Have just finished watching the next phase Video

[PD-1 3]

All i can say is....FANTASTIC....

........But my heart still bleeds for a working Multiplayer...

 

May i Congratulate the prople responsible for what as far as i can see is bar none the best ww-1 flight simulater out there includeing R.O.F. I could scarce believe what my eyes were telling me ....ABSOLUTLY BEAUTIFULL.!!!

 

I will not beat the Multiplayer drum here for from the get-go it was advertised as a single player flight simm....the Multiplay aspect of it just sort of happened as an added surprise...

 

The years of hard work and dedication to the cause must be acknowledged for to stay the course this long with the improvement i see will be your Legacy for all to behold....CONGRATS and WELL DONE O.B.D. and member's... I am in AWE!!!

 

THE OLD PILOT......PD

[Hellshade 110]

There is a HOST MISSION option in the OFF P4 Manager that you can see briefly in the movie.

 

It's not letting me upload attachments anymore for some reason. But if you go to page 2 of this forum link you can see my post of a pic of the OFF 4 Manager showing the HOST MISSION option. Exciting times indeed!

 

http://combatace.com/topic/69306-phase-4-preview-movie-1/page__st__20

 

 

Hellshade

[Vasco 3]

I for one would be over the moon if they repaired MP functionality in P4, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The MP community really were the bastard sons of this sim and had to work hard just to keep the co-op aspect alive for as long as we did (Dogfight mode in P3 i.e. players vs players was impossible because of the incorrect rendering of the aircraft in flight).

 

There are members of this community (virtually silent these days) who put their heart and soul into helping players to set up OFF in order to be able to fly online with their friends, and OBD couldn't even be bothered to test the aircraft they released in HitR would work in MP; quite a few didn't - it was up to our small community to identify the problems and make modded versions of the aircraft. OBD couldn't even be bothered to fix them for everybody when we told them how we did it.

 

Anyway, the majority of the old MP community are happily flying and shooting each other down in 'that other Great War flight sim'. If OBD wants us back, along with all the knowledge and experience of how to make OFF work properly in MP gathered over years of supporting this sim, they're going to have to demonstrate that they've changed their tune on MP development and support. That doesn't mean to say we won't purchase P4 and fly it offline (I certainly will be), but after participating in the organised MP campaigns of 70+ pilots and aircrew (Bloody April anyone?) and experiencing the stability of the RoF MP engine, it'll take more than a brief mention of 'MP functionality' on the box by OBD to bring me back.

 

Vasco

[Hellshade 110]

The "other" sim was designed with MP as the primary focus of it. Notice it didn't have any form of a proper single player campaign until 2 years after it shipped and even now it's still considered beta.

OFF P3 was designed primarily around the single player campaign. Since CFS3 was designed with dedicated microsoft servers in mind for its MP support and those had been turned off, the Devs of OBD decided to focus on making the best possible single player experience they could.

 

Each sim has it's strengths. Skyrim is an outstanding (IMHO) single player game...but it has zero MP support. The Devs focus there was to make the best possible single player experience they could. OBD had the same philosophy. I personally love the on-line dogfighting in the other sim. I have a blast at it and have even posted a new series of MP dogfight videos on my youtube site (Hellshade68) to show just how exciting it can be. But when I want a good single player campaign experience, I boot up OFF. The other sims experience is a nice start, but doesn't stand up to P3, let alone what P4 should bring to the table.

 

Anything is possible, but my guess is the MP support on P4 will also be a nice start, but I doubt it'll match that of a sim that was developed with MP as it's primary focus. I could be completely wrong since I have no idea what OBD has cooked up for us, but the fact that "Host Mission" is in the menu seems to me like it would mean the devs probably have all the planes showing up properly now without any fuss on the users part. Time will tell sir.

 

Hellshade

[Vasco 3]

Hellshade,

 

I certainly hope so, but we did it without the MS CFS3 servers. I bought the game long after they were decommissioned and the MP community ran 'Winston's Early Birds' and 'Vasco's Volunteers' events using one of the player's PCs as the host. It allowed up to 16 players to participate in the same mission (albeit with a certain amount of 'rubber banding' until you were close enough to the enemy aircraft for the graphics to load fully).

 

From memory (and it's been a while) I believe it was increasing the quality of the aircraft models far beyond what was anticipated when the engine was originally designed that caused certain problems with MP, but we simply couldn't work out whether that was the case for the incorrect rendering of the target aircraft's attitude when flying against each other (the aircraft would look as if it was in a nose-up slip turn when it actually in a level turn - the only way you could determine what it was doing was to look at the exhaust smoke).

 

Polovski stated in the thread below this one that it was the demise of the MS CFS3 servers that started the problems with MP in OFF, but that must have been for their development team as the MP community worked around them and got it operating reasonably well. I don't think the original CFS3 network code has ever been touched and the quality of the graphics has outstripped its ability to function well. Considering the hard work that OBD have done disecting the CFS3.exe to discover what the code affected and amending it accordingly, there doesn't appear to be any reason not to do the same for the network code for MP or replace it with a better engine if they so desired - update that to bring it alongside all the other improvements they've made and MP in OFF would be a direct challenge to that in RoF; with the size of the map and the OFF plane set in P4, could you imagine historical scenarios, campaigns and possibly even a persistent world we could develop for a dedicated player-funded server if they updated the network code?

 

.... but they've got to be willing to do it and until I see some form of committment on these forums or as a response to this thread, I'm afraid that experience has taught me not to expect anything from OBD in this respect.

 

Vasco

Edited January 4, 2012 by Vasco

[themightysrc 5]

" until I see some form of committment on these forums or as a response to this thread, I'm afraid that experience has taught me not to expect anything from OBD in this respect."

 

Vasco - bit of a tough judgement on people whose primary source of crust isn't game development, but the jobs they do elsewhere, I think.

 

I would love to have a big functioning MP, but unless the OBD devs are even vaguely convinced that they're going to get support for looking at the network code, then why would they bother? I suspect you might be better off showing OFF P3 (or better still P4) vids to RoF fans and then asking them to purchase OFF P3 and to bombard OBD with the demand that they produce a better MP system.

 

Cheers,

Si

[sitting_duck 3]

As i remeber right, issues in MP where slight until you added human AI. From watching the release video, don;t think coop MP (human vrs ai) would be a waste of anyones time.

 

I will be buying phase 4, and would not hurt to start some sort of list of pilots who want to engage in some MP once it comes out.

 

Might be prudent to find out if mission made for phase 3 will work in phase 4. But let's not condemn it until we see what we have...

[Herr Prop-Wasche 7]

I will definitely join in MP missions as soon as I get my hot little hands on my copy of P4 when it comes out.

 

Although I primarily enjoy SP and I am not a very good pilot to begin with, I had a blast on the few occasions I was able to join MP missions in P3. Vasco, Winston Doright, Axegrinder, etc. were extremely friendly and patient with me. My only problem was that Sunday afternoons were not a good time for me to join in MP because of family commitments. Hopefully, OBD has been silently working on improving some of the MP aspects of the sim and are only being quiet in order not to get everyone's hopes up. I'm guessing we will know by sometime this spring or summer.

[von Baur 54]

I agree with Vasco, and already stated in the "Taps" thread, that if OFF had a properly functioning multi-player side RoF would be just something people had as a change-of-pace sim. I certainly don't believe they would be able to hang with their 'pay-per-plane' philosophy. Would you put up with that if a sim with the scope and quality of OFF could fully support player-vs-player mp instead of just player-vs-AI? I've no direct experience with 'the other sim'; can you fly from Belgium to London and back in it? I've created a Gotha mission that does exactly that in OFF. But until you can do that and have to elude enemy SE5's that are similarly pilotted by humans coming up to intercept you, you might as well be playing single-player, IMO.

 

I also agree with Vasco that if the basic CFS3 engine could be adapted to accept the fantastic improvements the devs have made to terrains, aircraft, vehicles...everything...to make OFF-SP run as beautifully as it does, they could (if they wanted to) do the same for multiplayer.

[PD-1 3]

Since Multiplayer seems dead here...For those who want to fly multiplayer get a great Multiplayer exsperience in ww-1 IL-2 ..we are in the process of a new game build..so you can have the best of two worlds...single play here,multiplay there...new planes being released by the modding community every month.....this will be one great ww-1 multiplay when were finished the new build....get in on the new build by googleing PD's Place and sign up today....

 

PD