CaptSopwith

Thanks guys! The Evil Knievel video really made me fell better! ;) The wrist is feeling a bit better. Tried flying with the splint but not much luck. I'm using a Sidewinder 2 with the twist rudder... so turn fighting in a Camel is a painful proposition. Racing in rFactor proved slightly better lol. I can already hear the call for rudder pedals now. Donations can be made via PM.

Thanks guys, I appreciate it. I'd type more but... you know. ;)

Excellent history lesson BH! Greatly enjoyed it. PS: Is it wrong that Preussens Gloria makes me feel like I'm back playing the Hell's Angels mod for Red Baron? I believe Otto included this march on some of the editions of his mod (or UOP if you really want to be old school about it). Gads, seriously need to stop typing for one night...

I was just about to ask the same thing. Does the PW DM make the planes harder to shoot down or does it do something else?

What third party mods would you recommend?

Whatever happened to Homeboy? I remember using some of his recommended graphics settings and getting a noticeable improvement back when P3 first came out.

Congratulations on getting back in one piece! Scramble missions are the worst of a bad lot of choices. My stomach usually drops to the floor when I see we're being attacked. As a German pilot, you usually have a fighting chance. But flying these fragile, one gun, British and French kites makes for an unnerving experience. These missions inevitably end with the player landing a completely shot up wreck of a plane - if he even lands at all.

Nice skin Olham! I'll have to download that immediately.

I look forward to the next installment Lou. It looks like Paul had quite a close call last time! And the skies are only going to get more dangerous from here! Viel Glück!

I remember how much of an improvement it was over the original! The stock terrain was a blurry, nearly unrecognizable globby mess. I think this picture illustrates that pretty well. I would like to get an old gaming rig up and running at some point. I have all of the parts, just no working IDE hard drive. You're right though, RB died when the available technology simply past it by. I occasionally look in on the old forms and there's still a dedicated group working on modding the old gal. Truthfully, even I would wonder what could be left to do by now.

Awesome work guys! Your SIA Series of PDF files now make up a readme library in my OFF folder. Great stuff!

Wow! Awesome page Lou. I've bookmarked it for further reading. Cheers!

I remember that cow patch! I was reading this thread thinking about how far we've come. From LGM (Little Green Men) to an environment that is nearly alive. Quite an improvement in what, ten, twelve years? EDIT: Any Red Baron players remember the Green Truck and Green Tent? Talk about an immersive environment. Balloon Attack missions in RB3D had a bonus target, which consisted of a truck (or lorrie for you brits out there ;)) and a green tent located right below the offending balloon. I remember getting bonus points for shooting those targets up. Doing so, of course, required you avoided the two machine gun nests and four artillery pieces located near by. How far we've come indeed. PS: Completely agree, and I'm glad to see Winder smiling. Civilian targets, erm, I mean, options in the game would definitely add even more to the environment. Cheers!

Beautiful prints! I remember that first print quite well. Back in the old RBII days, someone made a patch for CM1.1 (the ancient file manager for date based patches in Red Baron) that changed the stock black and white photos into gorgeous color paintings. I believe I set that print to be the main screen. Thanks for the quick trip back to the late 1990's! I enjoyed it!

I checked the forum and didn't see any previous post about this. Forgive me if I missed it. For OFF pilots in the US who have not seen the film The Red Baron, it has been released (finally) on DVD. Amazon has it available for ordering. http://www.amazon.com/Red-Baron-Matthias-Schweighofer/dp/B0039USJBA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1275535102&sr=8-1 I've never seen it, but it looked promising.

He is and remains my all time favorite pilot. His pilot portrait appears on my office hours at the university.

It's down for me too Rabu. Has been for a while now.

Well, I came in here to say exactly what Hasse Wind already said! You hit the nail on the head mate, can't say it any better than that. IMHO, anyone who says a WWI flight sim should be fully dynamic, and that you should be able to affect the outcome of the war doesn't fully grasp the history of World War I aviation.

Those photos remind me of a few nasty car crashes I had the good fortune of walking away from. What's the old saying? Any landing you walk away from is a good landing?

From a flight sim experience, at least, the Snipe was a beast! My last encounter with it was in Red Baron II and woe be to any German flight to happened across a gaggle of these late war Sopwith's. The Snipe could easily hold its own, even against the Fokker D7! It could out turn, it could climb, and it could dive on you, frequently before you had a chance to react. Of course, that's just a game, and only one game at that. But my memories of the Snipe was one of dread when my long-flying late-war German pilot met his doom after a year and a half of flight time on the Western Front at the hands of three Snipes who latched on to me and shot me out of the sky without mercy. And that simulated pilot probably flew some ten years ago! (I even think it was in Wingstrut's Air War 1918 patch for Red Baron!).

The poor snipe gets no love! Here's a proper Snipe, with a certain Captain Widowmaker posing proudly in front.

No pressure flying that model at the park, eh? Imagine landing it wrong and writing the whole thing off after the months and months of work put into it? Crikey!

I'm confused... does this game have a campaign system, ala IL2 Sturmovik with generic missions generated for the pilot, or are you limited to a pre-fabricated, scripted campaign? Scoping the website didn't reveal much.

Just thought I'd share some thoughts after reading a great post over at SimHQ from our own RickityCrate. Here's the thread, btw. Some time ago I had started a late war pilot serving in Jasta 6 in summer of 1918. With the war in its closing, chaotic stages, I bumped up regional air activity to heavy to reflect the ridiculous numbers of aircraft flying over the front at that time. It never failed, my late war campaigns were always slide show-fests. OFF would take forever to load and when I would try to take off and my FPS was down in the low teens and rarely improved. During flight, I experienced intermittent stutters that never went away. Dogfighting became a real hit and miss affair. I tried everything I could think of on the graphics side of things - I dropped the resolution, turned down my anti-aliasing, dropped detail down - all to no avail. Every time I'd relaunch a mission, I was still in single digit FPS territory. Grumbling about a possible OFF bug and even wondering if the late war planes were just too polygon heavy, I resigned myself to flying earlier war campaigns - oblivious to my adjusting of the regional air activity as a possible cause of the problem. After doing some more work, and coming across the aforementioned thread at SimHQ, I went back and tinkered with my late war Jasta fodder and dropped regional air activity back to medium. And just like that, my FPS were back up where they've always been, even with all of my graphical detail ramped up! I should have known it was something I did! And that's when I figured it out. OFF was generating so much regional activity that it was taxing my computer to a crawl! So alas, until I upgrade my rig (which will likely be sometime next decade! lol) I'll have to keep flying at medium activity for now. Once more, a potential glitch turns out to be a really cool feature of OFF. There is so much going on behind the scenes, over the horizon that we don't know about. It reminds me of a "feature" listed on the back of the old Red Baron II box. It read something like "dogfights rage whether you're there to see them or not. The whole virtual world is alive at all times." OFF carries on that tradition with pride. Well done guys! Here's hoping I knock out that PhD quickly so I can get a real job and buy a new computer in time for P4!

Yep! I run OFF at my desktop resolution (1680x1050) and tried dropping it back out of sheer desperation lol! It's interesting how even with everything dialed back it made no difference in FPS. Peculiar engine indeed.