HomeBoy

Greetings! Just got my copy in the mail yesterday. Got er' all patched up (1.28a), plowed through all the faqs, done the video setup, cfs3config setups and suggestions, etc. I think I've done everything and have read everything I could find. Runs beautifully! [for the most part] I'm loving it so far! I'm getting this error once in a while in a popup window and then CTD: Runtime Error: 1480 Can't create AutoDraw image I seem to need to reboot the entire computer to clear it up. I've only got maybe two hours in total and it's happened three times now. Once when I was trying to look at my log book, once when I was trying to "Go to Field" from QC and most recently after I touched down after successfully completing a QC mission (and scoring a kill). Sad part, when it CTD it lost all record that I'd even flown the mission. I searched the forum here for string matches and found nothing. I found nothing on the faq or help section either. Anybody have any idea on this one? It's not a huge problem but it is annoying. Game works perfectly other than this. BTW, my specs are in my sig. I'm running XP SP3. Thanks for any advice PS: Oops, I'm sorry. Just found the other thread about this problem. Sounds like no one has any ideas about it. Oh well, just my luck. Any thoughts would certainly be welcome though. Thank you!

Yeah, that's a good site and a great place to go to get your process count down on your machine. I haven't visited in a while and did after reading your post. He has XP SP3 updates there so I plowed back through all my services last night. Cleaned up about six more processes. Even did my wife's computer which got rid of a bunch of unnecessary processes as well. Thanks for that. A visit to blackviper is always a good thing to do. Sort of like flossing your teeth.

almccoyjr, Thanks for the inquiry. Actually, it was not a CH problem but rather a problem with OFF not "seeing" my BU0836 interface controller that I installed inside my Pro Throttle that provides me with analog trim. I sent email to OFF support and they didn't have any idea about it either. It's an odd problem and the only game I've encountered that has any problems at all with Leo's board. Oh well, it's not a show stopper as I can work around not having my elevator trim wheel on my throttle. Widowmaker, "Disable validate device" doesn't seem to make any difference at all, at least with my rig. I turn it off because I know my controllers are "valid" and it seems to work with that disabled so I figure I'd leave it that way. Since our machines are similar, please let me know if you discover any improvements over what I've set up. Good luck there! Edit: Oops! Just realized I misread your reply Widow. You were asking me about my selecting the "Disable Write-Only Vertex/Index Buffers." I did that after reading somewhere in the FAQ. Please double check me on that though. I'm sure you can find fixes/improvements if you look closely. <S>!

Hi BeerThirty, You have not specified which TIR unit (TIR3, TIR4 w/trackclip, etc) you have so I will assume it is TrackIR4 with the standard baseball cap reflectors. First, make sure you have the latest TIR driver from NaturalPoint. Setting up a good profile is a slow, tedious process. I spent a couple of months getting mine just the way I wanted it. If you would like to try my profile, you can grab it here. I originally designed it for Aces High (WW2 combat game) but find it works perfectly in OFF. Also, it is very important that you check the lighting and movement in the TrackIR utility. Bring up the "Tracking Window" (where you see the three green dots reflecting back from the reflectors on your head). If you see ANY red anywhere in that window you are going to get erratic behavior. There are two ways to deal with that problem. One is to make your unit less sensitive. This only works to a point. Bring up the "Tracking Settings" window and select the "Light Filtering" box. You can move the slider until the red blotches are gone from the Tracking Window. If you have too much background light (and it doesn't take much) then you will not be able to filter it out enough to help. In that case you will simply have to adjust your environment (shades on the windows, moving your computer around, etc. to get away from the light source. The bottom line is, you must have NO red anywhere in the Tracking Window. If you do, TIR simply WILL NOT WORK! Use the "Heads Window" to watch the "actual" head movement compared against the "amplified" movement. If you are not satisfied with how your head moves, this is the place to fix it by adjusting things using the "curve editor." I recommend you err toward the "aggressive" side. Common sense will try to get you to go less aggressive and "smooth" but I have found just the opposite is really what you want. My profile is very aggressive. You may find it too much so and can tone it down a bit but you REALLY want your head to move around quickly. Trust me, you can learn to control the head movement and in time it will become second nature. I compare it to learning to wear progressive glasses. At first they drove me crazy but after a while I never even thought about it again. Finally, spend a little time reading through the manual. There is not a ton of info in there so you could easily read through it in a half hour. It is well worth spending the time on. TrackIR, IMHO, is the second most important device next to a good joystick that you can own when playing flight sims. I think it's especially important in a WW1 sim as there are so many things blocking your view and everything about flying these crates is visual. Good luck. Contact me directly (my email address is in my sig) if you need further help. I've been around the block a few times with TIR so I'm sure I can help.

Hi Polovski, Thanks for the tip. I will try Vet and some other combinations. Please don't take my post as whining. There are so many settings, etc. that I really wondered if I just didn't have something configured right. This is a really fun game! Thank you very much for all the work you guys have put it.

Very nice Lou! I've wondered if you could do that. Haven't tried it yet. I'll have to give that a go. Now, I suppose there is no way to get back out of the hangar once you're in there huh? One strange thing that happened to me. I landed after a mission and was trying to pull my plane around where several others were parked so I could line mine up with theirs. I got a little cock-eyed and couldn't quite turn around good and was just sitting there. I went to external view to see what I needed to do and saw this truck driving up. I thought "cool, maybe he's going to refuel me or something" so I decided to watch what he did. He drove right into me and blew me up! Next thing I know, I was staring at that screen that informed me that my pilot had died! So watch out for those kamikaze ground vehicles!

It's a "misconduct meter." The reason it looks like you're the only one that has one is because you can only see your own. The little blue boxes are the divisions in the meter. I assume if I click on the "Report" box under your icon, you will get "Warning" points. The meter would start to go up as you got more and more. If you get a certain amount of warning points you win a prize. We could experiment on you and see how it works if you'd like. (Just kidding)

I have a lot of experience in this area since I build and mod controllers as a hobby/business. Without much argument, CH Products are the finest controllers you can buy. They are quite expensive (especially to the other side of the pond) but they last forever. Also, for a WW1 sim, they are WAY overkill! Therefore, I wouldn't recommend CH. Logitech (aptly referred to as "Logicrap") is nothing more than a "temporary" controller. If you only wanted to play for a month or two and move onto something else, it might (i.e., maybe) be worth some small investment. Thrustmaster has most of it's market in Europe and I believe them to be nice equipment though I don't have much experience with them. I would think you could do ok going that way. I think your best bet might be a Saitek Aviator. They are very well built, have a nice feel, and don't cost very much (slightly more than a cheap Logitech). I have recommended several to my Euro buddies and haven't gotten any hate mail yet. It's worth looking into anyway. Good luck. Hope you're happy with whatever you end up getting. -mark

I have a rather complicated setup since I play a variety of flight sims and build/mod my own controllers. I cannot get OFF to see one of my controllers. I've tired a number of tricks but no luck. Strange, this is the only game I've every had a problem like this with. If you have any suggestions I certainly would appreciate the help. Inside my CH Products Pro Throttle, I've installed a BU0836 that provides me with three wheel axes for elevator, rudder, and aileron trim. I wanted to use the elevator trim axis for this game but OFF simply ignores that controller completely. As you can see in the following picture, "BU0836 Interface" shows up fine in Game Controllers but when I bring up the Control Options in OFF, it is not there. I have tried all sorts of things to no avail: -Combining all my CH controllers into a single controller ("CH Device 1") with CH Control Manager thinking there were too many controllers for OFF to handle. - Removing all controllers except BU0836. - Adding an experimental proprietary controller that should be way more problematic than the BU0836. OFF saw it just fine. - Editing "mine.xca" directly and adding the interface by hand: I am quite out of ideas. Please help! Thank you -mark

Wow! This is even more impressive than I thought. No labels! Did you see combat that mission? I can't imagine doing that without labels. Most of my fights last at least 60 seconds, often much more. After that, without labels, I would have no more idea of where my wingman was than a squirrel! In fact, he would likely be out of icon range too and without TAC, I'd simply have to point my nose toward home and hope for the best. That's some pretty impressive flying. I'm longing to get there though. As stated, baby steps.

Red-Dog, I assume you did not warp or use ap at any point right? Do you turn labels on at all? Impressive. I've only been playing for a couple of days now but I want to head in this direction. <S>!

Thanks Herr-Prop, Trimming back the processes apparently has fixed the mysterious 1480 problem. I've got my running processes down to 29 now which is better than the 50 or so that normally run. I'm sure if I were to spend the time I could trim it even more but that does seem to have fixed it. Much abliged sir! <S>!

The only real reason to run Vsync force-on is if your frame rates are consistently above 60 fps (the rather artificial "refresh" rate of most flat-screen monitors). In my case, the FR only occasionally hops up into the 50s-60s so I turn Vsync to force-off. The purpose of this settings is to synchronize the frames your monitor is displaying with the refresh rate (a CRT technology issue really as LCDs don't really have a refresh rate) of your monitor. If you're not getting fast enough FPS then you won't benefit from the setting anyway so you may as well turn it off. Aces High, the other game I play, will produce FPS well over 100 on my system so I turn Vsync on in that case which REALLY helps in that game. My frame rate is 60 consistently under all circumstances because it is being synchronized with my monitor's refresh rate. Not true at all with MS-FX and this game so it's best to turn it off.

Thanks Herr Prop. I should be fine with swap (Have mine set at 3306,4096) which is all you can get when running 4GB with XP. I use FSautostart (similar to Enditall) but I haven't set it up to use with OFF yet. I'll do that next and see if it helps. Thanks for the tip. Hope that will fix it. -mark

Another piece of the puzzle: I discovered after this happens (and apparently the need to reboot) there must be a process stuck in memory because when I go to shutdown the system, a popup shows this error briefly before it goes away and the shutdown begins: The instruction at "0x774fb ... something" could not be read at least I'm pretty sure that's what it said. It went away before I could write it all down.

I remember you Mac! This is great to find you here. You may not remember me as I didn't fly on line all that much; mostly did the campaign and read books, built models, etc and did H2H with Gil a lot. Gil (Budman) is a good friend of mine. We met when I challenged him on the Fighter Duel Ladder and had to call him on the phone. In those days, when you wanted to fight someone, you called them on the phone, turned on your 1200 bps modems, said "see you in the game", then "hooked up." I got him into RC planes and in return he invited me to join LafEsc. I was actually planning to come up to the Rhinebeck reunion but couldn't do it. I would have met you otherwise. I attended the Albert online "funeral." That was amazing. Anyway, very nice to make contact with you again Interlocutor. Glad you're a part of the OFF community. Regards -mark

Sorry to break in here as I'm am very much a new comer but I believe I can help. With respect to TIR, I'm not a new comer. I've been using it for several years now. TIR is very configurable. You can certainly tune it to filter the reflections very successfully. It should pose no problems at all with your glasses. I normally wear progressives but for computer gaming I wear 3X "drug store" reading classes as you really want all portions of the screen to have the same focus points. Moving your head (except when appropriate) while using TIR is unacceptable. There is no way I could wear progressives, bifocals, etc. while using TIR! The reading glasses work very well for me. If I had to though, I would ask my doctor to fit me with a prescription that would work! After all, priorities right? If you are new to TIR, prepare to spend some time developing a good TIR profile. I spent literally a couple of months getting mine right. Turning off "roll" was something I finally realized was messing things up for me pretty bad and turning that off made a big difference. That's not an issue with OFF of course since it's already 5DOF. Another thing that seemed counter-intuitive but made a huge difference was making TIR more aggressive, not less. It takes a bit of getting used to but once you do, it really is more natural that way. Now, I am so used to TIR, I am not even aware I'm using it. I can snap my head around like nobody's business; rivals those with POV hats! I use TIR in Aces High (my primary game), LockOn, and FSX. I use the same profile for each and anticipate it working well with OFF too. In case you're interested, here is my TIR profile. Again, sorry to break in but I felt this might be helpful. -HB Edit: Oops, sort of forgot this was a thread about Freetrack not TIR. One thing I wanted to mention about TIR versus FT is having the X and Y axes are really important to me (especially for a WW1 game) because there is so much cockpit stuff to look around. Having the ability to lean left a little bit to look around a strut is huge (to me). FT is only 2DOF (as I recall) and you will not have that ability. With that said though, FT really does work well and is certainly a cheap way to go.

I've searched briefly on the boards here and didn't see anything. I don't own CFS3 so I guess I'm looking at $39.99 for BH&H plus finding a copy of CFS3 ($10-15 at amazon) right? Can you point me to threads that discuss the gameplay, offline, online, etc.? Red Baron II was the game that got me hooked on mmog back in 1997 (or whenever that was) and I have longed for a good WW1 game ever since. I have purchased so many games over the years and watched them rot on my HD that I want to be a little more deliberate about this. I'm guessing that BH&H is a new patch for OFF? Sorry for the idiot questions. I'm just beginning to look into this. Thank you much for any assistance.

Thanks for all replies. I've placed the order! I have been playing Aces High (WW2 online game) for ten years or so now (since the experience with RB3D). I'm not quitting AH but I do want to take a break from it for a little while. I have really missed the old slow crates! Hello sitting_duck. I only played RB3D online for less than a year (1997 seems like). My ingame id was HomeBoy. I flew with the Lafayette Escadrille. We had our own paint scheme and everything. I even built a couple of models and painted them our squad colors. They're "flying" over my head right now as a matter of fact. One of the guys even made tee shirts which I finally had to retire to a shining rag about a year ago. Those were some great memories. Maybe if I can get the camera away from my wife, I'll take some pictures and post them here. I have come full circle I guess. After RB3D I got into Fighter Duel (WW2 dueling game over phone modem), then dabbled with Flying Circus (a WW1 online experiment that lasted a year or so), then someone invited me to check out the online WW2 combat game Aces High where I've been ever since. Sprinkled in along the way have been serious (at times) investments in Falcon4 (and variants) and LockOn Flaming Cliffs (which I've gotten back to playing lately). However, I have for a long time wanted to get back to the simple/slow stuff. Watching some of the videos I've found on youtube has really gotten me piqued to get into this game. I watched the very slow and somewhat stagnant progress of Storm Of Aces and finally gave up on hoping that would develop. To be honest, I have known of OFF for a while and have not given it a serious look because I never had much of a positive opinion of the CFS series. I picked up CFS2 somewhere and "played" (pun intended) with it for a while and ended up deleting it. OFF, I agree, appears to be an entirely different animal. I found a CH controller map at the ch_hangar and have been looking over the key commands (few as they are; at least as applies to OFF) and getting my controllers ready for OFF. Not a difficult task especially after some of the setups for jet games. Thanks again. This seems like a very nice community. I'm looking forward to getting to know you guys. regards -mark (HomeBoy)

Found the reviews etc. I was looking for. Duh! Sorry for the impulsive post earlier. Thanks viewers for not posting what you were probably thinking. <S!>