CaptSopwith

Poor Gerhard Roth... I suppose he didn't stand much of a chance, what with being the first "Skip Training and Deploy Straight to the Front" pilot of the lot. No take off and landing training. No flying circuits. No chance, really, to even enjoy a little peace and quiet - unlike his British counter-part: Cecil Coles, who just finished flight training around London in 1915. Straight into the meat grinder - that was poor Roth's fate. And he fared well. Our pilot entered the war at the worst possible time: 1918, just before the Michael Offensive. His unit, Jasta 74, was often outclassed in machinery and the unit's airmen lacked a certain... how should I put it gently: situational awareness. But Roth not only survived, he thrived. He shot down two Sopwith Strutters that invaded German airspace near his own field. But, as the saying goes, "Unconfirmed by Army means unconfirmed." The weather that day was atrocious and, given the state of the lines at that point, Army Command simply didn't have time to go rummaging through some woods for a few wayward Strutter carcasses. Roth finally earned his goblet, however, with a third Strutter, this time bagged over friendly lines, with a squadron witness. It took just eight missions. Already he had been wounded once, with a nasty gunshot wound that left him in hospital a fortnight. But Roth got a bit impatient and started to time compress during his missions. And it was the compression that killed him... His final mission, just three weeks since he joined Jasta 74, took him near the front lines again on a line patrol with only two wing men who, as I mentioned, often to fail to catch the small details. As he came out of time compression, three dots rapidly grew clearer at his 6 o'clock. Three SPAD VII's with the fangs out. It was not only Roth's final mission, but that of one of his wing men. They came in fast and opened fire. Before Roth's flight could even break, he was hit. Roth, the lowest rank in the group was flying at the rear of the formation, leaving his comrades clueless as to the fate about to descend upon them. The sounds were awful. Gunfire ripped his Albatros DIII OAW to shreds in a matter of a few seconds. Wood shattered, support wires snapped violently and then, with the sickening thud and thwack that will stay with me, the rounds hit Roth. The screen flashed red, the Albatros slipped out of control, and crash landed about a minute later. Smoke trailing as Roth slowly faded while strapped in the shattered remains of his craft. Four days later, he died in hospital. So the telegram says. WOFF is indeed an enhancement in every respect. It models the flight characteristics, the tactics employed, the history from the period, and the horrific end that so many pilots faced. Even after all these years of playing WWI sims, and all of the fatalities along the way. Roth's death felt especially hard to take. You cannot help but care much more for these virtual pilots than any that preceded it. WOFF is a holistic sim - everything you see and interact with forges a connection with your pilot. You feel invested before they ever get off the ground. Even the simple act of picking a birth date and place of birth changes your attachment to them. Well done OBD. WOFF is the first sim where I truly "get" the sort of loss experienced in this war. RIP, young Roth.

I think it's time we brushed off the dust here and display the real beauty of this sim! From the last week of flying - my favorite kind of downtime at the end of a long day. In no particular order: Cheers! Hope you enjoy them!

Good to see the maps being updated, mate! Been too long. I imagine the map is looking pretty populated compared to its humble origins! I'll have to print one of those out someday and hang it on my wall! Glad to have you back Olham!

Well hi there Widow! Great to see your name pop up again! I can relate to falling away from the boards. My ancient computer basically played one game for the last two years - although "fix the glitch" felt more like a glorified version of whack-a-mole than anything fun... So I also gave up on OFF - and WOFF? Ha, didn't have a hope of running it. So I finally caved and with some help, picked up a new computer that also happens to have the specs to run WOFF at a respectable rate. I'm more than happy to post my exploits over here at CA - especially if it would draw you back to the sim. I have to say, a week in and I'm astounded at the thing! PS: I'm sure you probably tried every trick in the book to make it work, but did you try cranking your settings up in WOFF to see if it ironed out the micro stutters I've read about? I had the same problem and every time I'd tick the settings back it only got worse. So I took a play from the boards and cranked my settings up to what I thought were impossible to run and sure enough, no more stutter. I get some slight frame rate drops - but only if I'm over heavily populated terrain, like London at dawn with Terrain and Scenery on 4. Otherwise, it's smooth as silk. Completely buggered two decades of computer logic in my brain but it worked! At any rate, good to see you drop by! We'll see if we can lure you back in full time.

Hi Jim! I can just post them here if that works for you. I will qualify my settings by saying - I set them about five years ago now from my old copy of WoG, so how I got to these settings and why they work, is now well beyond my memory. I also remember having the dragging mouse issue. I found, for a while at least, that the solution was to hold the joystick opposite of the drift of the cursor, doing so at least neutralizes the thing so you can use it. Somewhere after that, it just sort of stopped doing that, from what I remember. Grad school has fried most my my brain lol. Hope this helps at least! You'll be amazed at the difference once you get to fire it up again.

I echo your sentiments Hellshade - what a shame to have lost him. Widow was always one of my favorite members to chat with as well. It was always a pleasure to see him kicking around the boards - his subtle and not-so subtle messages asking for a Snipe were good for a laugh. Hope he is doing okay...

Hi Jim! Good to hear from you mate! I still have WoG installed on my Windows 10 box! I get at DOSBox using a program called D-Fend Reloaded which works great. The link to the latest version, I think, can be found here: http://dfendreloaded.sourceforge.net/ You should then be able to either install WoG through D-Fend, or if the CD allows, simply copy and paste the files from the CD en masse to a folder in your D-Fend VirtualHD (the folder is usually located in your user folder if you're using Windows 7 or 10). Then you can run the wizard in D-Fend to set up the game to work accordingly. Pretty easy, at least in my experience! hope that helps! If all else fails, give me a shout and I can send you my D-Fend settings for WoG. Great old game!

Still here. I've kept the boards bookmarked under my "Daily Links" section and they've never left. Been busy with RL, and didn't have WOFF until this week. Finally back though! Always pop by when time allows.

After spending a few days home sick as a dog, I began tinkering with the computer and two days later I have this to show for it. Behold, I have the ultimate gaming computer! (At least in my mind ). I now have, in one place, the ability to run everything from OFF to Wolfenstein 3D and all of the games in between. By my count, my PC now covers every game I've ever owned from 1993 until last Christmas. And I still have 200GB free! Not bad for a couple of sick days! The best part is, for some reason, with the latest set of nVidia drivers, everything runs smoothly without any major tinkering. Now the hard part is going to be deciding what to play next! PS: You'll notice, however, what shortcuts are on my desktop, ready to go at a moments notice.

Well now - it's been a while since we had a new post here so I thought I'd share some OFF screenshots from the last few days. I recently discovered the amazing AnKor mod for WOFF and found, thanks to Widowmaker, that it works in OFF as well! (Albeit with a LOT of tweaking on my part to get rid of some dreaded micro-stutters that users were seeing in WOFF). If you you're interested in how I adjusted my settings, see our discussion here: http://combatace.com/topic/82497-does-ankors-mod-work-on-off/page-2?do=findComment&comment=663286 While it took some work, the added immersion to the sim was more than worth the effort. Even OFF, which isn't nearly as graphically optimized as WOFF, looks like a class-leading flight sim! That added depth of shadows filtering across your cockpit is absolutely astounding. And the shadows have an amazing amount of depth to them - you can see shadows cast from the air cooled jackets of your twin Spandaus against the cockpit, or the shadow cast by a guage mounted on the cockpit's dash. The shadows also add depth and immersion to dogfights: wing struts pop as the sun glints off of the canvas that's tightly bound to the struts underneath, shadows cast across enemy pilot's faces as they whip their planes around to attack. The effect, whlie subtle at first, makes a tremendous difference in the look and feel of the sim. So, to celebrate this little breakthrough, I've posted some before and after photos. The first is from a dogfight I found myself in last week - before installing the mod. While it's certainly beautiful, it's nothing comapred to the screenshots that follow. Hope you enjoy them!

Hi All: As promised, I am going to post my settings. They should be attached below. I'll also note that I have aircraft textures set to normal in the workshop (high seemed to bring back the stutter a bit.) I've been playing with them yet again this morning and I think (knock on wood! I've gotten OFF smoothed out). My system is also woefully out of date, so if you have a better system, you can up several of these settings (both in the workshop and in your respective video card settings). I found that the biggest help in reducing the stutter in game (which only appears when D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC is disabled - and has to be in order for AnKor's mod to run in OFF), is enabling Adaptive V-Sync. For me, choosing Half Refresh Rate had the best results. OFF now runs locked in around 30fps and while it doesn't have those moments of liquid smooth FPS, it does reduce the immersion breaking FPS drops when the sim suddenly plummets from 65fps to 18. I also notice so far that the instances of FPS dropping into the teens is much reduced, even with regional activity set to high. Again, this hasn't been tested completely, but Quick Combat, and Quick Scenarios look good - even the missions with 20v20 and a few campaign missions in 1918 with high regional activity. So... fingers crossed. Of course, the easy answer would have been to just yank AnKor's mod out and play as it was - my OFF worked fine before - but the shadows are just too good of an immersion enhancement to give it up. It really looks like a top class, current gen flight sim now! At any rate - I hope these settings helped! Sorry for my prolonged absence around here. RL, as always lately, has been very busy but rewarding! Cheers!

Hi Andy! I will post my settings later today. I'm still having some micro-stuttering issues with my OFF... which is why I've been hesitant to jump into WOFF. I just don't think my rig has anywhere near enough power to play it... and, being a grad student on a super tight budget, I don't see that changing anytime soon. Looks amazing though, wish I could try it out! I'm still playing with my settings trying to see if I can get the stutter to disappear once and for all. Once I remove AnKor's mod, the problem disappears. I really think if there was a way to enable D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC that would sort out the problem as it is the ONLY setting that is different in the workshop from what's there when I'm not running the mod.

Hi Mud! I narrowed down the issue that was preventing OFF from starting for both Widow and I. It appears that checking the D3DSWAPEFFECT_COPY_VSYNC option under the Texture Info part of CFS3.cfg was causing the problem... ...removing that problem opened up a whole host of other issues for me. Without that option checked, OFF starts having the same stuttering issues that appear to have been a problem in WOFF. After two hours of checking the WOFF boards and tweaking my options, I seem to have it working but man, it took some effort!

Hi Widow! Hope you're doing well. I popped in earlier and saw this thread about AnKor's mod. I had the same trouble you did getting it to run - I kept getting dumped back into the OFF main menu. Go into your CFS3.cfg settings in the workshop, set everything back to default, and the mod should run. For me, I was able to adjust the graphics settings and the overrides without any glitches. The mod doesn't seem to like having the texture settings messed with. If your setup is like mine, you've probably customized it a bit over the years to eek out that extra bit of performance. Setting the cfg file back to its defaults seems to have fixed it for me. And WOW, what a difference it makes! Even OFF looks as good as any ultra-modern day WWI sim I've seen. Great stuff!

Greetings from the Rocky Mountains where I am spending a lovely Christmas away! I just wanted to join in and wish everyone, especially the WOFF team, a very very Merry Christmas! Thank you for giving us WOFF in time for the holidays. I can't even imagine how much time, effort, and work went into WOFF. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that there might be a super budget gaming computer under the tree this year so I can enjoy some flying time in WOFF. In the meantime I'm enjoying everyone's After Action Reports, screenshots, videos, and every review I can get a hold of. It looks absolutely fantastic... I think you have created the greatest single player flight sim ever made - in other words, everything I've wanted since I was a 12 year old kid playing Wings of Glory. So to Pol, Sandbagger, Winder, Shred, and the rest of the team, and to everyone here I know, Olham, Lou, Wodin, Robert, Hellshade, Shiloh, and everyone else... a very Merry Christmas!

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but... I feel like $60 is more than a fair price. A big budget game like Battlefield 3 expects you to happily part with that much, plus another $50 to become a "Premium" player, and then your online subscription of choice, be it Xbox or PlayStation, expect that you'll hand over another fistful of cash to play other people. And yes, I know that we're talking about a flight sim, not a multi-billion dollar title, but for me, that's all the more reason to pay $60 plus another bit for 4000 + aircraft skins. I've known Pol, Winder, Sandbagger, OvS, Shred, and the rest for going on fifteen years now. And they have, in their time away from their day jobs, created a flight sim that would have been released by a major publisher back in the 90s. It's the most complete single player recreation of the Western Front in World War I. It gives you 55 aircraft to play with out of the box, and it immerses you in the most completely dynamic campaign that we are likely to see - possibly ever again. And I also agree with 33Lima... value is in the eye of the beholder. For me, this is the sim I've wanted to play since I discovered WWI aviation in the mid-90s. So for me, $60, even on my budget, is one heck of a good value.

I'm still praying for a gaming computer this Christmas... in the meantime, my first campaigns will be lived vicariously through my friends here at the boards! I will definitely be picking up WOFF after the new year (read: when the next loan check arrives for school... call it a morale booster ) and whether it will run on my rig or not, I want to show my support for the team. Cheers!

Good to see you, Fortiesboy! Hope you're doing well. I don't have WOFF just yet but after reading over the list of modifications to the AI code for the game, I was deeply impressed. It sounds like WOFF really is one of the last (if not the last) great Single Player, Dynamic Campaign Driven, flight simulators of its kind. In addition to the comments left above, I thought I'd direct you to Hellshade's preview videos which demonstrates the breadth of knowledge that the AI now possess - particularly at low altitude which used to be their Achilles Heel. See what you think! :)

...everything changes! Hi guys! I hope all of you have been well in the weeks / months since I last posted antyhing of note. As usual, RL (particularly school) has taken up all of my time, and much of my "free" time as well! It's fantastic to see everyone returning now that WOFF has come out. I only wish I had a computer with even a snowball's chance in hades of running the thing. My 2008 era desktop is struggling to run OFF with the graphics cranked up, let alone anything new. And, as an incredibly poor grad student, that probably won't change anytime soon. (I really need to publish that best-selling novel about WWI pilots while working on my dissertation! ;)) So... if I may return to the BoC, I'll have to grab one of those new badges for my signature. And, if I can ask: How the heck has everyone been!?!? Would love to hear what everyone has been up to. It's great to see Olham, Lou, Hellshade (fantastic videos, sir!) all back and chatting busily at the bar. I'll be traveling for the Holidays - which means my beloved OFF rig will be left behind, but I will have my laptop with me - so hopefully I'll be posting far more often than I have in the last few months. Cheers!

That might just be the best news I've heard in months! Thank you for letting me know Shred - how is life treating you these days? Hope you're doing well!

Hiya Lou! CaptSopwith reporting for duty! Hope I'm not too late for roll call, and a pint of Guinness at the pub! I have updated my pilot's badge accordingly, as befits the occassion! And remember, Guinness is good for you!

Great post, Widow! Gave me quite a good laugh this morning. And about that Snipe, I'd say you bent some of the main support spars but like the other say, some straightening, a little elbow grease, and some PC-10 doping, and it'll be good as new! And take it easy on those landings! Those Snipes don't grow on trees, you know!

Hey Shiloh! I didn't know you were a fellow graduate student! Mind if I ask what you're studying? I'm a history PhD, not surprisingly!

I'd say "Grad Student Stanard Time" where five minutes is actually closer to six months! Good to see you too plug! That power supply you sent me is still going strong! Hope you're doing well!

I agree that $60 is a lot of money these days for just about anyone... and believe me, as a broke grad student, I can sympathize! That said, there really aren't any flight sim developers left anymore - at least, not in the WWI arena. The ROF team has largely moved on to work on other projects, and the kickstarter funded resurrections of RB3D and Wings look great, but they're not going to be a hardcore, technically researched WWI sim that puts every squadron at their resepctive bases at the correct time of each month of the war... there's just no market for that outside of our merry band of Barmy OFF'ers! And you know what? I've known Pol since I was what... 17? I remember posting back and forth with half of the OFF team back when I was in High School and they were modding Red Baron 3D. I know it's biased, but they've been killing themselves now for going on four years and with - it seems - a lot less manpower than they once had. So really, even on food stamps, I'm willing to kick them 60 bucks for their troubles. Right now, it feels like the least I could do. And I agree with you on consoles! 60 bucks for a half-baked, over-hyped game that's going to force me to pay another 20 bucks here and there for DLC to finish a game that should have been done when they printed the thing? Yeah... not so much. At this stage, if I had to choose between as PS4 and a new gaming rig? WOFF would win me back to my keyboard and mouse - not to mention my ancient Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick! Cheers!