CaptSopwith

Nice skin Olham! I'll have to download that immediately.

I look forward to the next installment Lou. It looks like Paul had quite a close call last time! And the skies are only going to get more dangerous from here! Viel Glück!

I remember how much of an improvement it was over the original! The stock terrain was a blurry, nearly unrecognizable globby mess. I think this picture illustrates that pretty well. I would like to get an old gaming rig up and running at some point. I have all of the parts, just no working IDE hard drive. You're right though, RB died when the available technology simply past it by. I occasionally look in on the old forms and there's still a dedicated group working on modding the old gal. Truthfully, even I would wonder what could be left to do by now.

Awesome work guys! Your SIA Series of PDF files now make up a readme library in my OFF folder. Great stuff!

Wow! Awesome page Lou. I've bookmarked it for further reading. Cheers!

I remember that cow patch! I was reading this thread thinking about how far we've come. From LGM (Little Green Men) to an environment that is nearly alive. Quite an improvement in what, ten, twelve years? EDIT: Any Red Baron players remember the Green Truck and Green Tent? Talk about an immersive environment. Balloon Attack missions in RB3D had a bonus target, which consisted of a truck (or lorrie for you brits out there ;)) and a green tent located right below the offending balloon. I remember getting bonus points for shooting those targets up. Doing so, of course, required you avoided the two machine gun nests and four artillery pieces located near by. How far we've come indeed. PS: Completely agree, and I'm glad to see Winder smiling. Civilian targets, erm, I mean, options in the game would definitely add even more to the environment. Cheers!

Beautiful prints! I remember that first print quite well. Back in the old RBII days, someone made a patch for CM1.1 (the ancient file manager for date based patches in Red Baron) that changed the stock black and white photos into gorgeous color paintings. I believe I set that print to be the main screen. Thanks for the quick trip back to the late 1990's! I enjoyed it!

He is and remains my all time favorite pilot. His pilot portrait appears on my office hours at the university.

It's down for me too Rabu. Has been for a while now.

Well, I came in here to say exactly what Hasse Wind already said! You hit the nail on the head mate, can't say it any better than that. IMHO, anyone who says a WWI flight sim should be fully dynamic, and that you should be able to affect the outcome of the war doesn't fully grasp the history of World War I aviation.

Those photos remind me of a few nasty car crashes I had the good fortune of walking away from. What's the old saying? Any landing you walk away from is a good landing?

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.

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.

Looks like Rise of Flight is trying to sweeten the pot and attract some new pilots with a new release of ROF dubbed ICE (Iron Cross Edition). Here's the press release. http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/post/2010/06/03/ROF-ICE.aspx

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!

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?

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.

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.