get set up; main thing is, use JSGME and enable or disable the mods, after installing them into JSGME's 'Mods' folder, in the right sequence. It's all here: http://graviteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=10944.0 (NTA) ...and here: http://graviteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=11026.0 (SPM).
NTA 1.8 is apparently the most recent and complete mod and that's what I'm using for this mission, along with the associated sound mod, mission packs and update. Edit, August 2014 - the NTA mod has been discontinued but its successor, the STA Mod, is now available: http://stasf2008.eph...d-on-steel-fury
The tank
Like the Tiger featured in my last SF '42 mission report, the M4 General Sherman needs little introduction. Nicknamed rather derisively the 'Tommy Cooker' or the 'Ronson' (after the cigarette lighter's slogan, 'lights first time'), the M4 may have earned an unenviable reputation for burning when penetrated and it mighn't have been a match for some of the later German tanks in a straight fight. But when it appeared in action with the British Eighth Army in North Africa in 1942, it was one of the best tanks in the world. Even in 1944-45, it could do many of the things a tank had to do, as well or better than its opponents. Strong points included a decent dual-purpose gun, reliability and fast turret traverse
The NTA Sherman is a late WW2 model M4A3, with the 47 degree, single piece upper hull front with larger driver and radio operator hatches; the T23-type turret with 'vision' cupola for the commander; 76mm gun; and internally, wet ammo stowage to reduce the fire risk. The 76 is of course a better AT weapon than the earlier 75mm, comparable to the German long-barrelled 7.5cm KwK 40 tank and Pak 40 anti-tank guns and able to fire APCR tungsten-cored rounds. The latter gave the Sherman 76 a better chance against the later German tanks at shorter ranges but was reportedly in short supply in tank units, being reserved mainly for the Tank Destroyer force, whose towed and self-propelled 76mm guns were supposed to be the main counter to enemy tanks, in US doctrine. The SF '42 M4A3(76) is a really nice rendition, with a just a hint of the 'gypsy caravan' look from external stowage and extra track sections on the hull front for extra protection. There are no interiors; these are of limited use anyway, as you can play just fine from the third person external view or (in the first-person view) from either the hatch-open view or the gunsight/periscope/vision port view.
The mission
From the list of available single missions, I chose 'Everything, but the Bridge!' by prolific Ukranian mission-maker Lockie. This is part of mission pack 2.1, which I think is designed for the NTA mod. Like Lockie's other missions, this comes with a neat loading screen, which includes a tantalising excerpt from a report of an engagement during the Battle of the Bulge, the historical setting for this mission. The German Ardennes Offensive in December 1944 is probably familiar to most of us, if only from the well-known Hollywood movie which featured grey-painted Spanish Army M47s acting as King Tigers, M24 Chaffees acting as Shermans, and that famous rendition of the Panzerlied with Robert Shaw. As that French General said on observing the charge of the Light Brigade, 'C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre!'
I haven't played much SF '42 until dusting it off recently but in my experience, the typical mission is a deliberate but rather chaotic attack by a combined arms company-based combat team. This one was clearly going to be very different, as I could see from the briefing. Here it is; the mission map anyway. I have minimised the text briefing as it hides a lot of the map and in this case, it told me nothing much, except to defend the bridge:
My little outfit is the trio of red diamonds, bottom centre-left. The bridge is in the middle. From the tactical symbols, the defenders - on the left bank apart from one AT gun - comprise some dismounted infantry, some soft-skimmed vehicles, a single tank, and a handful of anti-tank guns, likely the 57mm ones derived from the British 6-pounder, used by US Infantry Divisions. I believe the map is a re-labelled version of one of the Ukranian ones that come with the sim. The terrain itself is fairly level, not what you'd expect for the Ardennes. It might have been a good idea if I had enabled the winter weather mod to produce snowscapes appropriate for at least the later stages of the Battle of the Bulge but I don't know if it's compatible and I stuck with the original.
Even though this mission is evidently an ad hoc operation, I'd have preferred a fuller, more immersive 'battle picture' and more scene-setting, in the mission briefing. Here’s how I ended up picturing the briefing, in my own mind:
You're a lieutenant in the US Army commanding a platoon of three 76mm-armed M4 tanks from the 66th Tank Regiment, Second Armoured Division, the famous 'Hell on Wheels'. In the confusion following the Division's sudden redeployment to deal with the German Ardennes Offensive, your platoon has become separated from your unit. As you motor uncertainly along a track beside a river, an infantry major and his radio operator step out of the trees to your left and wave you down. The major looks tired but business-like, waving his '45 like he means to use it.
'I'm the Officer Commanding, Company B, First Battalion, 145th Infantry. I don't care who you are or where you're going, but starting right now, you're working for me.
Look at this map. There's a bridge over the Roer River here. It's on your right, just a few hundred yards ahead of you. See it?
There's also a whole bunch of Kraut tanks and infantry heading straight for it, coming from way over there, on your far left - see those blue arrows on the map?
Company B - what's left of us - is in a defensive perimeter, on the near side of the bridge, with a few 57mm AT guns.
The Krauts musn't get that bridge. We've to hold it, at all costs. No more bug-outs.
Take your three M4s up there and keep the Krauts away from the bridge. Their tanks are your priority targets. Your choice, where you set up. But do it quick. Move out NOW!'
They say 'Time spent in reconnaisance is never wasted'. For this mission, as usual in sims and often in real life, my recce would have to be a map one. First job before starting the mission was to take the map and my orders and make a quick Combat Appreciation. For this sort of thing, I used an abbreviated format we were taught by a captain in the RM Commandos - good enough for the booties, good enough for me. It's 'Aim - Enemy - Ground - Plan' and here goes my quick effort for this mission.
Aim - the easy bit, to destroy any Germans making for the bridge.
Enemy - tanks and infantry in unknown, but possibly company group, strength, shortly likely to cross my front from left to right, headed for the bridge.
Ground - looking towards the enemy from the bridge: on the left, a treeline with good cover and some room to manoeuvre; in the centre, a large open space with little cover, which the enemy will likely have to cross, a good killing ground; to the right, a narrow treeline backed by a bend in the river which severely limits mobility that way. Contour lines are few and gentle so the terrain looks rather flat, apart from the rather shallow river banks and a very low hillock to my immediate left. Basically, I'm looking for covered, preferably hull-down firing positions on the enemy's lighter-armoured flanks.
Plan - move to positions in the tree line to the left of Company B's defended locality. Fire into the flanks of the enemy as he crosses my front from left to right, heading for the bridge. My tanks to be in a line, set back from the treeline, sacrificing wider arcs of fire for better concealment. Change firing positions every few rounds, as one does. Cover from fire would be nice but accept cover from view if that's all I can get up there, as seems likely.
Plan made, I loaded the mission and roared off down the track towards the bridge, trying hard not to veer off and fall into the river, conventional Sherman gun tanks not being noted for being amphibious, notwithstanding the abilities of DD versions.
Looking behind me only to see my other two tanks immobile, I realised I'd forgotten to brief them. The F8 key brought up the map again and from its command and control icons, I ordered single file/column formation and 'do as I do'. As they caught up, I pressed on. About 50 meters before the trees on my left petered out, I turned 90 degrees left and rumbled through the woods, some distance inside and parallel to the treeline from which I intended to catch the enemy with flanking fire.
As I motored on, the trees thinned out but I was still screened from the killing ground to my right by a decent line of smaller trees. From that direction, the cacophony of sound I could hear above my engine noise indicated that the battle was already in full swing. I'm using the recommended NTA sound mod, which I assume was responsible for the US tanker voices I could hear on the intercom. This mod changes many of the other sound effects too; hard to say from one usage whether or not I prefer it to stock, which is pretty good too. Anyway, I pressed on, more cautiously now. The woods thickened up around me and I swung 90 degrees right, to face the edge of the treeline. Beyond, the enemy seemed already to be advancing, heard but not yet seen through the screen of foliage in front of my tank. I began to edge slowly forward, to the point where I would acquire a narrow line of sight out into the killing ground. As I did so, I ordered my tanks into line abreast, anxiously looking around to see how well my AI Tank Commanders would cope with my series of manoeuvres. The answer, alas, was 'none too well!' ...to be continued!
Into the Blue: OFF & FE2
By 33LIMA,
Recreating a classic WW1 pilot's tale flying Sopwiths in France!
This mission report was inspired by my reading material on a recent short holiday. I had last read Norman Macmillan's 'Into the Blue' back in the early 1970s along with other classics then available from the local public library, such as my favourites, Arthur Gould Lee's 'No Parachute' and 'Open Cockpit'.
While the latter two are back in print, I had to go to eBay to get a copy of 'Into the Blue', and I much enjoyed re-reading it, after all those years. The book comprises segments originally written for publication at or about the time, expanded to book format in 1929, then expanded again for the 1969 edition to include recent research by the author and with real names replacing some pseudonyms used in the earlier edition. This composite origin makes it hard sometimes to distinguish what is or isn't genuine contemporary observation or terminology; but the work is not just a good read, it's a mine of many useful snippets of information on RFC and RAF operations and training, as experienced by the author.
The book
The story starts with initial training at Netherhaven and Upavon in England, 1916-17, flying first Maurice Farman MF17 'shorthorns' - also known as 'the Rumpety' - then moving on to Avro 504As and Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutters, the latter as the type on which the author would expect to fly operationally on posting to France. The main impression is that even by early 1917, flying training was very rudimentary, lacking not just combat training but even basics like spin recovery. This part of the story is brought to life with many experiences and anecdotes. The one I like best is told of one of the COs at Central Flying School, Upavon, the dapper Major Gordon Bell, who had a bad strutter. One day, the story goes, after having been shot down while on operations, he crashed into a tree:
"As he shinned down the tree to the ground, a resplendent staff officer rode up to him and said, 'Have you crashed? 'N-n-n-n-no,' replied G.B., 'I a-a-a-a-always l-l-l-l-land like that.' "
From training, the author was posted to 45 Squadron RFC, at St Marie Cappel on the northern part of the British sector, not far south of the English Channel coast. He arrived at the end of March 1917 and flew Strutters right through 'Bloody April' and beyond, regretfully finding that the 2-seater Sopwiths, though fine flying machines, were long past their best as fighters. Despite that, they had to soldier on, flying the same types of patrol as the single seater 'scouts', with the added hazard of also flying longer-range reconnaisance missions. For the latter, being fighters, they were expected to escort their own photographic machines, and though they rarely failed to get their pictures, a particularly heavy price was often paid on these missions. For some reason the author records that fellow-Strutter outfit 70 Squadron did sometimes get escorts, but never 45, who had to rely on help from whatever friendly patrols might be operating along their route. In that regard the author is fairly scathing about the failure to make any serious attempt to co-ordinate with or even inform patrols, though he also accepts that such efforts would have been prone to all kinds of difficulties.
Among the many interesting details is of course the experience of flying Strutters. They were apparently prone to 'float' on landing, making it too easy to overshoot landings on small operational airfields. The airbrakes fitted to Strutters may have been designed specifically to help with this. But the author records they were too close inboard to have much effect and instead, disrupted airflow over the tail so badly that pilots generally used them once and then never again! Macmillan also records the replacement of the original Ross synchronisation gear for the front-firing Vickers with the more reliable and faster-firing Sopwith Kauper system, though he also notes that the former system left the standard gun trigger in place and this was sometimes used to engage a fleeting target, regardless of the holed propellers which resulted. Macmillan also records the arrival of 130HP Clerget engines which offered little improvement over the previous 110hp versions. Despite this, the squadron performed solidly and even generated some aces, especially those who learned to fight their Strutters as crews later learned to fight the Bristol F2B Fighter, using the front gun as well as the observer's Lewis.
The squadron re-equipped with Camels, in the field, only during August 1917. Late in the year, they transferred to the Italian Front after the disaster at Caporetto. However, Macmillan suffered burns in a non-flying accident and when fit again back in England, was posted as an instructor. Here, his accounts of the training regime make a fine contrast to his description of his own initiation, thanks to the improvements made by then Lt Col Smith-Barry whose approach to flying training is often credited with setting the foundation for the modern syllabus, as we know it today. Macmillan primarily trained Camel pilots, and he records that no pilot he was instructing was killed or injured in a Camel crash. Interestingly, he attributes this partly to his insistence that all heavy landings must be reported so that centre-section rigging could be checked and tightened. Apparently the Camel's centre-section struts were not firmly fixed to the upper wing, but set into sockets, where they were held by the tension of the centre-section rigging. The latter could become loose, especially after a heavy landing and the author reports that after the war, the famous Hawker designer Sir Sydney Camm, confided his own belief that this was a cause of many Camel crashes.
The mission - Over Flanders Fields
Keen to see how well I could re-create for myself the author's experiences of combat in Strutters, I decided to start with OFF (not yet having acquired its recent successor, WOFF). There were two reasons for this. First, in my experience of WW1 sims, OFF is perhaps the best at the 2-seater experience. Second, I was sure that, with OFF's particularly faithful recreation of WW1's air war orders of battle, I would be able to choose a career in 'Forty-Five'. I was not to be disappointed as regards the second point; though with the first, I would be less happy with the results.
I started by creating a new pilot and his unit. I found 45 Squadron listed as a fighter squadron ('bomber' being the alternative, under which most two-seater units are listed in OFF, though it is not a very satisfactory term for WW1). I gave my character Macmillan's surname and wanted to start about the same time as he did, just before 'Bloody April'. As potential OFF careers seem to have start dates associated with a change of base or aircraft, this wasn't possible and I started instead on 28 April; near enough!
In the briefing screen, I was pleased to see that although I was the only Macmillan on the squadron roster, this included, as historical aces, several of those named as such in the book. Good stuff and typical OFF attention to detail!
Kicking off my first mission, came more typical OFF stuff, though not so good this time. Our first mission was a 'scramble', to intercept incoming enemy aircraft. In OFF there are far too many such missions and your own airfield is often the target of strafing fighters, including German ones which generally operated on their own side of the Lines and just did not undertake this kind of mission, not in early 1917 anyway and not much if at all, after that.
Unable to change to a different type of mission, I had to start it up, then cancel the mission, after it had loaded. Then start another mission. This wasn't much better - a railyard attack. At this point in the war this would have been a common enough target for a bombing raid, but for BE2s or the like, not our squadron or other fighters. The RNAS operated Strutters in the bomber role but these were I think generally the single-seater version. Besides, 45 Squadron was listed in OFF as a fighter squadron and as Norman Macmillan's book makes clear, that's how they operated, along with southern neighbours and fellow Strutter unit 70 Squadron - as fighters who sometimes also flew longer-range recce missions.
Third time lucky, my next effort generated a more realistic mission - a reconnaisance. This was only up to the trenchlines, and thus not really the sort of mission commonly flown by RFC Strutters by Macmillan's account, but it would do nicely. Unusually for the period, we had an escort - four RNAS Sopwith Pups. Here's the mission briefing screen:
OFF sometimes assigns rather large numbers to a mission but the five squadron machines on this show was pretty representative of the period. Here we we are at St Marie Cappel - naturally, OFF has the squadron operating from the correct airfield, even though these are now generic layouts not the accurate airfields commonly featured in the previous release, Phase 2.
Oddly I think for late April 1917, the default 'skin' for the squadron has PC10 brown wings but clear doped linen fuselages and red and white tailplanes - more accurate I'd think for the squadron's early days, in late 1916. Macmillan several times refers to their planes as being brown and both the operational Strutters pictured in 'Into the Blue' have dark fuselages as well as upper wings. For my own machine, I opted to use a different skin, that for the aircraft of the man who became better known as Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris. He's noted as an efficient flight commander in Macmillan's book and it's a nice OFF touch that I can fly in a plane flown by someone featured in the book. The overall PC10 uppers, with the forward fin in a lighter colour, white fuselage band behind the roundel and white number ahead, nicely matches a 45 Sqdn Strutter pictured in flight in the book, numbered '2' and said to be flown by Garratt and Carey.
I don't know how I did it but in fiddling about unsuccessfully to get Ankor's DX mod (which adds self-shadowing to WOFF planes, and has been got to work in OFF and CFS3 by MajorMagee over at Sim OutHouse, but caused my missions not to load) I seemed to have messed up many of my OFF settings. For one thing my 'Always lead' option was not working on this mission. I didn't notice this in the briefing nor did I twig when one of the flight - the real leader - took off ahead of me. Anyway, getting over my irritation at one of the chaps taking off (as I believed) in front of the boss, I checked controls, started up and roared off down the runway and into the air. I say 'roared' but the OFF engine sound is rather muted.
Turning to orbit the aerodrome, I found that, although not tail-heavy and stable enough in level flight, she needed a great deal of bottom rudder to avoid her tail drooping badly in a turn.
The OFF Strutter is a good-looking bird, with a nicely-appointed cockpit, complete with reproductions of brass manufacturer's plaques and a padded windshield. I suspect many pilots removed the latter for better visibility and hoped not to regret its inclusion in OFF, later! Wing ribs are enhanced by what appears to be bump-mapped textures. Another nice OFF touch is the rendition of the transparent material on the centre section. She has the French Etevée Lewis gun mount for the observer, which was probably something of an antique by Spring 1917, in the RFC anyway. It may better suit the French Strutters; but tho the Aviation Militaire ended up a bigger user of the Strutter than the British, they were late adopters and I suspect most French machines would have had the British Scarff ring mount. I don't know if the WOFF Strutter changes this but I'm sure its textures are much improved.
I duly orbited the airfield in a climbing spiral, still not having realised that I was not leading the flight. This may be why I wasn't able to select 'Next waypoint' on the Tactical Display and get my blue route line to skip to the heading of the objective. Or it might be down to my lost settings, which included my joystick key assignments and my lower-visibility tactical display and labels (an Olham mod).
So I ended up following all the many waypoints before the leg to the Lines. As I did so, I used the padlock and 'player-target view' to have a look at our escort, the RNAS Pups. OFF uses the limited CFS3 view system which is much less satisfactory for this sort of thing than, say, FE2 or RoF; but I gather WOFF has made some improvements in this direction.
Finally, the current route line switched to the direction of the objective and I settled down into a steady climb towards the Lines, still thinking myself the leader and watching to see if I needed to throttle back to let 'my' flight catch me up.
...to be continued!
GermanCE Terrain Re-Work Preview
By CowboyTodd41,
The Strike Fighters series is over a decade old this year. The series is renowned among combat flight enthusiasts for it's open modability, gentle learning curve, and (foremost) the scenarios it models. When it comes to The Cold War, no other sim does it like the SF series does. As amazing as something like the DCS series may be, it won't let me shoot down Mig-15's over the Yalu one mission, then without even transitioning to a new program, shoot down a flight of Backfires with AIM-54's the next.
That being said, the sim is not without it's issues. The first being the aforementioned fact of the sim's age. At eleven years old, it's certainly beginning to show some wrinkles. One of the most obvious wrinkles the sim shows is in the terrain engine. When creating SF:P1, TK elected to use the old style TFD/HFD terrain engine rather than the new .lod based terrains of his other contemporaries Lock-On and Il2. I presume this decision was for ease of design as TK is basically a one man show, and he probably had a lot of knowledge of this terrain type from it's usage in European Air War. While this terrain type isn't as detailed as others, it does have one great upside; ease of modding.
The terrain releases over the years from the various modders for both sims has mapped virtually the entire planet as jet sim playground. We have maps for everything from Ethiopia to Cyprus to San Diego. The terrains have been getting more and more detailed with large numbers or new targets and target areas. The recent Desert v4 release being one of the shining examples of this. One area the detail has always been lacking though, is in the detail of the airfields themselves. When designing the original Desert terrain, because it was fictional, TK chose to create a number of air bases that use the general look of 60's-70's USAF bases. They look fine in a place like Dhimar, but once you port them to a place like Germany, they begin to stick out like a sore thumb.
For forums member Rends, the look was too jarring. After learning the Strike Fighters modding basics, he got right to work. Gathering other members of the renowned German Modders Group they set out to turn the most important map in the SF series into the Real Deal™.
I reached out to Rends to ask him some questions about this most massive undertakings.
Your main project right now is your total reworking of the GermanyCE terrain. What was it that sparked you to take on such a large and complicated task?
Well it was the watertower that disturbed me. I got SF2 because of the A-10 and found it a nice feature that it has a Germany Terrain. Once ingame i noticed the watertower and it looked so out of place. I felt like being on a US airbase in the States rather than on a German airfield. I realy wanted to change the waterower only but by then I was looking at the terrain no longer as a gamer but a modder. That's not good if you ask me ;-)
An A-10 over the new GermanyCE, with targets moved into towns
The screen shots you've shown off so far in the forums have been truly incredible. The level fidelity in the airbases is something we've rarely seen outside of say, Yakee Air Pirate. Buechel Air Base in particular. Do you plan on maintaining that level of detail throughout the whole map, or do you have a few "set peice" bases and then a number of "generic bases" to supplement them?
You mentioned Büchel Air base. Once here at Combatace i found Images of Gepards german airfield mod and i asked at the german Forum where to get it. It took only a few days and Florian Ravenclaw007 and 76.IAP-Blackbird jumped on the bandwagon of what is now the Germany rework. Sure it's a Project started by me but a lot of stuff is done by other guys. Büchel and Pferdsfeld is Florians work and Ravenclaw and Blackbird made some stuff i couldn't found in the download section. Not to mention the help i got from the community here. It's fantastic. And yes the plan is to recreate most of the airfields. But as you mentioned this is a large Project and not be done in a few months. But don't worry i plan to upload an open beta soon*. I just want to know how it works on different computers. And there will be a release a short time after. From there on there will be regular updates until we have either finished the project or lost interest (i hope not,lol)
The main gate at Büchel. Pretty fantastic!
I metioned earlier about the scale of a task this large. But beyond just being a large task, it seems it would be quite tedious as well. Has the process of inserting objects via the notepad driven you to madness yet?
I wish there was a real Terrain Editor out there with no need to place objects using notepad. Yes it can be boring and it is boring sometimes. But then you fire up the game and if all the stuff is there were it belongs, I'm satisfied. This helps not to become mad (sometimes) ;-)
Continuing along the same lines, object placement and terrain re-working is a pretty complicated task. Did it take you long to pick this up?
Once you understand how the game works [modding] isn't that difficult anymore. There are a few Tools out there and they are very useful. And I have modded other games in the past. Guess that helps too.
A great before and after look at a factory target. The difference is huge.
I noticed you're fairly new to the community, having only been registered since December of last year. Were you playing the SF series before then?
No SF2 europe was the first game of the series I got. And I got it at the end of the last year. I knew some screenshots before but that's all.
Before being a member of the SF/CA community, have you been a memeber of any other simming communities?
I'm a longtime member at simhq to hang around, graviteam.com, a forum for 'Steel Fury 42' WWII tank drivers, and gametoast.com.A community dedicated to mod the StarWars Battlefront series; my second love after flight sims.
Well thanks very much to Rends for allowing me to interview him and providing us with some great insight into this much anticipated mod!
-Todd
*This interview was conducted about a week or so before the article was posted. The afternoon just before this article was finalized, Rends provided an update about the beta version.
Game Developer Interview: Tricubic Studios Combat Helo
By Skyviper,
In 1972 the United States Army sought a new aircraft for the anti armor attack role that was once filled by the AH -56 Cheyenne. This aircraft would need to be under Army command so platforms such as the A-10 were out of the question due to the Key West Agreement which forbids the Army to own fixed winged aircraft. In 1983 the first production model of the new Advanced Attack Helicopter rolled of the line; the AH-64 Apache.
Many of us are the hunt for those very rare and very illusive combat helicopter sims. CombatACE has your six covered wingman because we have the scoop on such a game being developed right now… a game that is nearing its release.
CombatACE got the chance to catch up with Richard Hawley the lead the developer of Combat Helo, an AH-64 flight simulator. Thank you Mr. Hawley for taking the time to do this interview with us.
Please, tell us a little bit about Tricubic Studios.
My wife and I founded the company back in 2010 as the business entity for Combat Helo developed by myself, David Hopkinson and Fred Naar. David is responsible for the 3D art and map building, Fred is well known in his own right as the author of Helicopter Total Realism (a free add-on for Microsoft FSX) and I glue it all together into a coherent mess…make sure everything gets delayed and annoy people.
The name comes from Tricubic Interpolation, a method from which you can derive points in a regular grid from points around it. It sounded clever at the time, now it’s just pretentious.
What inspired you to start creating games?
No bolt of lightning or sudden realization. This has been a singular, life upsetting tumultuous pain in the ass determination for over a decade now. But like most things it started small and grew over time. I’m in my mid-forties now, in the 1980’s computers were a new thing, school hadn’t seen a computer so when I got my first computer I was asked by my teachers to bring it to show. Four years later it seemed like every teenage boy had one hidden away in the bedroom for playing games. At least the cool ones did (grin).
How long have you been in the gaming industry?
Tricky one that. Before it was an industry in a very real multi-billion dollar sense it was a cottage industry. By the time I left school I had already contributed to three games. When I was 14 I helped out an outfit called “Assassin Software” publishing games on the ZX Spectrum from a board games shop. MY gaming origins are polluted with all those first edition Steve Jackson and Avalon Hill mega games that take months to set-up and play. All the table-top strategy games and RPGs. We sold them, played them. So when they moved into video game publishing I was added loading screens, machine code effects and duplicating the tapes. Later I was doing conversions of some of those games to other 8 bit home computers such as the Amstrad CPC and Memotech MTX 500. They were all extensions of those strategy games but on a computer.
Flash forward to present day; recently I installed an emulator on a tablet, I searched on one of our games (“Next War”) and I was shocked to see graphics I drew over 30 years ago appear instantly on a device in the palm of my hand. I want to go back to that young me and shout “Look at this awesome thing! You should have done more of it!”
In my life I’ve done a lot of things, freelance work. Microprose UK didn’t want me, then they did. Sometime later they had their famous financial breakdownto be bought out by Hasbro.After that I ended up writing working with Longbow 2 mission editing tools. Thenwriting stuff for Empire Interactive Enemy Engaged helicopter games. Then more game tools and QA work for third parties. You’ll see my name in a few sim manuals over the years in various roles.
What do you enjoy most about creating games?
I don’t think of myself as someone who makes games, I make things, I’m a maker with a need to be working on something all the time. I see a cool tool in a shop and think of possibilities,“What can you make with that tool?”I leave behind a trail of electronic projects, last year I completed a five year build of a video arcade machine, this year I started working on prop replica StormTrooper E11 Blaster. I wrote a book on Terrain Modelling for game engines (available on Amazon etc.)So many projects, not enough time. For Combat Helo I think the biggest thrill was Dave’s creative process. Watching something come to life. And later it will bewatching what other people will make with it, or build around it. That’s a big motivator for me.This guy at Komodo Simulations makes replica helicopter controls for museums and such; he’s got designs for 1:1 size Apache flight sticks in the works. I can’t imagine anything more thrilling than sitting in our cockpit on a huge screen feeling actual flight sticks. I’m happy to add features into our game to allow people to build crazy stuff so long as it doesn’t have a knock on effect to our schedule.
I have also found the perfect blend of my old school table-top origins and computers with this Augmented Reality technology. I really wish I had time to work on that.
What inspired the creation of Combat Helo?
Originally it was some time after the demise of the Origin Jameslabel behind the Longbow series. I wanted to play Longbow 3 and nobody was there to make it. A combination of a fanatical fan base and falling sales resulted in publishers dropping the genre like a hot potato. I attempted to have a go at a making Combat Helo back in 2002. During that time we made some progress but all I ended up with was a lot of prototype code for different ideas and systems will little cohesion. The cockpit was designed by a very talented guy from Italy who used the references I gave him. In fact we had a lot of good art contributions but the problem you quickly discover is that once you have art kindly contributed by six different people, you get six different styles. The hi-res cockpit that was built was never textured however you can maybe still see it today, it used to be included as the ‘test’ Apache helicopter in the Outerra demo. Due to work pressures I had to park the 2002 project and nothing happened for a few years. The world changed in that time.
I heard a news story about badly managed helicopter resources in Afghanistan with British commanders asking for more and British politicians saying everything was fine of course. In Afghanistan combat rescue units were stretched in the early days. What would it take to fix that? Was the mission possible given such limited resource?I liked resource management problems in simulations, so called strategic decision making. So when a query about my abandoned 2002 Combat Helo project came up I considered in detail what it would take to complete.Would Combat Rescue be a good topic for a game given the touchy subject matter? So I read Ed Macy’s books, Immediate Response by Mark Hammond and just immerse myself in the subject.
Then came along the idea of incorporating a counter-insurgency (COIN) type of campaignbut it tied into the question I had about resources.Thus was born the hidden agenda of Combat Helo and its COIN campaign, to find out what force levels were required to achieve a pre-set goal. In the end we never completed the implementation for that (nice subtext there). But it’s all good design work that one day could be resurrected. The system behind this was partly inspired by Physicist Sean Gourley’s work on the mathematics of war; his team identified an amazing yet counter-intuitive fact, that war (even asymmetric conflicts) had structure.That structure could be described as a simple one line equation (which I have pinned in large print on my wall). I ran with that and prototyped a model for our COIN campaign. As it happened we didn’t have the man power or funds to deliver that so it’s been parked until we can do it justice. I’m never in any hurry.
So the Apache, COIN, Combat Rescue, the need for a successor to Longbow. All these things conspired, we had to do it. And I was fortunate enough to find Dave. Couldn’t have carried it forward without him.
What are some the challenges that have been encountered during development and how have they been overcome?
Lack of funds from the outset. I agreed to re-start Combat Helo if it was funded. But after we had shown a simple prototype the economy went south and money vanished. I should have taken the decision to abandon it there and then. I totally regret that choice and trying to muddle on. If I had left it, when crowd-funding became a thing we could have returned to it. By that time I was already in huge personal debt and now my family was suffering as a result. So the project had to be parked. That’s why there are huge gaps in development after then end of 2010. It became something I could only pick up as a hobby project until things got better, which they eventually did.
The other challenges were technical. First you had a helicopter that had many classified systems. Then you had a large world that needed to be populated with trees with physical properties that would work in an off the shelf game engine.In 2009 Leadwerks engine was the only engine outside of EA’s Battlefield and possibly the new ArmA game was doing deferred rendering (that’s rendering geometry in one pass and then all the lighting in a later pass).In our ignorance we hit every problem in the book when it comes to trying to create large worlds with game engines designed for small ones.
David worked hard with the primitive tools he had. Getting maps of a decent size and performance required us to use every trick in the book. Since we were going for a retro sim look we can get away with a lot of it. The best feature of the engine is real-time lighting, so we make use of it where we can. Play to your strengths. If we had to do it all over we’d do it differently of course.
One of the problems you get is that of floating point math error. The further you move away from the origin of a world the more error creeps into every calculation until eventually the whole model is a jittering mess. You saw this in Longbow 2 in the virtual cockpit mode, that cockpit jitter everyone thought was a vibration effect was actually the fixed point math routines crapping out. And also one of the technical problems of the ill-fated A10 game. We had the same issue although I came up with portals to fix it. Everything in the cockpit sits at the world origin so it’s steady as a rock. I match up lighting with the outside world, you can hardly see the join, even leaning out of the cockpit with TrackIR.
Normally dedicated simulation games get around this by both tiling and resetting the origin, camera matrix manipulation or 64bit math.
How long has Combat Helo been in development and how much research went into its development?
The first lines of code started in September 2009, I was fortunate to meet David Hopkinson. We looked at what the order of battle would be, drew up a list of assets we’d have in game and how to build them.
My research material dates back to 1996. I literally have boxes full of articles from journals, periodicals, sales brochures. All the historical material from when I was writing material for Enemy Engaged, hours of video. Pretty much anything I find and notes from conversations with crew.
If you go back through our blogs you can see it evolving over time. Dave helped research and drive the asset list, looking at Iranian equipment, US equipment, the area around Herat in Afghanistan and together we came up with a fitting scenario where they all fitted.
We drew up ideas for how radio comm trees would work, the handing over of flights between brigade combat teams (BCTs), we had all this really cool stuff researched that went into the master design documents. Sadly most of it is on the cutting room floor as we need to publish a simpler game. We hope that Gunnery will give us the opportunity to go back and build the original grand campaign.
We certainly drank a LOT of coffee.
How will Combat Helo standout from other similar games such as DCS Blackshark?
They are chalk and cheese, an English expression meaning they may look similar but are very different. The DCS series is a purist simulation product, written by engineers and enthusiasts with an engineering eye. All very procedural and institutionalised. PC combat sims as a genre used to be very different, they were more like animated documentaries. Different experiences.
One forces you to conform, the other indulges. We’re all about indulgence. Our Apache cockpit experience lets you learn as much as you want, go out and blow things up, play with it. We’re working on improving the content pipeline so we can keep throwing new maps and missions, even a dynamic campaign in there. We’re also trying to optimise your up-time. In our Apache you can spend 10 to 15 minutes prepping your ship or hit a key to get going, it’s your choice and we won’t judge you for it. There will be one initial load time and that’s it. No wait time between menus or “small” accidents.
Doing a barrel roll will NEVER be an option (well you probably can pull it off but it’s tricky).
One of the features I tried to bring to Combat Helo was this notion that you can walk around in a limited way. Do inspections and arm the aircraft, interact with base objects. I know this is all been done with military games and we’re not trying to be those games either.
Later when we activate co-op play your friends will be able to act as a load-master, arming aircraft as they are ready. We have laptops in the command tent that act as interfaces to the mission engine. A player will be able to assign specific missions to any aircraft ready at the airbase. Everything is message based, we experimented with pulling out game information and updating a HTML 5 page in real-time. That worked quite well, when it’s time to implement a user-facing mission editor we might go the route of SOAP messages from a web page. I’ve got code stubs in there just in case. It depends what people want and how they fly with their friends.
What can users both novice and veteran expect from your game?
We’re creating a game for a generation that missed out on those simulations from Origin and Microprose, PC combat simulations were a genre of their own. Those games were jingoistic indulgencies, escapism with a fair amount of technical depth.
They can expect to install the game and get up and running fairly quickly. This is an authentic representation AH-64D. It’s an odd bird, you can think of it as a Block I that’s undergoing a rolling upgrade to Block II. We made deliberate design choices about readability and ease of use.
95% of the cockpit switches work, engine start-up, APU, lighting settings, store jettison etc. Even the wipers have two speeds and an intermittent wipe mode.Pilots should expect some confusion about how the weapon systems interact between the front and rear seats (I still get confused). My advice is not to keep jumping between seats if you can avoid it, learn to go through the steps you need for the task at hand but we don’t force you.
The real Longbow is a very complex aircraft and there is a lot we don’t cover. It simply isn’t practical or possible to do without touching on areas that are secret. In those areas that are sensitive I take my cues from other games and make a best educated guess. The feedback I get from pilots is along the lines of “good enough” which suits me.
The initial release will contain a typical representation of a live fire gunnery range, operating out of a local stage-point. Essentially you’re given the keys, an ethereal instructor pilot and exercises to complete. You get to try different gunnery techniques, operating the aircraft systems and then engaging in some dynamic (but totally fictional) survival missions in SAM infested hills moving from point A to point B.
The AH-64D is armed with a 30mm cannon, a selection of rockets (including illumination and smoke) and AGM-114 L and K Hellfires (Radar and Laser guided respectively). TrackIR head tracking support is included so you can slave the cannon to your physical head movement if you wish.
We’ll have a mode for pick-up and play with a 360 joypad so you can fly instant action missions Comanche style. We have some lively crew speech to keep things interesting.
Initially we won’t ship with multi-player, it’s logistically difficult to debug and test. The game has been designed around messaging for multi-player so I don’t anticipate major problems, just lots of little ones, we will be enabling co-op (font seat / back seat) play around the third major release on our published roadmap. The cross-coupling of the systems presents interesting play challenges. You can actually fight your co-pilotfor control of systems.
Also expect the occasional exploding cow (if you know which setting in the config.ini to tweak).
What can users who play hardcore flight sims expect from your game?
The best I can hope for is that they feel nostalgic for the games they played in the mid to late nineties and enjoy some of the attention to the flight model and cockpit experience. We have a really advanced flight-model thanks to Fred Naar who created the amazing free helicopter physics replacement add-on for FSX. There’s nothing else like it.
“Gunnery” is best described as Longbow 2 Tutorial Mode with trees mixed with a little Comanche Maximum Overkill. It’s a rolling release meaning we have a roadmap for the year in which we will be releasing upgrades and new content to extend the experience. Eventually moving towards our ambitious grand design.
Will you allow your game to modded? Will users to be able to add custom skins, sounds, and helicopters?
We acknowledge there’s scope for improvement. We’re only a small team and there are many talented individuals who make awesome texture and sound packs that can improve the experience. It’s something we’ll try to help with, any reasonable requests for information on the games forum will be answered by us. Anything really cool we’ll try and make it happen. Sadly making new helicopters is likely to be impossible without a lot of code behind. However if someone created a UH-60 that fits the game style we’d love to hear from them and maybe make it an official add-on/plugin. Same goes for more armour and other threats. We’re happy to update our internal database to add new entities.
If Combat Helo becomes successful what other titles do you plan to create? Is there a Cobra sim in the future?
Not a Cobra (although we did consider that and others). If “Gunnery” is reasonably successful we have a CH-47D already built, just needs us to integrate it into the code. This will allow for more mission profiles such as co-operative armed escort and combat rescue. I would like to add something like the “Little Bird” or a BlackHawk.
Post “Gunnery” and the roadmap want to crowd-fund the next phase. We have been experimenting with an amazing new engine UnigineSIM which delivers everything we need out of the box for our huge open-world campaign.We’re still in talks with Unigine so we don’t know which way this will go. I have high hopes, it’s a great engine, great design and we can do some amazing things with it. One of things we’re certainly going to do is make it much easier to add new cockpits and aircraft. But the focus will always be on helicopters and joint operations in that easy to pick up but hard to master game style.
Real-time 3D cockpit interior of the CH-47D.
Fully clickable overhead panel
Unigine SIM engine - Combat Helo (2) could look like this.
When do you plan for Combat Helo to be released and how can it obtained upon release?
We will be publishing the game on Steam, we’re currently listed in the Steam Greenlight Concepts area if you want to stop by, comment or start a discussion. It’s been well received on Steam Greenlight so far, hitting the number two spot at the weekend. That’s pretty encouraging for a PC simulation. Clearly people want these things. We don’t talk about dates but we’re aiming for around the end of Q1 this year which is not far off. That’s why you see all the activity on Facebook, Twitter, and the new official site (that’s www.combat-helo.com). Sérgio is new to the team but not to flight simulations, he’s community building. And importantly, he reminds me about my obligations and expectations. He’s been fantastic. Don’t worry, when it escapes on Steam we’ll be sure to tell everyone.
What are the final system specifications going to be?
NVidia Shader Model 3.0 GPU or ATI Shader Model 4.0 graphics card (NVidia GeForce 6600, ATI Radeon 3000). Or better. Most modern 3D cards.Any mid-level gaming PC, i5 2.5 GHz or better. 3.5GHz CPU and upwards is recommended for higher detail scenery.HOTAS Joystick configuration strongly recommended for simulation mode play. The lighting and post-shader effects are GPU intensive so I would strongly recommend the beefiest card you can muster. You can get a lot of performance improvements by selectively turning off effects. I can tweak it to run fine on my gaming laptop with an nVidia mobile GPU.
Do you have anything you would like to tell your supporters?
Stick with us for the ride. We have some amazing things in the pipeline and we need you to help us make it happen. PC Sims are as strong as ever and there’s room for variety. Support for Gunnery means we can carry on, taking it to the next level. And above all, thank you for the support and patience.
Combat Helo looms over developer Richard Hawley
Once again Mr. Hawley thank you for taking the time to answer all of these questions and I'm sure I speak for a lot of members here at CombatACE when in saying that I look forward to the release of Combat Helo.
We're aren't done yet. Somebody had to create the terrain, the Apache, and a number of other things in the world of Combat Helo.Dave Hopkinson, a teacher from the UK who now lives and works in Asia, is the artist that brought the world of Combat Helo to life. He too agreed to an interview us and for that Dave we thank you.
How long have you been creating art?
On and off I've been producing 2D and 3D computer art for about 16 years. My original 3D art experience came from making levels for the first person shooter series Quake and also DukeNukem 3D. Later I moved onto 3D modeling and I started with Gmax (a free version of 3d studio max that was designed for developing game mods) and then moved on to 3D studio max. I worked on a variety of new aircraft for the Strike fighters series and then worked on Battle of Britain 2: Wings of victory. I also worked on a handful of total conversion mods for Medieval 2: Total war.
What are some the things you like to create?
Cockpits are an area that I really enjoy working on. The skill set involved in developing an accurate and detailed cockpit is quite unique and it can be very rewarding. To build an accurate cockpit you really need to work along side real world pilots and often the materials are written rather than visual. For example it's very rare to find a complete set of blueprints for a cockpit which means you really need to do some investigations, experiments and thorough research. Cockpits also allow you some artistic license as you have room to include small details that vary in individual aircraft. Photos of babes on the dashboard, colourful magazines in the map tray, odd quotations, comical re-spellings etc. Easter eggs in other words.
What inspires you to create the art you make?
As a technical artist there isn't a great deal of need for inspiration. Generally my job is to recreate objects that appear to be the same in 3D space as they are in reality. My production level is usually attributed to motivation which typically comes from seeing the developments on Richard's side of the project.
What are some of the things you enjoy about art and graphic design for video games?
For me the greatest reward comes from seeing people use and enjoy the artwork I create. Overcoming challenges and proving to myself that I have the ability to accurately reproduce an object also brings a sense of satisfaction.
Your work for Combat Helo is great. How much research went to the design of the AH-64 Apache?
Richard is a walking Apache encyclopedia of AH-64 knowledge and therefore there wasn't a great deal for me to do in this regard. He provided a huge quantity of images, videos and other reference materials that I needed to produce the artwork.
What are some the challenges you encountered while creating the Apache for Combat Helo and how have you overcome them?
The 3D engine that we are using to develop Combat Helo provided both Richard and I with a long list of challenges that we slowly had to work around and deal with. The main challenge that I encountered was getting the cockpit model with over 500 sub objects (switches, knobs, buttons, controls etc) to render at an acceptable frame rate. We had to experiment with the way the objects were grouped and arranged in order to optimize render time. We developed a method of hiding small detailed objects in the CP/G cockpit when you were in the pilot seat and vice versa. Thankfully the leadwerks engine provides support for lua scripting so we found ways to solve rendering problems through scripting.
How long did it take for you to create a model the Apache and get it to a point where you were pleased with how it looks?
We were lucky enough to inherit a basic Apache fuselage model from the earlier Combat Helo project which I used as a basis for developing the model. I re-modeled all of the components attached to the fuselage (landing gear, rotors, IHADs, cannon, stub wings, pylons, stores, weapons etc) then went through the usual process of UV mapping and painting it. We knew from the start that we were looking for a 90's sim retro feel and that super detailed models were not going to be in order. Typically a model of that quality will take a solid week of working to build, uv map and paint.
How does it feel to know that your artwork will be enjoyed by thousands of people?
Hopefully tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands! :P The more the merrier.
Fun question: When creating the terrain … did you have a Bob Ross moment?
I definitely had a few Rolf "Can you tell what is it yet?" Harris moments. In all honesty, terrain development is no joke. It's the one area of artwork where you really need to 'embrace the grind'. We're hoping that Combat Helo 2 will feature a much more detailed terrain while involving much less work.
Do you have anything you would to tell your supporters?
Thank you for waiting patiently. Please buy Combat Helo I don’t think you’ll have to tell many of us that twice. Especially considering a how a flood almost killed the project and how current events in Bangkok are troubling for you, your family, and Combat Helo. Please stay safe over there. Once again thank you Mr. Hopkinson and Mr. Hawley for taking the time to do this interview. You can visit the Combat Helo Album to check out more their screen shots and art work. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and in the words Wrench “Happy Landings!”
How long have you been creating art?
On and off I've been producing 2D and 3D computer art for about 16 years. My original 3D art experience came from making levels for the first person shooter series Quake and also DukeNukem 3D. Later I moved onto 3D modeling and I started with Gmax (a free version of 3d studio max that was designed for developing game mods) and then moved on to 3D studio max. I worked on a variety of new aircraft for the Strike fighters series and then worked on Battle of Britain 2: Wings of victory. I also worked on a handful of total conversion mods for Medieval 2: Total war.
What are some the things you like to create?
Cockpits are an area that I really enjoy working on. The skill set involved in developing an accurate and detailed cockpit is quite unique and it can be very rewarding. To build an accurate cockpit you really need to work along side real world pilots and often the materials are written rather than visual. For example it's very rare to find a complete set of blueprints for a cockpit which means you really need to do some investigations, experiments and thorough research. Cockpits also allow you some artistic license as you have room to include small details that vary in individual aircraft. Photos of babes on the dashboard, colourful magazines in the map tray, odd quotations, comical re-spellings etc. Easter eggs in other words.
What inspires you to create the art you make?
As a technical artist there isn't a great deal of need for inspiration. Generally my job is to recreate objects that appear to be the same in 3D space as they are in reality. My production level is usually attributed to motivation which typically comes from seeing the developments on Richard's side of the project.
What are some of the things you enjoy about art and graphic design for video games?
For me the greatest reward comes from seeing people use and enjoy the artwork I create. Overcoming challenges and proving to myself that I have the ability to accurately reproduce an object also brings a sense of satisfaction.
Your work for Combat Helo is great. How much research went to the design of the AH-64 Apache?
Richard is a walking Apache encyclopedia of AH-64 knowledge and therefore there wasn't a great deal for me to do in this regard. He provided a huge quantity of images, videos and other reference materials that I needed to produce the artwork.
What are some the challenges you encountered while creating the Apache for Combat Helo and how have you overcome them?
The 3D engine that we are using to develop Combat Helo provided both Richard and I with a long list of challenges that we slowly had to work around and deal with. The main challenge that I encountered was getting the cockpit model with over 500 sub objects (switches, knobs, buttons, controls etc) to render at an acceptable frame rate. We had to experiment with the way the objects were grouped and arranged in order to optimize render time. We developed a method of hiding small detailed objects in the CP/G cockpit when you were in the pilot seat and vice versa. Thankfully the leadwerks engine provides support for lua scripting so we found ways to solve rendering problems through scripting.
How long did it take for you to create a model the Apache and get it to a point where you were pleased with how it looks?
We were lucky enough to inherit a basic Apache fuselage model from the earlier Combat Helo project which I used as a basis for developing the model. I re-modeled all of the components attached to the fuselage (landing gear, rotors, IHADs, cannon, stub wings, pylons, stores, weapons etc) then went through the usual process of UV mapping and painting it. We knew from the start that we were looking for a 90's sim retro feel and that super detailed models were not going to be in order. Typically a model of that quality will take a solid week of working to build, uv map and paint.
How does it feel to know that your artwork will be enjoyed by thousands of people?
Hopefully tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands! :P The more the merrier.
Fun question: When creating the terrain … did you have a Bob Ross moment?
I definitely had a few Rolf "Can you tell what is it yet?" Harris moments. In all honesty, terrain development is no joke. It's the one area of artwork where you really need to 'embrace the grind'. We're hoping that Combat Helo 2 will feature a much more detailed terrain while involving much less work.
Do you have anything you would to tell your supporters?
Thank you for waiting patiently. Please buy Combat Helo I don’t think you’ll have to tell many of us that twice. Especially considering a how a flood almost killed the project and how current events in Bangkok are troubling for you, your family, and Combat Helo. Please stay safe over there. Once again thank you Mr. Hopkinson and Mr. Hawley for taking the time to do this interview. You can visit the Combat Helo Album to check out more their screen shots and art work. Thank you for taking the time to stop by and in the words Wrench “Happy Landings!”
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