CaptSopwith

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.

Beautiful Screenshots guys! I just wanted to thank those who have posted - I have shamelessly saved them and made an entire Windows 7 OFF theme! Beautiful Tripe skin Mike! What is the status of the campaign now? Is he still hanging on?

Hi Gentlemen, Not sure if you still remember me, I've been incredibly busy with RL work now for the past year. Thankfully, the load has slackened somewhat and the summer has given me some much needed flight time. I'll admit it, I've also been sidetracked during the past year with Xbox Live. Yes... I was a Modern Warfare player and then moved to Battlefield. But lately I've had more then ten minutes of downtime each evening and I've wandered back to my flight sims. I felt the need to post this after the events of the last few days, and once again thank the community and the band of developers who make OFF. This is an OFF post, so I'll keep the topic on track, but suffice it to say, I looked into some other WWI sim options in the last week or so. After reading every review I could, and haunting various forms, I downloaded it and tried it out. While I was floored with certain features, I was left feeling... well, empty. Yeah, this sim had some impressive aspects to it and even some wow moments, but they weren't enough to completely win me over, or mask a lot of aspects I had issues with. And then tonight, after my dabbling ended, I returned to my copy of OFF HiTR. I had a few hiccups with it when I first snagged HiTR (I've been playing OFF since P1) and then RL caught up with me and I never had the time to really delve into what this addon had in store for me. Well I finally just exited out of OFF a few minutes ago and felt compelled to post. You guys have done a truly marvelous thing. I know a few members of the OFF team from my days of uploading inane, rambling, and often overenthusiastic posts (like this one) on Delphi back in the Red Baron days some eleven years ago. Tonight I sat and watched Pol's intro video for the first time in a while and I have to say Pol, I was really wowed all over again. After spending a few days navigating a pretty sterile interface with no real mood to speak of, the several minutes of opening footage reminded me that yeah, this is a game, but it represents something much bigger than that. Your film reminded me, and I think reminds all of us, that there were real flesh and blood people doing these things 90+ years ago. It sets the atmosphere for everything that comes next and it does it beautifully. And it's the details that the OFF team nails time and again. The menu music, the claim forms, the daily newspapers, the duty board, the pre-flight weather report. These all set the mood and immerse you in ways that graphical special effects can only accomplish for a few fleeting seconds. OFF had me in its grip tonight for hours, and it felt fantastic. The feeling of flight, the sound effects (I must admit I snagged Creaghorns mod and WOW), the graphics, all serve to suspend reality for however long you sit at the controls and do an incredible job of sending you back in time. The OFF team, simply put, just gets it. While my other experience left me feeling like some anthropologist digging up fossilized remains of a long forgotten past, OFF, as always, made me feel more like a young recruit sent up to the lines with 8 hours of training - scared to death. For the sake of balance, I'll take a moment and play devil's advocate. Could the graphic's engine be newer? Sure. Could improvements be made here and there? Absolutely - that's why there is going to be a P4 (and I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that!). But, as with every great flight sim I've ever loved, the end result is so much greater than the sum of its parts. What other sims accomplished that for me? Well, Red Baron 3D and European Air War. Neither were the prettiest of their time (Flying Corps Gold touted graphical prettiness with only 7 planes), but both of them received hundreds of hours of flight time from me because I simply couldn't get enough of them. And in my opinion, I thought they looked fantastic - beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. OFF, after a year (maybe more? This grad school gig has completely ruined my sense of time) of on and off flying for me, has not only rekindled my love of flight sims, it has made me more excited to get the day done, get home, and get in some flight time for the first time since I was 16 and dying to get home from high school so I could fly another mission in RBII. Yeah, the others might look pretty, but it was the two hours of flying I did tonight in OFF that left me smiling at the end of the day. As a final note, I'm working to become a professional historian. I want to teach at the university level and I specialize in World War I and, believe it or not, Germany. And while I shouldn't say this professionally, a few missions in OFF reignites my passion for the subject and my desire to research it, write about it, and teach it for the rest of my life. It's a fantastic shot of energy when you're tired and still have a mountain of reading to accomplish. Pardon the length of the post, but I had to share. You guys are brilliant and I am so glad that this team is together working on this product. Please, keep going. PS: Thanks to OvS for nagging me to wander from the Delphi forums about five years ago and take a look at what he was "tinkering with" at the time. I owe you one. If you're ever in need of any further historical input, feel free to drop me a line. S!

Wow, did I just have a nerve jarring mission! My American pilot, James Patterson (raise your hand if you know the reference) is currently serving with the 148th Aero Squadron in 1918. The 148th is equipped with the (in)famous Sopwith Camel. I must admit, I have very little seat time in the camel. My British fighter of choice is the SE5a. As the old Red Baron II manual said, the SE5 made even a mediocre pilot look good, and I consider myself mediocre at best when things really get ugly in the air. Our flight was conducting artillery spotting about 40 miles to the southeast of our base. With the evening growing late, I decided to warp my way to the target. I know, I’m a purist at heart but a realist when it comes to getting enough sleep before work the next day. We popped out of warp over the lines. Amazingly, we traveled 40 miles without running into a single enemy flight - a rarity in 1918. I should note that I fly with my settings ticked to the DiD standard, which includes having auto mixture turned off. I like knowing that I have to coax the performance out of my engine during a flight. I was about to discover, however, that this was a serious mistake. As I came out of warp, I realized my engine was dead – the prop wind milling in the air. I quickly restarted the engine but couldn’t coax it back to life. I tried maxing out the throttle and adjusting the mixture but to no avail. Every time I restarted, the engine turned over a few times, sputtered, coughed, and conked out again. To add to my dilemma, we came out of warp because we had encountered a flight of blue and yellow Fokker D7s, and they weren’t happy to see us. I decided after the first unsuccessful restart that my best bet was to nose down and run for my life. After all, my five wingman seemed to have the Fokker’s pretty well tied up at this point. All the way down to close to 4,000 feet, I kept trying to restart my dead engine. I had some glimmers of hope, but no success. It was at that moment I began to hear gunfire, and this time it was close. Sure enough, one of the Fokker’s had disengaged from the furball and followed me down with the intent of shooting me out of the sky. Thankfully, and this is why I love this sim, a trusty flight member was hot on his tail, trying to save me from an early end to my career, not to mention my virtual life. The Fokker overshot me and I looked up to see both the blue and yellow painted scout followed hotly by my wingman. In another fantastic attention to detail, we were flying right through a massive flak barrage, filled with both black and white flak bursts. Apparently everyone within ten miles of us, both German and Allied were firing at us as we fought it out! At that moment my engine finally coughed to life. Eureka! I maxed the throttle, adjusted the mixture, and before I knew it I was back in the fight, or at least able to defend myself. There wasn’t much work for me to do, however. My wingman, hot under the collar, was already blazing away at the offending Fokker. He blasted the German scout out of the sky, finally setting the D7 on fire and sending it screaming to earth (complete with sound effects – another tip of the hat towards Creaghorn!). At that point, knuckles white, I made for the nearest base and set her down. I figured I had pressed my luck enough for one day. Around me was a flight of Re8’s attacking front line positions, complete with bombs under the wings. There must have been 8 or 10 of them. The other Fokkers lost out, my U.S. 148th wingmen taking them out rather nicely. And this was after my pilot's first campaign mission last night – a supposed balloon busting sortie that never was. We had barely formed up when we were bounced by a flight of all black Pfalz DIII’s. I learned quickly that full torque on the stick is a poor decision in the Camel. I nearly killed myself with a quick spin into the dirt three or four times! I managed to fire a few rounds at some enemy planes, but with no effect. Most of the time I was trying to keep my Camel pointing the right way. That’s the pure joy of OFF, you never know what the day is going to bring.

Definitely. With any luck I could fly a DiD pilot. Unfortunately, I don't quite meet the requirements. I fly with TAC Display turned on, as I don't have a TrackIR rig, which puts me outside of the rules and regs. Either way, I'm just enjoying the flight time. Sounds amazing British_eh! I need to get my passport so I can head over to Europe and walk around where it all happened. My WWI lectures have become somewhat famous around campus - apparently my lecture even made some waves on the social networking sites lol. I love lecturing on the topic, and would love to hop the pond and see it all first hand. Good to see you too Rabu! Hope all is well on the west coast! I've been lurking around the forums as well but never had the time to write in the way I wanted to. Thanks for the compliments on the post. I looked back on some SimHQ reviews of OFF as it went through Phase 1 and 2 and I'm astounded by the differences. You don't really notice them if you fly from day to day as the sim evolved - but when you look back four or five years to where it started, the changes are noticeable. The graphics are vastly improved, the terrain is still the best I've ever seen in any flight sim, regardless of era, and OFF has just gone from strength to strength. If new pilots can find their way past the legacy of CFS3 as an engine, they are immensely rewarded. Speaking of terrain, as I know it's something of a forte for you - I flew over the trenches in the other WWI sim I spoke of earlier and I found myself completely underwhelmed. While the terrain looked pretty nice, the trenches themselves were made up of very artificial, perfectly zig-zag lines. They looked like a slightly improved version of the old Promised Land terrains from last decade. At first I was thrown by the trenches as OFF models them, but they have a much more organic, "built as needed" feel to them that I'm quite used to them now and still find myself grimacing as I approach the front. I read a review for European Air War about eleven years ago but the closing paragraph stayed with me. I frequently quote from when describing OFF. Amazingly, I just checked IGN and the review is still there. Here's how it concludes: We've seen one issue countless times in countless other games: Gameplay will always win out over graphics. If you want eye candy, pick up Combat Flight Simulator or World War II Fighters. If you're looking for a long-term relationship, you can't go wrong with European Air War. It's not perfect, but since when is a successful relationship not about compromise? If you substitute the titles, I think that conclusion still holds true today. That said, I think OFF looks great, but you get my gist. S! guys! It's a pleasure to be back amongst the ranks again.

Thanks for the exceedingly kind words Olham, I greatly appreciate it. It feels great to get back to flying. It's been ages since I worked through a campaign pilot and actually got to enjoy it. My American pilot is... no, I'd better not, everytime I speak of my pilots, they perish the next day!

Looks fantastic Lothar! A job well done!

I think it was the mixture / altitude combination. I was flying at full rich when I warped and when we came out of warp we were at relatively high altitude (I'm guessing 11,000 or so ft?). The engine seemed choked. I tried to adjust the mixture and throttle but every time I'd hit E to restart the engine, the controls for both the plane's mixture and throttle would reset (both to their max setting) and cause the engine to choke out again. Only after I got low enough for the full mixture settings to work did the engine refire. It was quite an exciting few minutes - especially since my entire flight was tangled up in a major dogfight at that point. To be honest, it felt more like a random failure at first, which is why I dived away from the fight (besides being incredibly vulnerable in the middle of a fight with no power), and headed for the nearest friendly base in the hopes that I could just land.

I just realized this should have been in the Reports from the Front section of the board and I've taken the liberty of reposting it there.

Awesome Lou! I'm amazed you were able to smuggle out the footage, well done! That's an adorable snipe! Well played sir! Well played!

Wow, thanks guys! I appreciate the welcome back - I didn't think I was missed! Hopefully I can post a bit more often, at least until life becomes utter insanity this fall! Cheers and drinks all around!

Creaghorn, Thought I would chime in. It's been a busy couple of months but I wanted to say that I love your sound mod! The improvement in the immersion of the game is, as you say, 100%. I did notice the silent Nieuports while playing HITR, however. I'm flying for 60 squadron RFC in August 1916 and sure enough, I often have silent wingmen. I know there's not much you can do to change it based on your files, but I did want to report that Hasse Wind wasn't the only pilot to witness it. That very minor glitch aside, I love the mod and I've been happily flying whenever I get the free time to do so. Cheers!

Hey guys, I've been doing some flying in HITR and noticed my frame rate wasn't nearly what it was before. I've been using Homeboy's settings from back in the summer, which have worked great. I went back into CFS3config to make sure they hadn't been reset and noticed that in the texture limit menu the Max Texture Dimension slider, which is set to 1024 by default, was not set to 0 where I put it. I changed it back several times but after running OFF and launching a mission, it keeps getting reset back to 1024. I tried running CFS3config as an admin and had no better luck. Every other setting is sticking except this one, which I'm sure is having an impact on my fps - which had been in the thirties but is now in the mid teens. Any ideas on how to get the setting to stick? I can't seem to make it work. Thanks in advance for the help guys!

Hey guys, After a few days of frustration with my system and a lot of help from the fellow pilots here on the board, I finally got HitR up and running! I have to say I'm very impressed. The textures in the cockpits of planes like the N28 look great. My frame rate seems consistent even though it looks like there's a lot more being rendered on the ground now. I finally started a campaign last night with an American pilot in the fighting 94th. Watching my fellow American pilots taking off around me really felt inspiring; especially seeing Rickenbacker taking off at the end of the airfield, talk about chills. Now I know what my German, French, and British counterparts have felt all along. The campaign missions are excellent - my flight stays in a nice loose formation and with the addition of wind buffeting they really "look" like they're flying - as if the forces of nature are acting on them as they struggle to remain airborne. We encountered heavy enemy air activity - several flights of beautifully skinned Albatros fighters. The first flight let us go, thankfully, as it looked like a full Jasta worth of them. We weren't as lucky coming back across the lines after patrolling the German skies. Two flights of Albatros fighters attacked - and quite intelligently as well. One pack of Albatroses went for A Flight, which had been flying top cover. The other group of Germans dived through that fight and came after us before we could help A flight out, it was eerie how well they intercepted us. The AI fought pretty hard too - a little more laid back than BHAH but not nearly as bad as my first impression gave me in QC. The campaign AI seems more fully developed. After a hard fight, and downing two of the Germans we returned home. So all in all I'm very impressed so far. You guys have done it again. If you're wondering why I'm posting at such a horrible hour (5am here in the States at the moment), I've been horribly sick all night and writing this post is taking my mind off how terrible my stomach has felt since 2am. I'm just glad to be at the point where I can sit and write for more than a few minutes at a time. Figures... the semester ends and the first day I have off I'm sick... ugh. And while I'm confessing sins - I tried out the demo version of RoF while frustrated with HitR (perhaps that's why I'm sick? j/k). I was impressed with the graphics and the physics model but there really isn't much else going on in that sim. I think Widowmaker put it right on here a few days ago - do you want one wild and crazy night with someone filled with all beauty and no brains or do you want a long term relationship? I'm putting my money on the long run and sticking with OFF. Ugh... time to crawl back into bed and pray for death...

Hmm, I went back and checked and my craft skin settings are set to Normal, where they've always been.

I think I've finally got them sorted but... After purchasing and downloading the HITR add on, I ran into some serious installation issues. I'm certainly no newbie to installing software so I was surprised when I encountered the following issues while trying to install a simple game add on: Endless hard disk grinding which locked up my entire system and crashed. Windows 7 rebooting and then announcing that it was not a genuine version of Windows (even though I purchased it directly from Microsoft) Rebooting in Safe mood just to delete the unzipped add on exe as any attempt to even click on it in normal mode locked the the system and repeated the first two problems. Attempting to download the file again only to encounter the same issues. Rebooting in safe mode to install the add on, I had no luck doing so in normal mode. Every lock up required a hard reboot as well, something I haven't had to do since my Windows 98 days. I think I've got everything sorted out now but damn, I need a drink. I have no idea why this caused so many problems, I've never had any issues with OBD software in the past but really guys, I wanted to ask for my money back for several hours this afternoon. I believe it had something to do with the file being zipped. It doesn't seem to save much space compressing the file and uncompressing it - be it in WinRAR or WinZip or just Windows 7, locked up the computer every single time. Good add on so far, but next time, do you mind not scaring me to death the night before I have a graduate research paper due?

Hey guys, Thanks for all of the advice. I've finally got a few days off and I've been working on the problem. I think I've got it sorted. If I boot the PC into safe mode I can easily unzip and install the file, no worries. It looks like safe mode in Win 7 has MSE turned off, so at this point, I'm ready to say that that's the cause of the problems. James, ironically enough, I went with MSE because it's such a lightweight, small anti-virus/anti-malware program. I had used AVAST until about two months ago when I upgraded to 7. I figured if Microsoft might be able to best protect their own operating system (that was probably not the smartest conclusion ever...). MSE so far has been great - light on resources (using a whole 4mb of ram) doesn't interfer with my games, etc. That is until I tried to unpack HitR. I've had no issues with zip files on this system so far, and I've been doing a lot of patching on some of my older racing sims lately so I've been unpacking plenty of files. When I reinstall a system, I go for light and efficient. Nothing runs in the background that doesn't need to. It has to be MSE, I have no other logical conclusion for the issue. I've ruled out just about everything else - including doing a fresh reformat and install on the HD just to rule out everything else. Whew... now I can actually do some flying. I'm looking forward to a patch for the AI, they seem a bit... laid back. But for now, I'm just glad the game is running at all.

Pol, I just did a fresh download on a fresh install of Windows 7. The file decompresses just fine until there is about 5 seconds remaining, and then the entire system locks up again. In the event it actually unzips the file, the exe locks up the system before I can even open it. Simply right-clicking on it to run it as an administrator is enough to crash my entire system. I've been able to get the install to start once - at which point my security software (Microsoft Security Essentials) turned off and Windows crashed yet again. I've done nothing to this system that would cause such an issue. I've run every diagnostic utility I can and I've even blanked the hard drive out and started all over, just to make absolutely sure there was nothing else on my end. Is it possible that MSE is causing this headache? If not, then I'm out of ideas. My only problem is that I can't seem to shut MSE off unless I boot in safe mode. I can only conclude that something about Microsoft Security Essentials does not like this file for whatever reason. I could get it to install in safe mode - but I wasn't sure if the install was complete. Is anyone else running MSE? If I install BitR in Safe Mode, will all of the files install correctly? Thanks for any help guys, I appreciate it.

Alright guys... I've run checkdisk on the hard drive, I've redownloaded the file in IE8, I've installed a new version of Winzip and I even tested the file in WinRAR. Everything came back clean. That said, I still cannot open the file and whenever I attempt to, the process gets to about 98%, the disk goes berserk, and I have to hard reboot. I'm fast running out of patience. I've also tried running the file from within the archive with the same results, no good. I've worked with plenty of zip files on this machine, so I know they work, but for some reason, this add on does not play nice with my computer. Any ideas?

Good idea Siggi, I'll give that a go as well. Fingers crossed!