HomeBoy

planecrazy, First, I can tell you first hand that OFF will support as many controllers as you care to install. I understand why you might not think that but what you're seeing is another problem. For some reason (this drives me crazy with MS FS as well), if you have multiple controllers, OFF (CFS3 really I think) loves to "automatically" assign the X axis of each controller to your ailerons, the Y to elevator and Z to your throttle. If you have four controllers on your computer, ALL four seem to want to have this assignment. Naturally, this causes great confusion in the game. I think it's this behavior that makes it look like you can't have more than one controller connected. What I do is bring up each controller in the OFF controller config utility and un-assign EVERYTHING and work through each controller one at a time and assign what I want. If you carefully work through your controllers that way you will find things to work quite well. Hope that takes a little of the magic out of all this. For the record, I absolutely despise the OFF controller interface as I also do the MSFS one. Good luck! -mark

Hi Mighty! I concur with what SittingDuck is telling you. There is a process that is having trouble dying and the log will help you narrow that down. Good luck! Sorry, haven't been paying close attention to this forum lately. -mark

Winder, Thank you and the OFF team for a very professionally done and excellent product! The support is first rate too! I am with others who say they would buy anything you release, regardless of price! As a recent convert (I studied this game for at least six months before I took off my shoes and rolled up my pants legs), may I share what took me so long to decide: 1. Microsoft CFS3! I REALLY didn't like the idea of an add-on to a game that I never liked. I bought CFS1 or 2 (can't remember which) and really despised it. I especially hated the interface, particularly the game controller configuration. I must admit that CFS3CONFIG is not pleasant and the controller interface reminds me why I deleted CFS from my computer and moved on. I don't have many bad things at all to say about OFF but CFS3CONFIG and that horrible control setup thing that you can only get to from an aircraft on the ground is a mouth full! Sorry about that. Just being honest. 2. I was afraid OFF would be a little on the arcade side the way I always felt CFS was. That's probably a little unfair. All the hacking of CFS (P51s with F-16 engines in them, etc.) just made me run in the opposite direction. Let me tell you, OFF is nothing like I expected there. This game is top quality in all respects that would ever bring the word "arcade" into the same paragraph. There is absolutely nothing arcade about OFF! That was a very pleasant surprise. Course, from all that I had read, I didn't think it was by the time I prepared to purchase. 3. After I realized how serious the OFF team was, I then began to be concerned that, in order to not be criticized for having "lame flight-models", the OFF team would make the flight models so hard that the game would not be fun. Well, again, very pleasantly surprised there. I think there is a wonderful compromise between "fun" and "realism" with the flight models of these ole crates. Thank you so much for that! Although #1 is a pain, #2 and #3 so far outweigh it that it really is no problem for me. The CFS3 stigma was what kept me away from this game for so long though. Now, I tell all my friends (that always rolled their eyes when I told them they'll never be another RB3D) that if you're waiting for a WW1 game to sink your teeth into, OFF is prime steak! Please put me on the team that does whatever they can to help make this project a success! Thank you again! -mark

Absolutely! I hope I have not been disrespectful to Catch about this.

I don't disagree with you Catch with respect to the need to be careful anytime you begin to make configuration changes (even changing video settings, etc.) and I certainly agree with the "proceed with caution" notion. I do think you are misrepresenting AlacrityPC/FSAutoStart though. There was never any claim that this was a "miracle application." Also, to say fast computer's don't need AlacrityPC is truly missing the point. Fast computers can get bogged down (in fact they just do it faster) than slow ones if a bunch of needless stuff gets loaded up on them. In addition, the ability to start other programs and stop services that will "do things" while your game is running are all valid issues AlacrityPC deals with. Finally, these tools DO NOT make any registry changes in any way. They simply suspend processes and programs. If you screw things up, a simple reboot is the wost damage you can do. I appreciate the spirit of your remarks Catch. I really do! I just think you're overreacting and reaching to make your point. Misinformation, regardless of the motive is never helpful. [Remember all those "drug" movies they showed us in high school in the 60's?] With that said, I join you that you should be careful any time you make changes to your system. Make backups, screenshots, take notes anytime you change something. Try to only change one thing at a time and reboot to see what that change is going to do. I'm sorry if I haven't made these cautions clearer in my doc. Hope I've not been too critical there Catch. Thank you for your concern. -mark

Haven't seen that Sitting_Duck. All my mem defrags have gone without problems. I have recently disabled my defrag as I didn't think it was helping me much. I have 4GB mem and I really don't think it's all that helpful to defrag that much. Takes too long and the benefits are minimal. You may actually have a physical memory problem. I have found the best memory tester to be memtest86 (you can Google for it). It builds on a bootable CD and really tests your memory. If you have a physical memory problem, memtest86 will find it. You can start it up when you go to bed and come check it in the morning. It REALLY checks your memory. If your memory passes memtest86 then you are OK! Are you overclocking by any chance? I had my old memory (before I got the sticks I have now) clocked a little high and they would fail once in a while.

The new guide on AlacrityPC is now done: http://snomhf.exofire.net/alacrityPC.html Please let me know if you find errors. There's bound to be some as long as it is! Enjoy -mark

As promised, here is the AlacrityPC guide. Enjoy -hb

I love this tracer mod! I don't even care if it's realistic or not. They look fantastic! Thank you everyone who had a hand in producing these!

I wish it was in the FAQ somewhere that if you don't get CFS 3.1, you will have to install CFS3 and patch it up to 3.1 before you can install OFF. However, if you get CFS 3.1 to begin with, you don't have to install it at all! The OFF installer will simply ask you to put that disk in and copy stuff off it. It never gets installed separately anywhere. I got lucky (first time in my whole life) that I just happened to get 3.1 when I ordered my copy. I had no idea at all that I needed to make sure it was 3.1. I truly just got lucky.

Don't feel bad TestPilot, I wondered the same thing when I first looked at cfs3config. It is not very intuitive. I kept wondering "Where's everybody seeing all these configuration screens!"

Hi Widow! How bout we hold off. I wrote the guide for FSAutoStart and am planning to rewrite it for AlacrityPC. I'll post again once I get the guide rewritten for the new version. If we want to sticky, I think we should wait till then. AlacrityPC just gets better and better! I've used a program for a long time called Game Commander which allows spoken voice commands to get translated to game commands. I use it in LockOn to issue the voice commands to wingman, the tower, etc. I always seem to forget to load that program before I kick off LockOn. With AlacrityPC, the "Run Program First" feature really makes this easy and seamless. Of course with OFF, I use the feature to set the priority for TrackIR. You can do whatever you want with it. Very nice!

Understand. Sorry none of this helped you. I was hoping it would!

Never, IMHO, has there been a game more closely coupled with TrackIR. I would even go so far as to say you shouldn't even play this game if you don't have TrackIR. Because OFF is so visually based (heck, a lot of the planes don't even have altimeters or airspeed indicators), the view is everything! [Please detect the tongue-in-cheek here neatly bundled with a side of seriousness] Glad to hear you're getting TrackIR though, you'll love it!

I flew a RAF mission last night from a field near Calais across the front into enemy territory to attack a railyard and back. Roundtrip was about 150 miles. Took about two hours. I only used TAC and turned off labels. Didn't use warp at all. I'm using the exact configuration I posted above (CSAA-16x) and it was absolutely beautiful in every way. I got frame rates around 50-60 with a few dropping down into the 20-30s occasionally once we started fighting around the railyard. I was fully prepared to drop back to 8x if need be but so far it seems like I'm ok with 16x. My, what a beautiful game this is! I am really curious which setting has made the difference. One of these days, I may plow into it and try to discover it. I was suspicious it was the aircraft texture max dimension but that's almost too obvious. It's probably some really tricky combination. Nah, I'm enjoying this game too much to want to waste more time configuring it. Those are actually your settings (if you look back to what you posted you'll see that). I'm not sure either about the effect of AF. I have experimented with setting it to 8x and 4x and don't really see much difference. I just left it at 8x since my performance seems so good now. VSync. Well, I have come to the conclusion that you should always turn that on. With VSync on, you will never get frame rates above 60. It is my opinion that the VC is wasting cycles generating frame rates higher than that anyway and VSync is a good way to limit that. It's very much the same idea as setting the ingame frame rate limiter only it's being done at the video driver level which is better I think. My first real experience with VSync was with Aces High. AH is not a game that taxes the video card a whole lot so guys (myself included) were getting frame rates way up into the 130s and 140s with these newer computers and graphics cards (e.g. 8800). What resulted was lots of "tearing" and "streaking" on the screen (especially with TrackIR as you turned your head quickly). VSync (designed really for CRTs which have a true refresh rate, LCDs do not), will prevent the VC from generating those high frame rates. When I play Aces High, my frame rate is pretty much locked constantly at 60 FPS. I think even games that tax your graphics much harder (FSX, OFF) also benefit from having this setting on. I experience fewer tearing and other anomilies with it turned on. There were some other settings that you had that I questioned but followed your lead anyway but frankly, this game looks so good now I think I'm just going to put my lab coat back in the closet and enjoy this game. It looks 100 times better now than it did Saturday morning. <S>! -mark

I don't know whether to call Rabu a genius or a lucky man! Either way Rabu, I give you a giant When I saw your graphics and frame rate, I thought you must have a computer that is off the scale powerful and when you reported what you had, my jaw dropped. Your machine is very similar to mine. Mine even outdoes yours a little bit (I have 4GB memory, have a faster HD and have overclocked to 3.1Ghz). That was pretty discouraging until I realized there must be some setting somewhere that is causing all the trouble for me. Well, there apparently was (still not sure yet exactly what), because I am now running with as stunning graphics as you are and I'm seeing 60+ FPS when there is no ground in sight! My frame rate is really good now most all the time. First time for that. Antialiasing is beautiful, etc., etc. I've never seen this game look this good or run this well! Thank you so much for investing so much time in helping me with this! What I did was very simple. I deleted every trace of OFF from my computer and reinstalled it. (This was really completely needless but at least I knew for sure what all the default settings were.) I took your settings that you posted and just blindly set mine to match (even when they didn't seem logical, for example, you have your "Multi-display" in vVidia setting set to "Multiple display" even though I only have one monitor and "Triple buffer" to Off even though the nVidia White Papers say that should be on if you are using Vertical Sync. I just blindly followed your lead. BTW, here are my settings that I now use: Disclaimer: As Madmatt points out, just because copying Rabu's setup worked for me is ABSOLUTELY no guarantee that it will work for you! It turns out that you have altered the default settings very little; very different from what's in the FAQ. The most interesting change from default that you made is the "Texture Max Dimension" in the "Texture Limits" table. The default is 1024, you set it to 0! I really raised my eyebrows over that one. Do you have some inside info there? Now's when things get really weird. As you said, you found that you needed to match the "CFS3.EXE" profile in NVIDIA Control Panel to the "Global" one in order to get AA to work right. Well, I found that if I have a CFS3.EXE profile at all, things won't work right. So, what I had to do is set all my other game profiles to not inherit from the global one at all and then use the global one as my OFF profile. This is really a hassle and especially in the future I'll always have to remember that the global settings are for OFF and I cannot change them in a "generic" sense. I really hate stuff like that but at least I'm getting this game to work now. Sheesh! Here are my nVidia settings: In any case, I am keeping a ruler near by so that if I feel the urge to get back into the settings and start changing things, I can give my fingers a good wack! No more experimenting for me! BTW, I found Madmatt's comments very enlightening and inline with my own experience. I have always found this graphics stuff very magical. When the "Voodoo" card first came out back in the nineties, I thought "What an appropriate name for a graphics card!" Thank you Matt for some great wisdom there. Ok, I'm going to start playing this game now! Thank you again Rabu for the help. I hope others (Sitting Duck comes to mind) will find this helpful as well. <S>! -mark

Hi Duck, Command line parameters... In most cases you won't need any. As you correctly point out, you can simply browse to the command and click it right into place. Now, there is one case where you will need command line parameters: If you decide to use my tricky little TrackIR priority program, it is written in Visual Basic which is not a compiled language. To run it, you will need the system program "cmd.exe" and the VBS script will be it's "command line parameter." Cool eh? Ah yes, AlacrityPC. Well, it is just the latest version of FSAutoStart. It turns out Ken Salter is alive and well and so is FSAutoStart in its new digs, only he now calls it AlacrityPC. If you like what this is doing for you, you will by all means want (at some point; no time like the present) to upgrade to AlacrityPC. Main reason, other than getting nice fast up-to-date bits, he has a discussion forum (like the one I'm typing into right now) and answers questions, etc. Major cool! Here is his web site where you can find everything, even a manual: http://alacritypc.kensalter.com/ Thanks for the Process Finder. I'll have to check that out. I'm embarrassed to tell you the really geeky way I find that sort of thing out. Sounds like a handy tool. Ok then. Good luck to you. Sounds like you're on your way to becoming an FSAutoStart geek too! Misery loves company.

Thank you for taking the time to do this Rabu! Your graphics look beautiful. That's most encouraging. You have proven (as I did with FSX) that CSAA is more than just marketing hype. You've also shown that I apparently have a serious problem with my configuration of OFF. Mine looks horrible and I don't get anywhere near the FRs you do. I was going to post a bunch of screenies here to show how my various settings look but I don't see a point in that after seeing yours. I obviously have issues. Here is my CSAA-SuperSampling screenshot just to contrast. For some reason, my graphics look a lot worse while sitting on the ground than airborne. Not sure what's up with that. I am going to remove all traces of my OFF and start from scratch. It must be that through all the trial-and-error, I have just screwed my copy up. Starting over seems to be the best thing to do. I am confident that I can get mine running well now that I understand things better. Out of the four games I play (Aces High, MS-FSX, LockOn, and OFF), OFF is the only one that I can't achieve beautiful graphics and very good FRs with. You have shown that I can get that with this game. That's good to know. Now, if it's not too much to ask, would you mind posting screenies of your: -Nvidia Control Panel settings for OFF (or I guess "global") -CFS3config tables -- -Change Display Options -Overrides -Texture Info -Texture Limits and Z Bias (if anything is not default) And anything else you think is appropriate? Also, would you report your system specs so I'll know how close our systems are? That's a lot to ask but I would appreciate it. kind regards -mark

What you're describing sets up MSAA. To get CSAA, you must not configure your game above 4xAA. Then you must set your video card AA mode to "Enhance Application" in order to enable CSAA. When I try to do this however, the picture is horrible; as if all AA is turned off. Here is a web site that describes CSAA and how to set it up: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html...TIxOCw3LCwxMTA= I wouldn't even care that much about this except that it made such a fantastic difference with MSFX I really wanted to use it with OFF.

Y'all are missing my point I'm afraid. I'm not having trouble getting AA to work. I can get MSAA and SSAA to work just fine. It is the CSAA (of which I describe the three step method of configuring in original post) that I can't get to work. The 8800 series supports three types of antialiasing: 1. Super Sampling (SSAA) - a brute-force method that produces the best smoothing and quality but hits your GC really hard (worst FRs of all). 2. Multi Sampling (MSAA) - very easy on FR but doesn't do that great a job in smoothing out the jaggies (not as good as SSAA anyway). 3. Coverage Sampling (CSAA) - a trick nVidia developed to get the good graphics quality of SSAA and the performance of MSAA (having your cake and eating it too). As I said, I was able to configure CSAA in Microsoft FX and it made a tremendous difference. My FRs increase probably by 10 and the picture quality is beautiful. I was just hoping I could do that same thing with OFF. I don't understand why I can't. This should work! gaw, In my first post, I was trying to say what you were saying about the CFS3 bug. It is mentioned in the FAQ. My only point in bringing it up was that I wish I had some confirmation that the game was indeed set for AA. You see, when you use SSAA and MSAA, the video card overrides any setting the game may set (assuming you configure it that way). Course you say you set the card to "application controlled" and get AA to work which answers my question. That confuses me even more as to why I can't get CSAA to work. Oh well, maybe someone who knows the graphics engine in this game will come forward with some words of wisdom. In the mean time, I guess I have no choice but to stick with MSAA.

Looks great Rickity! I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves this sort of thing. I get a lot of rolling eyes from my wife over things like this.

Yes, you should reboot after adjusting services. That way you know for sure that the services you stop will not try to come back. I recommend that once you get the game up and running (via FSAutoStart), hit the "windows" key which allows you to get to the desktop while the game is running. Right click on the task bar and bring up TaskManager. Check how many processes you see running and look through that list and make sure all the ones you stopped really did stop. The FSAutoStart command window will also display in red or yellow any processes that it has trouble with. You should work to not have any yellow or red lines show up there. If you are running XP, you are doing good if you get your process count down below 30. I'm getting about 26 and am very happy with that. Things like firewalls and antivirus programs are hard to stop (and you probably shouldn't stop them anyway) and I also have my UPS monitor, TrackIR processes which of course, I don't want to stop. Otherwise I could get my process count down to close to 20. That would be really sweet. The big processes you want to make sure and suspend with FSAutoStart are things like printers, auto-downloaders, java monitors, sidebars, etc. Those are programs you want running while you're "using the computer" but want to stop while you're doing important stuff (gaming.) :yes: You mention frame rates. FRs are a bit tricky. You may not necessarily see a lot of difference in FRs but get smoother performance anyway. Getting your FRs up noticeably is more a matter of tweaking your graphics settings and the graphics card settings. Cleaning up processes is definitely going to give you a smoother ride though so it's worth fooling with. You'll have fewer CTDs and stutters for sure. Congratulations on getting this far! Pretty soon you'll be ready to graduate to AlacrityPC.

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.

Hi Dutch, Yes, I tried Enditiall one time. It definitely gets the job done but it's pretty dated at this point. AlcrityPC is a lot more powerful and feature filled. One thing I really like about AlcrityPC is it shuts down the desktop completely which FSAutoStart nor Enditall (as I recall) did not do. I'd say give it a try and if you don't like it you can always delete it.

Great to hear Birddog! I've been playing with AlacrityPC for the last couple of hours. It's much better than FSAutoStart. I'm down to 26 running processes from 55! That's fantastic. Course, it takes a bit of trial-and-error to get down that much. One thing I noticed right away is how much faster it is than FSAutoStart in terms of killing off the process and then starting them back up. I've officially deleted FSAutoStart from my system now. AlacrityPC is definitely the way to go!