OFF Saves Pilot!

[Wayfarer 5]

It had been a great mission. Registering corps artillery ... white AA bursts showing Huns swarming all over the place ... me dodging and weaving every which way to avoid them ... a crooked bit of front so I couldn't quite tell where the enemy AA would come from ... our chaps raiding an airfield a few hundred yards away ... turning for home and then ... complete seize up! Wouldn't move or respond at all, and I really wanted to get this one logged. I tried a tentative pause, then a pan around ... nothing. I wandered sadly off to unburden my woe to middle daughter, who politely didn't listen.

Returning disconsolately to the screen, however, I discovered that the pause and pan had now registered ... revealing a concentration of allied AA slightly below and ahead of me, bracketing a formation of enemy aircraft that I had not noticed.

Unpausing, I abruptly changed heading and escaped!

Pondering on this, I think it is quite obvious what happened .. OFF was warning me! Realising I was heading for danger it did what it could to alert me and prevent me from meeting a fiery demise!

Cynics may point out that a check on my frame rate immediately after OFF became unstuck showed that I was getting about 11FPS and, with these busier times, I may have to take my sliders down a notch.

Middle daughter may simply tell me I am being stupid. I, however, prefer to believe that I was saved by OFF ... or the Angel of Mons.

 

 

[Olham 164]

Hihihi - we OFF Pilots may appear a bit strange to others every now and then.

And like all other so called mad men, we mutter: "What do they know..."

Such freezes happened to me a lot, before I upgraded.

I don't know what did the trick - I went from dual core to quad core CPU - from 2,83 GHz to 3,3 GHz;

I got more memory, and I use Windows 7 instead of Vista now.

Didn't change the graphics card - it's still the ATI HD4870.

[Wayfarer 5]

Well our system is fairly modest for nowadays, the processor is 3.0GHz dual core, the graphics card is an NVIDIA GEFORCE9600GT and we have 4GB RAM. I don't ever remember experiencing a complete freeze like this before, but it was very busy. There was a frantic barrage going on, several groups of German aircraft being fired at, me being fired at, allied aircraft were bombing an airfield very nearby.

I guessed what the problem was and was hoping it would catch up with itself, but it hung for a long time. I really didn't want to lose the mission as I was just starting on my way home.

As I am working my way through chronologically, and am up to October 1916, the sky has gradually been getting busier. I guess as it gets into 1917 it will be even more so. I have put a couple of my sliders down a notch.

That begs a question, can anyone explain how the 'Overall Graphics' slider relates to the rest of the settings?

Still it was fortunate how it showed up that enemy formation, or I might have run straight into it!

[Olham 164]

From what I saw, the "overall graphics" slider is a quick one to set everything to the same value like "5".

The others are for individual settings. Forget the overall one.

I found, that the most resource-hungry one is "scenery detail"; you may find with your system,

that you can run OFF fine with these values:

 

Aircraft: 5

Terrain Detail: 3

Scenery Detail: 2

Effects Quality: 4 or 5

Clouds: 5

 

This will provide you with good graphics.

The Anti-Aliasing and additional stuff should be selected in the Control Center of the Graphic Card.

Anti-Aliasing makes jagged edges and pixelated wires look smooth - it should at least be on 8x.

But there you need advice from the NVidea fraction - I use ATI.

 

Make sure, that your Anti-Virus and Firewall are set to "Game Mode".

That will stop them making updates or similar actions, while you are in a full-screen mode (which is gaming).

Edited August 1, 2011 by Olham

[Wayfarer 5]

Thanks Olham. I have taken my terrain slider down to 3 now. It has been doing ok at 4, but I think that now things are getting busier something has to give. I think the anti-virus and firewall are in game mode but I will check it again.