CaptSopwith

Wow... quite a song, and quite a moving video to go with it. Let us never forget those who fell in Flanders Fields, and elsewhere.

I fly full DiD - realism at 130%. IMHO (taken with a grain of salt of course), I think either FM/DM should apply to the DiD rules for the following reason: While the enemy planes are more vulnerable (I would say realistically so) with the normal DM, so are you. So if you make a mistake, you can just as easily have a wing shot off as your enemy. If you were using the hardened DM for your plane but the easy setup for the enemy, I would say it's a different story. I think the pilot should report the DM used (in order to give an accurate reflection of their kill count) but I don't think the normal DM should count against DiD. I'm a graduate student of European History - and from all of the research I've done on WWI aviation and combat - the normal DM accurately refelcts what I've read in the accounts of aerial combat. Support wires and struts were frequently shot away, resulting in wing failures. Fires were frequent, and it typically did not take more than 100 rounds at close range to down an EA. Granted, there are accounts of planes that would simply not go down, but these are the exception, not the rule. Again, these are just the thoughts of one pilot, I'm hardly an expert. So please, take these insights with a lot of salt. S!

Winder, I just wanted to say thanks for all of the hard work. I personally love the DM as of the 1.26 patch. I have yet to fly 1.28. Like a certain OvS back in the day, you guys are releasing patches and fixes faster than I can play them! That said, I think the idea of having a choice between a hardcore DM and the new varient is a fantastic idea - I know I certainly appreciate it. Just wanted to say that I have never seen a group of developers offer so many options to their sim, nor release so many updates as quickly as you have for a product that essentially worked out of the box. Usually a team releases this many fixes because something is horribly wrong - not because they are perfecting and adding features! Thank you, you have all done a fantastic job, IMHO. As we used to say back in the RBII days: Salute!

That's really disturbing!

I completely agree Parky! Even just the short flying I've done in QC with 1.26 has left my jaw on the floor. I flew a QC against a flight of Sopwith Camels the other night (making sure I was in at least a D7) and the speed at which the enemy flight broke formation, and quickly turned on us was staggering. I remember in some older sims, they'd fly by and you'd have up to and even more than a full minute to turn and engage them before the sluggish AI woke up and realized they needed to come after you. No more! The dogfights I encounter in OFF remind me more of the online dogfighting I did back in my RBII days more than any offline experience. The AI is wicked and you really can't take any chances with it. "Gamey" tactics - using the AI's weakness in intelligence to your advantage - no longer applies here. You're absolutely right - suriving 17 hours is going to be a challenge. But with the massively improved DM, I feel like I can really give the enemy a fair fight this time around. Excellent stuff!

I just finished reading the review over at SimHQ. I greatly enjoyed it - it looks like a very solid write up for the OFF team. Congrats guys! How does it feel to get some press after all of the hard work? ;) :fans:

I can relate Rabu. I got sucked into a grudge match over at The Aerodrome a number of years ago on one of their off topic forums. I made the mistake of assuming I could out-debate a firmly entrenched forum member - forgetting that people who spend hundreds of hours a week on a forum aren't going to admit to being wrong anyway. The whole thing turned very sour and I haven't been back since. I still love the site, but I avoid the forum - not because of him - but because I'm embarrassed by my own behavoir. Anyway, on another note. I've tried out the new DM in 1.26 last night in QC - I took Herr Stigg up against a cadre of Entente aircraft and throughly enjoyed it. I like being able to blast a target apart quickly - as it seemed to happen in most accounts from pilots like Richthofen. I also like the fact that I am also equally vulnerable. Before, I might linger a little too long on a target, even if I was getting shot from behind; confident that I could take a few hits and score my kill. Now, as soon as I see an opponent on my six, I book it out of there! Great stuff, you guys have done a hell of a job! :-)

Having read some of the comments over there, I second Pol's advice. Not worth the time and these things can only turn ugly.

Siggi, Very nice post. While I didn't play with matchboxes (starting fires was frowned upon in Miami), I did create a lot of my own toys. I've realized that, as a child of the 1980's, this was a bit odd. I built WWII planes out of tongue depressors and frequently staged dogfights around the backyard. The German's always lost, and those fantastic P38s always won. It was a great time. I get that same satisfaction playing OFF. It's a great sim to let your imagination run wild. I've created my lot of pilots and I take turns flying through campaigns. When I'm in the mood to test the new DM (which, btw is spectacular! You've made OFF damn near perfect with the 1.26 hotfix), I fire up my throw away pilot - a German I named Herr Stigg (which if you watch Top Gear, you'll appreciate). QC is a blast when you only have time for a short fix. Thankfully, I've been given a few months of complete and total free time - and I intend to use some of it to enjoy OFF before jumping into grad school for the next several years. But you're completely right. While I do want the Dev team to keep hammering away (after taking a well deserved break) I think we should all sit back, relax, realize that we have a really amazing gift on our hard drives, and really enjoy it. We die hard simmers are such perfectionists (in a good way) that we sometimes lose sight of all of the good we have. So I intend to fire up OFF this afternoon and get some more flight time over the front. Here's hoping my current crop of pilots last longer than their predecessors!

Von Oben: I greatly enjoyed your post. It really does make you think, when you realize that everytime we lose a pilot and create another one to send into the fray, all of our past flight sim experiences go with us. For me, personally, I have flown: F117A Stealth Figther, Wings of Glory, Red Baron II (for nearly a decade), Falcon 4.0, European Air War (for nearly as long as Red Baron), MiG Alley, IL2, OFF 2, and now BHAH. That's nearly fifteen years of flight simming under my belt that every pilot fresh to the front takes with him when he goes up. And STILL I'm sending them in like lambs to the slaughter. When you think of pilots like Richthofen and Rickenbacker, both men in what? Their twenties, doing this for real - it really becomes pretty unnerving. Would any of us stake our lives on a game where the odds are so bad? Think of the number of virtual pilots we've each lost, and realize that if that had been us, we would have been killed seveal dozen times over. Even in RBII, which I considered my best sim in terms of my performance as a pilot, I had one pilot, 1, who survived from 1916 to the end. And even he was maimed. Granted, RBII didn't say where he was maimed, and I doubt I want to know. I remember posting my accomplishment over on OvS's forum, back when he hosted his Hell's Angels Patch. I was so proud I wrote damn near ten paragraphs about the fact that, "holy crap! one of my guys actually survived!" I think the reality really hits you as you start getting older. I'm 27 now, which means I have lived longer than MvR. It puts a chill down your spine to realize that if I was him, I would be dead by now. You look at the photos of those guys - Voss and Boelcke in particular and they age so hard from the stress they're under, that you really have to remind yourself that they're only in their early to mid twenties. Really makes you think.

Very nice video and a beautiful score. Really enjoyed it.

Hey Parky! Nice to see most of us made it over here. Pull up a seat, beers on me mate.

Hi Chaps! Thought I'd check in. I managed to steer clear of most of the muck on the other forum. Saw that we have, for all intents and purposes, packed up shop and moved the squadron a little ways down the front. So here I am. CaptSopwith reporting for duty! I'll just pull up a chair, have a pint, and wait for the rest of the lads to check in.