CaptSopwith

Hear Hear! I'll be keeping you in my thoughts as well Typhoon! Let us know when you're safely out of recovery - we'll keep the place warm for you until you return!

Hey British! Good to hear from you! The "official" OFF forum is now located over at SimHQ. The decision was made a few weeks ago when CA suddenly went down and, through a aristilian confluence of events, the major CA support staff was out of internet reach. OBD is obviously close to releasing W.O.F.F. and so, to keep the lines of communication open on the pending release of their new product, needed to relocate in a hurry. The new board is over here: http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/forums/89/1/Over_Flanders_Fields.html SimHQ gave OBD and all of us some pretty nice digs - you'll quickly notice that it's the most customized forum over there. But most of us are still visiting both, so you'll likely see us both there and here. Hope this helps!

Pol released a short clip called "Dev Clip #1" over at SimHQ and it sparked an idea when I first read the title. I thought, for a moment, that it might be a clip of the developers themselves. Wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to create a podcast interview of the OBD team after W.O.F.F. is released later this year? I know I would watch and re-watch something like that. I'd love to hear from the great group of guys that have worked so hard over the last 7+ years making this gem of a flight sim that we all love. Hearing from Winder, Pol, OvS, and the rest of the team would be fantastic. How did the team come together? What made them decide to start coding with the CFS3 engine. What were the hurtles they discovered along the way? What did the reception of Phase 1 mean to them? How did the set the list of things to accomplish when it came time to work on Phase 2 and 3. What was it like to develop this last, most massive, update of them all? If we could get video - even better - but I think that kind of insight from the team once the dust settles would be a wonderful treat for the community - and a fitting sign of respect and admiration from us to hear just how they did it. And I think actually hearing from you guys would be a massive treat that a simple text interview just wouldn't do justice. Besides, we've been hearing Pol shout "Contact! Clear!" now for years! Great games have released "making of" packages before. Fallout 3 did it and even IL2 1946 had a long video of the team at work. I'm certainly not suggesting adding this on to your list for the release of W.O.F.F. (first of all, I have no place to, second - I'm not crazy!). But sometime after it's all done - one relaxing afternoon - perhaps one of us could host an interview with the team and ask you some questions about how you produced the greatest World War I flight simulator of all time. What do you think guys?

I almost cannot help but wonder if this wasn't meant as a nod to a classic that so many of this generation played when they first started. It seems we have come full circle here!

I've heard of situations where individuals - suddenly handed power and placed in positions of authority - can become drunk with power... but this has to be a new record! I think someone besides the mods need to keep the keys to the OFF Liqueur Cabinet!

This, is why I love this community! Congrats guys - can't think of a better group to keep the peace!

I like it Von Paulus! This was how I imitated Tom Cruise during my childhood in the late 1980s!

Redpiano - just watched your video. I love the music! Very "Great Escape" somehow...

Well, I guess if we include Nintendo games... and we should. This is my first real flight sim.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZwD1yGsG7A

That is quite rudimentary, Von Paulus! The first flight sim I ever played was, like yours, a modern sim. Here was the firs true PC flight game I ever played: F117-A Stealth Fighter; a game that introduced me to the great name of MicroProse.

Slightly off topic from the great discussion going on here but... ...these flight simulation films are really well done. I discovered the "death of" series of ROF movies a while back but hesitated to post them. I have come across another talented film maker who is working with IL2 Cliffs of Dover and he's managed to make some pretty impressive stuff. Here is one of his films about the Battle of Britain. Just thought you guys would find this interesting. Cheers!

Ah, Wings for the Amiga. Now this is the game I missed. I didn't get a PC until about 1993 and by the time I did (I was 11, mind you, so my family did, really), it was all DOS/Windows PC's. That said, this game has held up well. I dig the sound effects and the visual of placing you behind the pilot. It's a nice nod to movies like Hell's Angels and I can see, from a coding standpoint, how much this simplifies things - no cockpit to render. I dug around on youtube, if you have 8 hours to kill... ... someone posted the long play of the game. So you can see some of the intro cinematics - handy for someone like me. And yes... there is a part 2. I'll leave you to find it.

Well said, Dej! I second your sentiments regarding the spirit of the OFF community. It's a good bunch and we all seem to play well together. And really, at the end of the day, it's the community that keeps a game going, isn't it? I'm convinced that, had Red Baron II/3D not had guys like OvS, Beery, Pat Wilson, Shred, Flybert, RebRens, Kess... gads, the list goes on and on... it would have been a mediocre flight sim with a great dynamic engine that would have collected a lot of dust after a while. But, my goodness me, would you look at it? Even over on the now ancient Delphi boards, where I found my first flight sim community, there is still the occasional post and we're what, about fourteen years out from Red Baron's release? I'd like to find a Call of Duty or a Battlefield game that has had that kind of longevity. OFF has the same thing going for it - largely because so many of the ingredients come from the lineage of Red Baron 3D. And the community that has formed around it, both in the OBD team and here on the boards, I have to believe, keeps the development of OFF going strong. If I was Pol or Winder and I was up coding late, I'd like to think the occasional "keep going! You're doing great work!" posts from the community has to give them a small shot in the arm. Like I said, a community makes the game. I've seen other boards for other games - both airborne and not - where the community soured, support for a game started to dry up, the waters were quickly poisoned, and it all kind of just, well, fell apart. But when a community gets it right - like the Red Baron 3D, European Air War, and Over Flanders Fields boys, it makes all the difference in the world. Why else would all of us, with our incredibly busy lives, take the time out to post. It matters. I'm happy to be with this group and I'm proud of OBD for making such a wonderful simulation for the rest of us mere mortals to enjoy.

Nice one Mike!

I could use a little help to better understand things here... Do we have to follow this procedure with every campaign mission we fly? Or is this just an initial setup phase? I like the idea of adding some Mods to OFF - I've used them in the past... but I didn't like the trade off of losing all of the skins that were in the game. If this is a one time thing, IE: Install the mods you want, work through the above steps, and then you're good to go - I'd be willing to give it another try.

Oh Dear... yes, I did mean Bristol Scouts - how embarrassing! I would imagine a tangle with Bristol Fighters in a Fokker Eindecker would have been a rather short and nasty affair!

I was sort of partial to not knowing... kind of made the mystery a bit more fun!

You got me Widow... although Hasse Wind seems pretty confident that ascertaining his true identity isn't that difficult... now I just feel inept!

So last night, I conducted a small experiment... a little historical research, if you will. I went through my flight sim collection - at least the World War I category - and played through a mission in each, in order. I started with Wings of Glroy - my first taste of aerial combat in the Great War. Here's a video of what WoG looked like, way back in 1994. Next was Red Baron 3D in its stock form. Followed by the Beery Patch, 1918 Air War (a really fantastic UOP released by a guy named WingStrut that was tragically under-appreciated). And then came the Western Front Patch and Hell's Angels. Then I moved over to Over Flanders Fields and I had to sit back and marvel... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Di8adFiN_Ps&feature=relmfu If you had told me, in 1994, when I was a 12 year old kid, that one day I would have a computer that would model not just what it was like to fly an airplane from World War I, but also simulate the war on the ground and the entirety of aerial operations for nearly every squadron that served on the Western Front from Flanders to Alsace-Lorraine and model it day after day after day, from 1915 through to the end of the war in November 1918... I probably would have passed out - and never seen daylight for the rest of my adolescence! And then, if you told the 1994 version of me that one day I could snap a device to my headset that would allow me to look around my aircraft - lean over the side of the cockpit and see troops on the march below me, watch as my enemy dove out of the sun - guns blazing - and use it to dogfight my way out of trouble... I'm not sure what my reaction would have been - but you might have needed to revive me! This is a long, round about way of saying... my God, how far have we come?? Seriously - take a moment and think about the difference. When I was a kid, I was aiming at blurry pixels of German planes in the sky. This morning, I fired up OFF and took a Fokker Eindecker out on patrol over the mountains of Alsace-Lorraine and watched as a flight of Bristol Fighters - which were rendered in such high definition that I could recognize them long before they attacked - bounced us and open fire. We have it pretty good, chaps. Pretty damn good.

I have to echo Tom's sentiments here. I've gotten quite used to posting here for OFF - and yeah, without the avatars and sigpics, it felt a bit strange to see... Olham without his trademark pilot photo or Widow without his... Widowness But, I have to say... it's really quite funny how we get "used" to things that feel like "home." It's a website. It's a server housing a bunch of code that spools up hyperlink requests when we click on it from our four corners of the world. And so is SimHQ - it's just a different flavor of HTML and yet... we grow attached, we feel an emotional connection with it, and a sense of loss when it stops working. Human beings are funny, fickle creatures, aren't we? As far as doing split duty - I used to visit four or five forums as week back in the late 90s. There was Delphi for Red Baron 3D discussion... but that only covered SWWISA and the Western Front Patch. Then there was OvS' Hell's Angels forum on his site (which was taken down multiple times by Turkish hackers of all things... damn kids). Then I visited SimHQ for all things European Air War. And, lastly, was Frugal's long-defunct board for everything related to my sad attempts to learn Falcon 4.0. Talk about a lot of leg work! Ultimately, however, it's the people. While I love the EAW community and guys like Col. Gibbon and Moggy and Mr. Jelly, I bonded with the RB3D people so much more. Don't know why - like I said, we're fickle. But I'd like to think I clicked with people like Pol and Otto and guys like Shredward and Capt. Royce. And that group was built on with people here that I consider genuine friends - guys like Olham and Widow and Creaghorn. Believe me when I say that when I get some funding to do research in Germany, I'll be looking some of you up (if I'm in the right part of Germany, of course). Anyway... just some ramblings from yours truly.

This is brilliant - if you stop and think about it. By not telling us what his alter-ego was, we're all left wondering... what new names popped up lately that might be him? And, heaven help us, what if it's one of our own - someone we've known for ages. So now we all start looking around at each other and wonder... could Olham be UncleAL? What about Lou - he's always been a bit too civil for his own good - it has to be an act! Damn it Unc! You're creating havoc whether you're here or not!

I'm also happy to see the OFF Boards back up and running here. I can't remember how long I've been here at Combat Ace but I have gotten used to the surroundings. I'll happily support OBD and visit both boards. Heck, I had Combat Ace and SimHQ loaded up on my Morning Coffee extension anyway! Cheers to the staff here - glad you were able to get things sorted. I'm sure it must have felt like an eternity for you guys!

Lou, I've got to say - well done man! You are an inspiration to many of us here. I too have tried to lose some weight this semester but, more importantly, I wanted to be healthier, not just skinnier. I'm happy to report this term has been a success. I'm about ten pounds lighter (still about 6 or 7 over where I want to be) but I've been cycling and working out more often and as a result, as I sit here near the end of the term, I am relaxed, rested, and not too worse for wear. Compare that with my last semester where I dragged myself, half dead, into Christmas break. Great job and congratulations! I can only imagine how good it is to wake up and feel better! Cheers!

Hi Gents! Thanks very much for all of your feedback. I've compiled my notes on this potential project and I made sure to copy and paste all of your feedback as well - so I can refer to things that need to be adjusted, improved, or outright dropped and changed - as the case may be. I'm happy to see that this has the potential to be an enjoyable read and I'll be working on this project as time goes on. Again, my heartiest thanks to all of you - I greatly appreciate it!

Hi Guys! My thanks for all of the great feedback. It's been a hectic few days and I just now noticed how horribly garbled the syntax is in the first post! I copied and pasted my work from Microsoft Word and it seems to have completely butchered proper spacing - creating a lot of run on words and typos... yikes! My apologies in advance for having to wade through that mess! I'll see what I can do to get that sorted! Taking all of your feedback into consideration and working it into future developments! Cheers guys and thanks again!