themightysrc

I average about 8%. PS - I am a crap shot as well as a crap pilot. However, I am slowly improving...

"themightyscr, go to the following link and read what Creaghorn did and all the relevent information for his new PC. It even talks abouth the prize of the final PC build. http://combatace.com...-please-advice/ Hope it helps morris" Hi Morris, Thanks for that! I'll give that a good delve. Cheers, Si ON EDIT - Bah! Link's knackered - can you repost it please? Ta!

Hi Olham, That's what I suspected. Ho hum. Well, I suppose I better start saving up the pennies and see if I can't get a good rig built for about £500. Any suggestions on how I can come in under that limit and still end up with a good system would be very gratefully accepted. Cheers, Si

Right then, finally home. Just run PC Wizard, and here are the scores on the doors for my rig running OFF (not well enough). Tell me where the weaknesses lie, and the best route forward for me, please. Don't spare my blushes - this PC was a bargain in 2006: Motherboard - ASUS P5VDC-MX Chipset - VIA P4M800 CE Processor - Intel Pentium D820 @ 2800 mhz Memory - 2048 (2x1024 DDR SDRAM) Video - ATI Radeon HD 2400 AGP Pro I'm running XP Pro SP2. Right chaps, my CFS3 graphics sliders are 4,2,2,4,1 and nearly all my other config settings are as recommended by OBD, but with shadows disabled. How can I get the above rig to give me more than about 15 fps on a good day, with various services turned off via Gamebooster? Should I consider another package for that as well? Cheers, and thanks for any replies, Si

When I get home later, I think I'll post up my system spec for everyone to laugh/marvel at. My current FPS is quite poor, and I suspect that some of the learned folk here might be able to help.

Hi Rabu, "Does a game have to stress gore and shove it in your face to be effective? Should we have blood splatter on the wind screen along with brains in order to have a better time with OFF?" Er, no and no. A good game succeeds because it is the theatre of the mind - a great phrase that I first heard when playing fantasy roleplaying games about 200 years ago. Consider: we talk about immersion, and yet what we are actually talking about is the experience that we derive from OFF (and other games) which we have ourselves enhanced because of our willingness to imbue the experience with a suspension of disbelief (takes some doing which wearing a Trackir antennae set, as my wife will readily attest), and to invest in our own imagination. Remember RB3D, prior to all the lovely mods that came later? Didn't it look s**t! And didn't we all love it, and play it to death? Why did we do so, particularly if we had no background in WWI or flight sims? Well, in my case, I realised quickly that the overall experience was very much akin to FRP or theatre, and was as all-encompassing as those activities. It's a positive feedback sort of experience - you gain enjoyment, you invest more imagination, time and effort; you're rewarded with a deeper experience which leads to you become more immersed in the activity to the point where it becomes quite real in many ways - that's the tuning that your mind undergoes. Alright, the above is just my pet theory (ie, cod psychology, despite a degree in the damn subject!), but I think it fits what most of us feel about OFF. Certainly, looking back on RB3D out of the box, there's no way one could become so enamoured of the game based upon the original graphics... Cheers, Si

From what I can gather, these campaigns are likely to be prescripted, particularly after reading a post from a player who was playing the HitR ROF campaign and had effectively given up, as he couldn't get past a particular mission. Although he bombed and shot everything that came his way, he still got a 'mission failed' message regardless, and thus couldn't progress (if that's the word) to the next mission. As he pointed out, it had become immensely frustrating after about half a dozen attempts at the same mission, since IRL, success was judged by survival (somewhat like our own dear OFF), rather than 'completing the level' as he scathingly put it. From all of that, I took it to mean that ROF campaigns are simply a set of scripted missions, and that players have no latitude to continue on to the next one regardless. All sounds very Groundhog Day to me.

Sound advice there BH - I can empathise with it. My own preferred option is to ensure that I've had a beer prior to take-off. Once you're approaching the target, and therefore can count your mortality in minutes (on one hand), bank sharply to port and wave your fist violently at the screen showing the automatic death trap below, bellowing these words as loudly as you can: "You seriously think I'm going to attack that you mad f***ers?!?!!! Get f***ed!!!!" Then attempt to fly home. Of course, if you're like me, you'll get shot down anyway. But it is cathartic, somehow. HTH, Si

Hi Pol, Seeing as you're here: can you tell us early doors whether P4 will be DVD only or downloadable, and also, will it include all previous work - ie, P3 plus HitR as standard? Cheers, Si

"It would seem to me at least that the slow low-tech rigs aren't troubled by jaggies" I would agree with this. I have a 4 year old rig, which I've updated to 2gb RAM and as modern/fast a video card as one can get for AGP, and jaggies never trouble me. Lousy FPS? Yes, yes, yes! But not jaggies.

"the media is utterly ignorant of the technical issues, is in the business of promoting disaster, "

"I could answer the question, but not without being a little political, and since this is not the place for such definitions. I'll only state facts Liberals are against all war That about does it, in the fact Department. The rest is merely conjecture on my part, which I know is not desired" Al, with due respect, your entire post is in the Opinion Department. End of.

TBH, I find many of the OFF Youtube vids far, far more interesting and entertaining than this Red Baron one. I'm afraid it looked like a 10 year old's idea of WWI.

I'm still marveling that a mere 14 weeks ago, my area was in the grip of the most severe Winter weather in some decades. Today, I've been out in the garden doing some much needed work, and my back and shoulders are now prickling, so strong was the sun. However, I'm not complaining. The weather in the UK can be downright odd at times, but now, with the temperature dropping to about 20 degrees, and the evening sunshine heralding a display of light and scenery that is augmented by a cooling late Spring breeze, I'm have one of those gestalt moments when you realise that it's all just perfect. No doubt I'll wake up in the morning with a reddened back and overheated arms, but just for the moment, I'll take this little vignette of semi rural calm and remember January and just how special that was too.

Hi Winston, Sorry I've not been around for some weeks - I was involved in the local kerfuffle known as the UK elections! Now that everything's calmed down again, I'm expecting to be back for the Saturday sessions. Cheers, Si

"So I've reinstalled the game in the correct order, and tbh I've got mixed feelings about this game." Hi Phants, As far as I know, if you reinstall, you have to go back into the graphics config and do your tweaking all over again - if you've already done that, fine, but it's still worth going back to check it's all as you expect it to be. And don't forget to note or take a screenshot of your graphics settings! Cheers, Si

"And now with Capture the Flag...it just doesn't get any more realistic does it?" I have to say, that does seem a bit s**t. How is that WWI?

Somebody will have to tell me what 'capture the flag' is in terms of WWI sims, but I have a horrible feeling that I'm really not going to like the answer.

I suspect so, Pol. Whilst moderation is necessary for all fora - mainly to stop them degenerating into a race to the bottom, content and IQ wise - I've frequently been surprised at the bashing that goes on on the SimHQ forum, and the lack of input from its mods if the bashing is directed at games other than TSTMNBN. Being partisan is one thing, but as mentioned above by others, supporting all the products one can is not a bad idea in such a niche area, and hence the blanking of other games by some members of that forum seems to me to be partisanship of the worst possible variety. As to the HitR business, well, that was simply rather childish and spiteful to my mind, and I'm sure it may well have left something of a bad taste in the mouths of gamers who subscribe there and play both games. Back to the main subject, I'm very much looking forward to P4 - I hope it will have a suitably inspiring name - and I will happily respect OBD's wishes to keep the whole thing under wraps until such time as it's ready to take flight, so to speak. I'm very much looking forward to filling in full page claim forms...(hint, hint!). Cheers, Si

"It was well written with come good acting and characterization, but didn't really have the production values to recreate air to air combat. It focussed more on the lives of the men, rather than combat scenes" Er, what? Paying more attention to the people who lived through the madness of war, rather than concentrating on the hardware? What were they thinking of?

Well, I had to sell a kidney and take up a life of professional bank robbery in order to afford OFF and a 2nd had Sidewinder, but you don't find me complaining oh no. Apropos the original question - no, no import tax.

I have to say, I've not really scratched the surface of P3, and I don't expect P4 much before 2011 (late), so I really don't mind if the chaps take it easier. I'd love to see P3 expanded with more 2 seaters and some earlier planes - probably all part and parcel of P4, I'm guessing - and I'd be delighted to see the Italian front and Mesopotamia get the OFF treatment, complete, no doubt, with new aircraft, scenery and more. But I'm patient. This isn't an arcade game where you finally get past the last level/monster and then - perhaps - try again on a harder setting. This is already hard, and it takes up far too much time in my life. My only real hassle is where I'm going to find enough spare cash to be able to buy a new PC to run P3 as it should be run, and in preparation for P4. Anybody want to buy a load of unplayed boardgames? Cheers, Si

Excellent! I know what I'm going to be doing this evening! Cheers mate!

See ya, Lou. This place will be the quieter for your leaving. Check back in sometime - you'll practically be the new guy by then, and you know what that means! All the best, Si

"Which is why I'm totally against 'Revisionest History' which is history rewritten to make the heroes villians" Heroes as villains? Villains as heroes? It all depends on your viewpoint. I'd guess that you could frame more or less any historical event (well, war, I suppose in this context) as being from a POV where you can make that call, but it's only an opinion at the end of the day, and only supportable by how convincingly you can argue it.