HomeBoy

Hi Barn, No reason not to really. Final-B is the same as Beta-5b essentially. You just end up with a version that doesn't have "beta" in it. From my experience with NP it is safe to upgrade to their latest anytime one is available. They work very hard to make sure what they put out is quality and reliable. There were a few stinker releases early on with version 5 but they were all beta versions so I think that gives them a little "working space." Certainly, from my experience, production releases are rock solid. When the first 5.0 beta came out it was really bad. I (along with others) submitted a list of a dozen or so really bad issues. I was almost embarrassed to complain about so many things! To their credit, they replied to me, quoting me point by point and showed how they were working through each and every issue. Some of my complaints were more like "requests" and they fixed and added every single issue I listed. Several other people did the same and as far as I know, they fixed and added all their issue too. I was very impressed. I have the utmost respect and admiration for Seth, Vince and the folks at Natural Point. There is a lot of similarity between them and the OBD guys. We are very blessed between OBD and NP. So, long winded way of saying "Go for it, download and use the latest TIR software!"

The method BH is describing here is very close to the way I've been doing it to build my climb tables. Thanks for the validation there BH!

I concur with Condor. It appears that the more successful my mission is (I get kills and return safely), the more likely the mission does not get recorded. What is really strange is this appears to be getting steadily worse for me. I was some eight missions into my latest campaign with some four opportunities to fill out a claims form with only one or two goose-eggs sprinkled in and toward the end I wasn't getting any recorded flights at all because I was coming home safe. Of course, through all the testing, I've had to delete that pilot so I don't have any now with any successful missions. RC, We are speaking strictly of campaigns here. No QCs. BTW, I believe you are correct in your description.

Yes, Final-B is much better than the early betas. NP has done a great job of listening to the problems and requests from users and implementing the necessary changes. I am extremely satisfied with this latest release. Frankly though, if you have TIR4, there really is no particular reason to run 5.0 software (unless you just like having the latest) as it was designed specifically for the TIR5 with it's increased resolution and speed. If I had TIR4, I personally would probably not use 5.0. 4.0 may actually even work better (don't know that) as 5.0 has to perform some scaling math to work with the TIR4 because of the difference in resolution. TIR5 truly is a different animal. Of course it certainly won't hurt to try it and compare to the 4.0 software. Who knows, you may find you like 5.0 better (funny how we all perceive things differently). Hope that help some. -mark

Fellow OFFers, I have been having a technical problem with the game these last few weeks. Last night, I blew up and came here and behaved very childishly and made comments that I regret. I have always made an effort to be positive and supportive toward this community and the developers. I have certainly blown that in spades. Please accept my apology and I will try very hard to take my own advice I give my daughter all the time: "Nothing good ever happens after midnight!"

Please see my apology to the developers and the OFF community: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=45681

Please see my apology to the developers and the OFF community: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=45681

NOTAM I have been logging my campaign flights in a spiral notebook so that when it came time to fill out the claim form, I had the names of my wingmen, etc. recorded. I found that I was writing the same things over and over and often forgetting to include various pieces of info so I decided to build a form that I could print out on three-hole punched computer paper and put in a three-ring binder. I thought you might like to see/have the form I created. I print the form double sided which gives me 10 missions per sheet of paper. I have my maps, etc. all in this notebook and now a record of every mission I fly. Enjoy!

Hi Barkhorn, Normally the print utility you use (I use Windows Picture and Fax Viewer most of the time) will have a checkbox entitled something like "Fit to Page" which will force the image to use as much of the printable area on the page as possible. Check that out and see if that doesn't do it for you.

The blue light indicates that the game is recognizing the TIR device. If the blue light never comes on then it is not and obviously the thing won't work. The only think I can think to tell you is to try unplugging TIR (without being in the game), wait a few seconds and plug it back in then start the game and see if it finds it. I found with TIR4 that it was necessary to do that once in a while. I assume it works properly from the TIR interface? You see the three "greens" from the camera view? Does the orange light come on when you turn TIR off using the appropriate hot key while in the game? Sorry I don't have more thoughts right now.

OvS, Mine is stored in my Photobucket web site and is therefore simply a URL: http://i112.photobucket.com/albums/n199/sn...ampaignForm.png All you'd need to do is provide that url in a post to make it available. In my post above, I just put "" tags around the url. That works too. A user would simply right-click it (as Rickitycrate discovered) to save it to his computer.

Thanks Winder. Maybe I'll twist Condor's arm and make him submit a tech support ticket as he can reproduce the problem faster than I can. I'll certainly have him add me to the list though. Sorry. Should have done this before but I just assumed from all the views on those other threads that everybody that cared saw it. I'll stop assumin' now.

Hi Winder, Sorry, I thought you had probably seen the couple of threads where Condor (the other guy who regularly sees this) and I have talked about this. It hasn't generated much interest as Condor and I appear to be the only ones effected (others have said they see the goose-egg on rare occassions). Here is the tread I started about it: http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?showtopic=45368 This doesn't happen every time. Condor seems to see it more than I do. It happens to me on about my third or fourth mission. It seems to happen when "good things" happen (a couple of quality kills, etc.) or when I have a very long mission (1.5 hours, etc). My theory has been that I need to follow the waypoints religiously and that helps my chances but I really don't know if that has any effect. Sometimes it seems so but other times it does not. It's discouraging I'll say that as every time I take off I don't know if this one's for "real" or not. No, I don't want to reset my CFS3 settings yet again nor delete my pilots (again). I have done that so many times that I'm just weary about it. This has become more like a job than a game. Sorry, I really don't want to be whining but after I spend a couple of hours flying a mission where I get a couple of good quality kills only to get a goose-egg, that honestly takes the wind right out of me! I'm pretty saavy and think I know how to trouble-shoot but I'm really out of ideas on this one. Thanks for your concern.

This is a great patch! Heartfelt thanks to the dev team for such a great effort. This is really beautiful! I especially appreciate the "pilot cannot die" feature of the QC. That is going to make just wanting to get in and fly a quick one so very much nicer. Thank you for that! Unfortunately, it doesn't help the "Goose Eggs" I've been getting in campaign. After I applied the patch, I flew my next mission and purposely went the opposite direction (ignoring the waypoints completely) and just flew out for a few minutes and turned around and landed. Before, that almost always gave me a goose egg. This time though it didn't! I got credit for a three minute flight. I thought "Fantastic! The superpatch has fixed the goose-egg problem." Then, I launched my next mission and flew it like I always have (except I ignored a couple of waypoints because I thought I could get away with doing that now), got myself a couple of kills with my wingmen right there to witness. Flew about 1.5 hours and when I landed: GOOSE-EGG!!! Damn! I'm pretty discouraged at this point. I won't be doing any more campaigns but I guess I can enjoy doing QCs and just enjoying the beautiful graphics, etc. Since I'm about the only one that has this problem, I understand why this doesn't get any attention. I can live with that I suppose. Thanks again for a great patch!

My latest pilot is 5.5 hours into a campaign and beginning his seventh mission with two confirmed kills. He files with the Lafayette Escadrille and the date is 11May16. Our sixth mission came up as a Scramble. I have read here on the forum how bad those things are (i.e., difficult to survive) and because I am a "hot shot fighter pilot" I was eager to take a crack at this and risk losing the time invested in the campaign. What I discovered will make me skip over any future scrambles that will come along. I was only given one wingman (the others were on leave or hurt). I thought "This is perfect. Let's see how I can do!" When the mission started, I quickly looked around to see what we were up against (we're flying N11s) and counted eight E3s right overhead. Gulp! This is going to be a challenge. I started my engine and roared down the field while sending my wingman the "attack" command and veering off so as to get as much separation from my wingman (attempt to split the attack) and the attackers. I stayed low and built speed. First problem. Every now and then, I will fly a mission and then land successfully at my home airfield and exit to discover that I have recorded ZERO time in flight. Sometimes I will fly an hour and a half and get absolutely NOTHING for it. This is really infuriating. It doesn't happen all that often else I probably would be giving up on doing campaigns. I have this little theory that if I religiously follow ALL the waypoints and linger over the target for well over the specified time that I stand a better chance of having my flight recorded. I really don't know if this is true or not but something certainly causes my missions to get "Goose Egged" sometimes. Why am I telling you all this? Well, one of the first things I do when I start a mission is to check the map "m" and see what the waypoints are so I make sure and follow all of them. Well, I had second thoughts about that with a Scramble mission because really there should not be any waypoints but mostly out of habit, I pressed the "m" key. When I did, the game crashed and I was left with the pop-up window asking me if I want to send a report off to Microsoft. That was pretty frustrating but I figured it was just a fluke so I rebooted (just to make sure) and repeated the mission again. I tried bringing the map up again and BOOM! CTD once again! Apparently, since this is a Scramble mission and there is no waypoints, there must be a bug in OFF here as it tries to access a map that doesn't exist and the code runs off in the weeds. I tried it once more to make sure and that definitely is the case. So, lesson #1 about doing Scrambles, DO NOT TRY TO BRING UP THE MAP WHILE FLYING SCRAMBLE MISSIONS!!! Second problem. I started the Scramble mission once again (fifth attempt or something close) and found that only three attackers were overhead this time instead of the eight I'd been seeing before. I thought "Piece of cake! I'll blast these guys in no time!" Well, it was much tougher than I thought! Way harder than when I do something similar in QC. Cool! It took a while but I finally finished all three of them off and I directed my wingman to "rejoin" and headed for the airfield (which was only a mile or so away as all the fighting took place very close to the field). I came around and landed nicely and shut off my engine and coasted to a stop. I'm thinking "This is great! I can't imagine not getting three confirmed kills on this one as my wingman was right there to witness them and there is simply no controversy over these kills! Well, guess what, when I exited, I did not get a claim form, my flight time was ZERO, my number of rounds fired was ZERO, the number of kills was ZERO, the whole mission was ZERO! When I went to the flight review, I watched each kill I made and the messages that my pilot "Shot down an EIII", and counted all three kills just like they happened. But, it was all for nothing! Lesson #2: NEVER DO SCRAMBLES AGAIN! Well, I don't give up easy. I decided to just skip the obviously flawed Scramble mission and accepted the next "CAS" mission and flew it and recorded a 63 minute flight, not encountering any enemy and therefore not getting to claim any kills. So, I'm still sitting with just two kills where there should actually be eight. But I'm not bitter. The kills will come. I guess I'll just have to learn to "game" around the "game" a little better. Lesson #3: The more boring the flight is, the more likely it will not get Goose Egged! That last lesson is similar to the one I've learned about eating and dieting: "If the food tastes good then it's bad for me!" Ok, I feel better now. Thanks for listening. Sorry for all the whinning. Excuse me while I go get me some more cheese. [Yikes, cheese tastes good!]

Well, I (and apparently Condor) appear to be the only ones with this problem. I just flew a mission five times in a row and flew the opposite way from where the waypoints are and came back around and landed. Goose-egg all five times. Not a trace that I had ever taken off. I just don't have much more heart for this. I am not going to risk flying off for an hour or hour and half just to come back to a goose egg. I tried updating my nvidia drivers to 190.38 which caused my cfs3.config settings to get wiped out (I had forgotten about that). No big deal, I simply reset them but that has not seemed to make any difference at all. Oh well, thanks for trying to help me fellas. I really do appreciate it. I think I'm going to give up on this game for a while. Maybe when the superpatch comes out things will be better and I'll try again then. regards -mark

This question is mostly to the OFF team I quess but if anyone has any insight, I'd love to hear it. I have an Nvidia 8800 GTS. One of the selling points of this card (as well as all the 8800s) was their so-called Coverage Sampling Anti-Aliasing (CSAA) which is touted as faster than Super Sampling (SSAA) and better quality than Multi-Sampling (MSAA). I use CSAA in MS FX and it indeed gives me considerably better frame rates and the quality is equal to SSAA as far as I can tell. I was really hoping I could use CSAA with OFF but I can't seem to get it to work. Setting up CSAA is really goofy and tricky. Here's what you have to do (I got this from reading stuff on the nvidia forums): If your game has an AA setting, you have to enable it. If the game does not have an AA setting, you won't be able to use CSAA. If the game allows you to set an AA multiplier, you must use either 2x or 4x in order for the driver to use CSAA. In the case of FX, there is only the simple checkbox for "Antialiasing". You have to set the driver to use Antialiasing-Mode to "Enhance the Application Setting" You must use AA Settings of 8x, 16x, or 16xQ only for CSAA. Any of the other settings (2x, 4x, 8xQ) will force the driver to use MSAA. I have tried to follow the same procedure with OFF and the graphics look horrible. It looks like AA is completely disabled. Maybe it's that I don't know how to properly enable AA ingame. I am using cfs3config and where you set your monitor resolution is a pull-down for AA (2x or 4x). I set that to 2x and immediately quit. I found in the FAQ that it is a known bug that cfs3config will not "remember" that you had previously set AA but that it is indeed set. I have looked through the various xml files hoping I'd spot where it set AA but I can't seem to find anything. I'm thinking this is not working because I really don't have AA set ingame. Can anyone verify? I'd love to get CSAA to work as, at least with FX, I probably gained 10 FPS and the graphics quality nearly equals that of super sampling (which kills FRs). I can't imagine that I'm the only one who cares about this. Thank you to all you graphics experts out there! I eagerly await your reply.

Someone suggested (I think it was UncleAl) to superimpose your TAC over the top of your compass. That works great and provides just enough color under the gauge so that the sky-blue waypoint line isn't a problem at all. Course you have to adjust your TAC to be the same size as the compass (I think I used 0.15 or something like that which is perfect.) Give it a try and see what you think.

Well said sir! I wholeheartedly concur.

The only bad part about this music is after flying a couple of missions and spending the time to review them, etc. I get that music in my head such that I'm humming it for the rest of the evening and even while I'm trying to go to sleep. Pretty sad.

Thanks Scout! Hmmm, I work so very hard keeping my wingmen alive (I even forego kills I know I could get) just to make sure I get them home. I hope I can continue to be as motivated now having this bit of information.

Here's some more campaign strangeness. I went on a mission with three wingman. I managed to let all three of them get killed while in a furball. [i'm rather embarrassed about that actually] When I completed the mission, there was a notice about one of the guys in our squadron getting killed but it was not one of these three. When I reviewed the flight, the review shows all three of them being killed exactly as I recalled it. However, they are NOT dead! In fact, those three guys are in my next flight. Do wingman not die? I was sure I had one killed another time and he really DiD!

Interesting. I killed my pilot today and had to start a new campaign. My new pilot flew the first mission which took almost two hours. I was careful to follow every waypoint (even double backed on one on the way home so as to be sure to hit them all) and landed successfully. I got ZERO credit for the flight, all goose eggs! Zero flight time, zero shots, zero everything! The briefing said to stay over the target area for at least 17 min so we lingered for well over 20 min. I can't imagine what I could have done wrong. Very strange. First time I recall that happening. My pilot sits there now as if he has never flown a mission at all. Condor must be rubbing off on me. That's a scary thought!

See what I mean?

Here's another guide. This one describes how to use FSAutoStart to suspend programs and services from running while gaming. I have successfully trimmed my running processes down from about 55 to 28 while the game is running. Makes a huge difference.