CaptSopwith

Wow Pol, she looks beautiful! Keep up the great work! I really like the gritty, worn and beaten look to the cockpit. The wood looks like it's been used, the guns aren't fresh from the factory. It looks like a real warbird, and I mean that in the best possible way! :) Can't wait for the Gold Pack Winder, I'll be the first to line up to buy it, even on a grad student's budget!

Thank you Lou. I had never even heard of these books. I'm snagging the zip file now and I greatly look forward to reading these in my spare time. Thanks again!

Fantastic write-up Siggi. This sim continues to impress and re-impress me everytime I fly. There are a very few PC games that have given me true "wow" moments. Some of them were racing sims that showed spectacular AI (Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix Series), the rest have, by and large, been flight sims. I started with Wings of Glory back in 1994 and that was the sim that planted the bug in me. Red Baron II had lots of wow moments and even now, some ten years removed from the first missions I flew on the old gal, I can still remember details. But nothing I've seen yet gives me the consistent feeling of actually being in a war when I sit down to fly a mission. The immersion is just phenomenal; from the vehicles moving on the ground to the constant booming of artillery in a heavy sector, to the buzzing of other craft around you, it's not a game or even a sim, it's an experience. My previous flight was with 8-RNAS, flying some Sopwith Pups in December 1916. Our flight was tasked with bringing down a German observation balloon near our sector. There were, I believe, four of us, including myself and I was tasked with leading the flight. The skies were dreary and oppressive; heavy cloud cover blanketed the land and a thick pea-soup fog made the flight feel disorienting and claustrophobic. We headed towards the lines and while in route, spotted a flight of three or four Albatros scouts moving due East of us, running parallel of our flight path towards the balloon. I was half a mile out from the target, watching the Albs, wondering when they were going to cut right and bounce us, and watching for my target; all while artillery was blasting around us. The level of stress at that moment was tangible and I felt my hand sweating around my ancient Sidewinder 2 joystick. Finally, well over the target balloon and with flak all around me, I blipped the rotary engine, rolled my Pup, and dived on the target. The gas bag went up in a sheet of flame after only a few rounds. I'm still not sure if I hit it or if there was so much shrapnel in the air from their own artillery that friendly fire did the balloon in. At any rate, I pulled up hard, cranked the engine back to full blast, and booked it West for our lines, my flight in tow. I had lost sight of the Albatros fighters and was bent on getting back over friendly territory as quickly as I could. The flak was still bursting all around us and, after glancing off the right of my tail, I could see a trail of smoke in the distance. Craning my neck around (or in my case, pushing the hat switch a little to the right to get a better look), I could see one of our own had been hit by flak, burning, and spiraling slowly to earth. I don't know how the OBD guys pulled this effect off, but the sickening look of smoking, trailing debris and burning wreckage slowly winding to earth in a trail of deathly black smoke is still one the eeriest things I've ever seen in a game, and it never fails to turn my stomach. Damn, I thought, who did we just lose? Never once was I thinking about lines of code or impressive AI. "Who did we just lose?" was my only thought. Who? As if the computer controlled lines of code piloting that 3d rendered Pup was real. And that's when you know the OBD guys hit on something special. Who? When your sense of immersion is so great that you're worried about your fictional wingmen, you've got a classic "wow" game. But then again, knowing half of the guys that developed this amazing sim, I really shouldn't be surprised. This band of coders, painters, modelers, and programmers have been giving me wow moments since I flew Red Baron 3D back in the 1990s. Well done guys. And just to wrap up the story... no, we never were attacked by those Albatros fighters. I can only assume that they didn't see us through the pea soup - or simply weren't in the mood to tangle. Cheers guys!

Let me second this question RC. Unfortunately, in the midst of very busy RL issues, I cannot fly real time in the way I'd like to, that said, I've started an RFC24 campaign and know that I will have to "transfer" to another unit when the time comes. Any advice on how to do this within the data files in OFF? Many thanks in advance! Keep up the flying guys, I'm really enjoying reading the flight logs.

Hey guys, I'm noticing some nicely customized pilot photos in some screenshots posted for your campaigns. I wanted to find out how you edit your pilot details to customize his photo, the names of his fellow squad mates, and other goodies. If you have any pointers and how-to's, I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm looking forward to finally getting in some flying this weekend, and I wanted to set up my campaigns in style. Thanks in advance!

Thanks for all of the help Olham and Ras, I appreciate it! I've got my campaigns and my pilot photos set the way I want them now. Off to fly!

Thanks for the feedback Von Paulus. I think I'll give some of those ideas a shot this morning. I set up my graphics and nvidia settings based on some settings posted here a while back and it worked great under Vista. As of right now, my card pre-renders 3 frames, so I'll try increasing it and see if that helps. If not, then I'll try XP mode just to see. Thankfully I have a free morning before I have to teach a class at noon, so I'll brew some coffee and do some trouble shooting. Thanks again! I'll post back with some results when I get them. ---Ten Minutes Later--- Von Paulus, if I could give you a medal sir, I would! Turning up the pre-rendered frames from 3 to 6 seems to have solved my problem! There is no detectable stutter, and this was flying a quick scenario 20v20 Fok D7's vs SE5's. I'll need to playtest a few more missions to be sure, but so far it's looking promising (knock on wood). If this permenately fixes my problem, I'll give Windows 7 an A+ Another fun part of Win7 that I enjoy are the themes, which allow you to create slide shows. I was able to shamelessly save the pictures under the screenshots thread here on the boards and created an OFF theme that rotates screenshots every ten minutes. If that doesn't get you in the mood to fly, nothing will. Thanks again VP!

Welcome back Bison, good to see you on the boards again. I don't know what all you've been through personally, but I'm glad you came out the other side. You'll love BH&H, in fact, you may not see daylight again for quite some time. Cheers!

I was using that series of driver as well. I have a large game library on my PC, including some older titles like the original Call of Duty. For some reason the newest set of drivers breaks that game, causing a "Buffer Overrun" error when starting. So I rolled the drivers back one generation and the problem cleared up. I can't understand how these driver programmers can improve performance on some games and completely break others, it makes no sense. I hope the next set will improve the random stutter. My performance seems pretty decent - slightly lower fps than under Vista, it's just the damn stutter that's pretty irritating. Any ideas of what else we could try to improve it?

Hey Siggi, I finally got around to some more involved flying with OFF this evening and I'm noticing the same random hic-up jerkiness and stutters you mentioned. I'm using the GT8800 card with this W7 rig and while the frame rate is nearly as high as it was under Vista, the random stutter is irritating. What set of drivers are you using? I rolled back to the pre 191.xx drivers after the latest set fubared some older games I had in the collection.

Full-time grad student at the moment, working on an MA so I can get a PhD and become a professor of History. I specialize in the World Wars, Modern Germany, and yes, surprisingly enough, German aviation. :)

I'll chime in since I'm running Windows 7 Professional. So far my copy of OFF has run fine. I noticed some minor FPS drop, but I think that's more to do with the very buggy 191 series of nvidia drivers more than any OS problem. I quoted you Bullethead because I remember having this very same argument when XP came out. All of the die hard Red Baron II pilots - myself included - opted to stick with Windows 98 for years after XP came out simply because RBII would not run in XP. Everyone said "oh well, the game crashes... the graphics drivers are crap... if you can get it to run it doesn't play well... etc." At the time I was playing RB on my parent's computer (after all I was 16), and we had the option to upgrade our aging Dell PC to a newer model with XP. I turned the offer down, simply because I didn't want to lose RB. In the end, I was stuck with a dinosaur of a PC (which I used right up until I got my new gateway last year) and guess what? About six months after I declined a brand new PC, the RB folks figured out how to get it working in XP. Aside from that little tangent. Win7 has been a pretty easy upgrade process. I've had some niggling issues with drivers in regards to my games (but again, this can mostly be attributed to 191.xx being a pretty terrible set of drivers) but otherwise, everything that worked in Vista works in 7. The other nice improvement, besides the interface, is that Win7 eats up less RAM (my system measurements show only a quarter of my 3Gb of ram being used now compared to nearly half under Vista) and this tends to give me a bit better performance in my games. So far so good I say. The old adage is that every other Microsoft OS is a good one. I think it still holds true with seven. Just my 2cents. Your mileage may vary. Also, I'm an SP flier only in OFF, so I have no idea how MP works in 7. BTW: I'm still here lurking on the forums - but I'm up to my eyeballs in research here in grad school. I hope all is well with my fellow pilots here on the boards.

I've downloaded the drivers and had nothing but grief. While OFF ran fine, I had issues with a host of other games, including the original Call of Duty and Grand Prix 3. I checked around on the forums and noticed that this particular release seems to have some issues with older games. So take that with a grain of salt.

Gromit! Man has it been a long time! I don't know if you remember me at all, but I remember you from the old boards. Welcome back. You're really going to love this sim - I feel like I'm 15 or 16 and playing RBII all over again. S!

Good Lord! Reading an account like that, especially the second, makes you wonder if even a VC is enough! Salute to these incredibly gallant and brave men!

If you want an interesting read on a flight in a BE2C, Cecil Lewis' account in Sagittarius Rising is hair raising! Both he and his gunner were shot at by an attacking EIII and left diving for earth, hoping to escape. Of all the planes I'd want to be in during WWI (and that's a small list when you really start to think about it) the Quirk is definitely not on it.

Cue the obituary post for Cedric Nelson in 3...2...1... ;) Seriously though, that's an impressive tally. Well done mate! :)

After checking the OFF website, that's actually a huge list of fixes for a mini-patch. Thanks for all of the hard work guys, fantastic product support as always.

Funny, Olham. I had a very similar experience on the other side of the pond just yesterday. My first semester of grad school has left me precious little free time. At last I decided to take a few hours out and play some OFF. Sadly, Reinhart died months ago, but his wingman - Max-Wilhelm Lammertz, became my new pilot - starting him back a year in 1916 flying an Eindecker. He had had success - nearly 8 hours of seat time and 4 victories. A good start. Alas, I was tired and out of practice on the EIII and wound up writing off poor Lammertz when, while engaging a flight of quirks, he was attacked by three Bristol scouts and was shot up pretty badly. He survived, and knocked two of the scouts down, even with damage to his control wires, resulting in an even slower rate of turn than normal. But alas, as he was rolling his plane with all of the speed of the Titanic trying to avoid an iceberg - one of his wingman turned right into his flight path and killed him instantly in a head on collision. My second, third, and fourth string pilots were all written off in the next hour. Flak killed one, ground collision killed another, and a flock of angry Albatros DV's overwhelmed my namesake in an SE5. I have no more pilots and mountains of reading waiting for me as a result of my "relaxation" time. Cheers mate. I feel your pain!

Hey Royce! Thank you for the kind words. Yeah that was me - back in... 2004 I think? I'm glad you liked it. I've gone back and re-read it and I cringe at the style. I've since put my historical leanings to good use. I'm a grad student now working on my MA history degree and specializing in Early 20th Century Europe, Modern Germany, and German Aviation. For anyone who's curious as to what Royce is referring to, head over to OVS's archived Hell's Angels site where he graciously stored my history of the sim and the community. http://www.hellsange...com/history.htm

I think a lot of us have great RB memories. I picked up RB in 1998 when my parents bought a new computer. I upgraded the video card to a Voodoo and spent years on the boards trying out new mods (HASP, WFP, Beery 2.0, Wingstrut 2.2, FCJ, etc...) and making friends along the way. I loved the SP campaign and even hopped on, with a dial up modem, to play MMP. That said, I'm running a brand new Vista rig and RB3D only sort of works (actually it stutters and runs too fast, depending on the situation) and OFF feels very much like the natural successor to RB in terms of feel and immersion. If I had my old rig with me here at grad school, I'd probably fire up RB (and European Air War, the definitive WWII sim of the era) more often. C'est la vie. RB gave me nearly 10 years of amazing missions - I hope OFF P3 lasts me as long. Pssst: Don't tell anyone this. But I actually took out the old menu music from RB3D (not the mods, the original music that shipped with RBII) and spliced it into the OFF menu music. Please don't be offended. I love the score to OFF, but found that after a few missions I felt incredibly depressed (adagio for strings will wrench your heart) and needed something a bit more uplifting sounding, even for WWI. So I really feel like I'm playing a brand new RB that is worlds better than the original.

Wow, I've been away a bit - the new place looks fantastic! Well done!

I completely agree. I just started a Jasta 4 pilot (after my previous German pilot died in March 1917), in late 1915. The Fokker is a decent aircraft - but sluggish, low powered, and not terribly quick to turn. Height and Caution are indeed your best bets. Only engage when you know you can overhwelm and destory your enemy. This is all well and good until you start getting jumped by superior numbers at higher altitude - at which point it really comes down to some luck as well as skill. And to be honest, my Eindecker pilot has seen more combat than my March 1917 pilot ever did! My first mission had me attack a flight of Bristol Scouts, followed by an engagement of Be2c's, and then another pack of Bristol Scouts, all in the same mission! The last engagement was particularly hair raising as they dived on us while I was attempting to land. I would have turned and attacked but I was well and truly low on ammo by this point. I never rushed to get a plane down so quickly in my life! The second and third missions were just as busy - flights of Be2c's and a ton of Bristol Scouts (I'm not sure they even made as many as I've seen in OFF so far! lol). So for a quiet campaign, an EIII pilot in what will be Jasta 4 was apparently not the way to go. That said, I'm really enjoying it! Now if I can just keep him alive long enough to get into a Halberstadt!

lol! There was an old joke back in the RB3D days that said if you wanted full immersion you needed something like a wicker seat, a large brick to bash your head into upon crash landing, a huge fan with a block of ice in front of it, and a bucket of gasoline to set your self alight if you were hit in the fuel tank!

And then they'll post screenshots of how much green is in their field lol. At the end of the day, some sim pilots feel the need to compare specs. No matter what the criteria is, or how you frame it, the systemic issue remains. That said, I play at full realism because I'm a history junkie and I want it as close to a digital representation as I can get.