CaptSopwith

A few new photos from today's sorties on opposite ends of the war (both adversarial and chronological). New crates look fantastic!

Had the pleasure to take up the new Siemens-Schuckert D.III. A fascinating aircraft. Super nimble, great climb rate. The cockpit feels a bit... cramped and the gun housing is mounted pretty high up - or perhaps my pilot just happens to be shorter in stature lol. Jumped into the free roam view to capture some additional images and found our airfield under attack. It was actually traumatic to snap photos of little virtual ground crew working on their machines one minute, and then seeing them killed in by aerial bombing the next. The addition of these guys really makes the airfield feel like a living entity and not just your first waypoint on a flight map. I think I took too many photos - after snapping the "K" key one time too many the sim kicked me back to the manager but it did successfully end the mission. I'll be more mindful of my itchy (camera) trigger finger next time!

It's fantastic, Rick! I think you'll love it!

Gents... we've got a gem on our hands! TLH feels so polished and refined. It's a thousand small touches that add up to a massive upgrade. The map is so much more readable! It's actually enjoyable to review it now for your waypoints - something I haven't said since the old map in Red Baron 3D. The menu colors are lovely. The load times are absolutely improved, even though I already had the sim on an SSD. The FPS feel smoother as well, less popping in the frame rate - I suspect a credit to the new way the sim is loading in aircraft skins. And speaking of which... I know we haven't gotten the true goodies yet from OvS and company, but what is there is stunning. Such a beautiful looking sim. Here are some sights from tonight's flight at the beginning of Bloody April. Cheers guys - it's such a pleasure to be here to see what this sim has grown into.

From Pol over on SimHq: Hi all, we are pleased to announce that WOFF 'THE LAST HURRAH' EXPANSION 2 IS NOW AVAILABLE Please see the WOFF website for details, and to purchase! Please note this requires BOTH WOFF BH&H II, and OTT Expansion.

44 missions is quite an accomplishment! Much further than I've gotten in the later stages of the war! Cheers!

Your comment makes me feel a bit better, Rick! After all, you are getting in way more flight hours than most of us and if you struggle, it helps me feel a bit better. I think, at this point, the odds of getting a long term pilot through from 1915 to the end, with the possibilities of mechanical failure, being hit by flak, going down behind enemy lines, crashing on landing, falling prey to an enemy scout if you are playing as the observer and not the pilot in a two-seater... the odds would have to be pretty staggering. And it makes you marvel at the ones who made it. Cheers mate! Still enjoying your videos!

An unnerving thought, my friend! As a teacher, I already see a pervasive number of essays and responses that have been generated and not written. It would be cool to see if an AI could find some more juice in the CFS3 engine or even help the team port the sim to another engine altogether... but for now, I'll take the handmade option over the Terminator lol

To finally survive a full DiD campaign in Red Baron 3D! Wounded? Yes! Captured? Temporarily? But Lt. John Parks survived a full tour of duty with the 94th Aero squadron from March to November 1918. It was so much fun to revisit "the old gal" and play through, this time with a stock install running in D3D mode, like I did in 1998 when I first got the game - what a treat! Now if he can just avoid catching the flu on the ship home, he'll be in good shape! And at this rate, I might get a pilot through WOFF by the time I'm 70!

@Rick Rawlings - your experiences with enemy two-seaters looks awfully familiar! I too have been maimed by sniper-esque rear gunners, especially in machines like the Roland or Hannover... I find that if I switch the rear gunner accuracy in the workshop settings to less accurate, it feels a little more like the historical accounts I've read. At any rate - I always enjoy dropping by to catch the latest edition! Cheers mate!

Giving this a bump - hard to believe a year has gone by - can't tell you how much I've enjoyed the stories in this thread! May it continue! Cheers!

I'm enjoying a mid-afternoon coffee and wanted to send a little note of thanks over to the entire crew working on this latest and greatest iteration of WOFF. At 43 I'm probably still one of the younger (ish) members of the community, and always have been (I joined the ancient Flight Sim boards on Delphi when I was 16!). I've been playing video games since I was 4, and my grandfather (a WWII vet) handed me an Atari 5600 controller and a copy of Moon Patrol. I still love games and I think I've been through just about every generation of console without missing a beat since the NES. Which means that in addition to my flight sim rig (a 40th birthday present from my wife ), I've enjoyed the PS5 immensely. I love getting into racing games and play just about every version of the F1 series and Gran Turismo that I can get my hands on. Modern gaming sure is amazing! But it also has a lot of increasingly troublesome drawbacks. I'm excited (cautiously) for the new Battlefield 6 - so I snagged the Open Beta for both console and PC only to find today that I'm number 7800 in the queue on PlayStation and 152,280 on PC... Modern games also need a constant internet connection, and sometimes I wonder who I'm really supporting when I sign into a server that may be in Russia (which feels a lot more problematic than it did when I first got those games)... Which is why I'm so grateful that there is still a dedicated band of brothers making this sim - a game whose only goal is to create as true to life a representation of an era that we are all fascinated by. Filling out claim forms that often go nowhere, choosing to actually degrade the visuals by slapping on a greasy pair of scratched up virtual goggles... the things we do to feel a little more in touch with the source material lol :screwy: But how refreshing is it in our era of drip-fed content, buggy day one launches and their subsequent 80+ GB "patches," we still have a relic of the golden age of gaming: an offline, dynamic, immersive, remarkable flight sim that takes you as you are, doesn't shove DLC in your face, or ask you to upgrade to the super premium deluxe edition, or micro-transaction you to death for loot boxes and cosmetics. When the team has the next leap ready, it's there for you to buy, one and done - complete with several planes, and dozens of improvements. This is a rare space these days. And one, that, as I sat and stared at my monitor, for a AAA game to tell me that my input is so valuable that I'm in a queue of players longer than several cities I've lived in... I was happy to close the window and send you all a note instead. So thank you - for your passion, your dedication to accuracy (reading the exchanges between OvS, Graf, Elephant, and JFM have been a favorite reading pastime for me this summer), the gorgeous screen shots and just how much we love this odd little corner of the gaming / internet world we inhabit. It's still a pleasure to be along for the ride, all these years later. Cheers gents!

I think that's actually a very healthy approach Rick! I've driven myself batty chasing stutters and FPS issues over the years. Best to get on with it and accept that the sim will throw some curve balls your way - the joys of a truly dynamic sim!

Thank you kindly for your replies guys! I appreciate it! It's been extremely helpful to get a sense of where everyone is running. I think I'm landing between your two experiences. I have the scenery and the Anti-Aliasing settings turned up as I'd rather have a smoother image quality and more eye candy without the FPS dipping too low (below 40 is tolerable, below 30 starts to feel a bit chuggy). I was wondering because of my system specs, but it sounds like I'm very much clocking in where everyone else is. Diving into some other flight sims that I thought had higher FPS, I discovered that they in fact did not, or if they did, it was because the horizon render distance was set to 20KM, so that explained what I was seeing. Rick - I love catching up with your videos mate! Thanks so much for taking the time to share them! Hope you are doing well BB! Good to see you all again! Cheers!

Howdy Gents, Hope you are all doing well. I am finally getting a chance to sink my teeth into OTT and I'm enjoying immensely. As noted by Pol and Winder, the system requirements are quite a bit higher than before. I'm wondering what your target FPS is these days. I have a beefy gaming rig (specs below) and I'm finding that with the scenery and terrain detail dialed in at 3 and the visibility set to 100km, I'm consistently in the mid to low 30s. Traditionally with a new game, I set most of the settings on max (the joys of getting a new gaming rig when I turned 40 lol). After reading over the release notes for OTT, I realized that perhaps my fps philosophy has been incorrect - I keep aiming for a high FPS and with an older engine like CFS3 combined with the wizardry of OBD, I'm not sure I'm viewing these games settings with the right mindset. With all that rambling out of the way, I wanted to ask: What is a good average fps for your adventures in WOFF these days? Do you aim for a high fps or do you look for a smooth fps even if its lower. I'm really curious to hear about your experiences. I'd be delighted to hear from Pol or Winder as well - what targets do you aim for when you are doing your final tests before a release? Rick, I know that you are not only playing WOFF, but you're also recording - which is an insane load on a system! What fps do you look for? Thanks in advance for sharing them and any tweaks and settings that you've had some luck with. Cheers! Intel (11th Gen) i9-11900KF @3.50GHz RAM: 32GB nVidia GeForce RTX 3080 (10GBV RAM) WOFF installed on SSD Monitor: 2560x1440 at 144Hz