themightysrc

I think I broadly agree with Gous here. I actually do prefer the 'new' (AKA, broken) AI, and spent some of yesterday evening in a slowly evolving and growing dogfight - it started out with me and the chaps from RNAS 8 in our Tripes against about half a dozen or so DIIIs being flown in a rather cagey manner - perhaps understandable given what they were facing. Certainly in the past, said Albatroses would have been on us in a flash and fought to the death: in other words, the 1.32g default. Now however, they remained high and only when we made determined efforts to bring them to account by climbing to meet them did they start to come down on us (booming and zooming). Quite intelligent tactics really. Things hotted up (we could only despatch them very s-l-o-w-l-y) when about another 8 of the buggers turned up soon afterwards. I didn't detect much in the way of reticence from them! I lost count of the number of aircraft in the fight, and I'm certain that it grew further, and the fight spread over a wide area, dropping in height as it went from about 12000 feet down to tree top level by the coast (those rows of deckchairs on the beach near Neiuport are a very nice touch, BTW). End result: a long and satisfying - and to my mind, extremely historically accurate - encounter. Not the total annihilation of one side or the other; not about 20 burning wrecks dotted all over the landscape: a few shot down Huns, and one or two of my fellow flyers put down or wounded. And that's what WWI aerial fights were like, if the accounts I've read are up to snuff. My 2d.

" some can't hit a barn door at 10 paces (no names)" Aw, Pol, thank you for being so discrete! There are times when you really don't want to be name checked, and this is one of them. Oh s**te, that's given the game away...

Hi FB, Gous is Greek, and I suspect may be using 'can' rather than 'could', 'will' instead of 'would'. His English, is, though, much better than my Greek! Yasou Gous! Ti kanete?

Cheers Al - I'll check that out too.

Hi ZZ, "mightysrc.....this may sound trite, but have you defragged your machine lately? I'm getting even better frame rates than before I installed HITR because of doing this." I may well do that - I've actually just reformatted and reloaded XP plus other stuff, but I don't suppose it'll harm. <on edit> I should hasten to add that after the initial load/flight, frame rates shot up to about 18-20, which is liveable, and an improvement on the pre-Hitr average. Also, I should mention that I suspect that loading times for missions have dropped: more behind the scenes work? Cheers, Si

Hi UKW, I'm running a Radeon card that I recently purchased (top of the range for AGP - ie, not that powerful), and I think that the drivers are all up to date. But I'll check. Thanks for pointing out the obvious! Cheers, Si

Hi, This is really a minor league plea for help, as it doesn't affect the game per se. I recently reinstalled OFF due to a major XP screw up, and I was reminded that the intro movies that used to run so sweetly and look so good went West some time ago when I was still running pre-crash. What happens now, if I try to view a movie (eg, the credits) is that it does fire up but does so with an extremely lurid palette of greens, reds, blues, etc. You can still pick out the aircraft shapes, and the actual movement on screen is fine, but the LSD effects are quite overwhelming. I'm sure it's actually an XP thing, but I don't know how to fix it. Any ideas? thanks, Si

I've now had a chance to look around the new universe. At first, I was woefully disappointed by the drop in FPS - down to single figures - until I realised that I hadn't actually finished off reconfiguring my ATI stuff in CFS3 config. That done, and with a QC between the N28 and EV (well, I had to didn't I?) under my belt, I've actually noticed a better rendering of the aircraft on screen, as well as very impressive scenery below. I like the way that the day after a snowstorm, there are still vestiges of snow puddled around on the deck. It was probably always like this, but I've never noticed it before. Anyway - the flying. Yes, the wind noise is great. I find it immensely helpful as I don't even have to use my speedometer any more: I'm just listening to the wind noise and gauging my speed. Nice. The aircraft, as I said, seem to be rendered more smoothly than before, and aside from the odd judder, the whole thing's a lot more pleasing to the eye. I suspect that my ageing AGP video setup and generally antiquated spec of my PC is finally catching up on me, so I think New Year will see me getting down to the serious business of specing and building a new rig - I'll be back here for advice! There's some criticism elsewhere of the AI, and OBD have stated they're going to put it back to how it was, but I'm very happy with it as it is now. Fights are skirmishes rather than last stands all the time, which is how it was most of the time in WWI. Running away is now a realistic option on both sides. Having been followed back to my airfield (Tripehound out of ammo, therefore I ran for it) by a vengeful DIII, I can vouch for the fact that the AI is now more opportunistic, as it strafed me whilst I cowered in the cockpit. Perhaps OBD could formalise the new AI as a Workshop parameter - the choices being Cowardly, Just Right and Psychopathic? So, hat's off to Winder, Pol and the rest of the crew. This is a wonderful addition to what was already a tremendous game, and a steal at £14.60. Did I mention the terrific country dependent themes on the OFF desktop? Very nice - the Briddish one is particularly impressive. I think that's enough gushing for now.

"Hmm thats odd I'm sure it has a front mounted gun in BHAH..... I'll have to check! Another point is they never have an observer gun in BHAH... in reality they had one unless they where carrying a heavy bomb load... havent seen one firing backwards yet in BHAH" No Siggi, you're spot on: BH&H BE2s do have a front mounted gun, and nowt for the observer - that was actually my point!

"BE2 is the worst as it doesnt act anything like the real thing, they where designed to be aggresive in combat with a fixed front facing gun, not defensive... It should try to turn constantly to get you in it's sights not just sit there as if it has a rear gunner. If they didn't dogfight they would not have bothered with the weight of a gun at the front." Siggi, I'm probably wrong about this, but my impression was that the BE2(x) was just a bog standard RFC machine for all purposes, rather than a scout. AFAIK, they didn't mount a FF gun, and only had the rear facing one with the appalling field of fire added after it became obvious that crews needed something more effective than harsh language to fling at attackers. The BE12 was the laughable attempt to make it a single seat scout (and a lamentable failure), but the BE was renowned for its benign handling characteristics - stable, predictable and hard to crash: not exactly scout characteristics! <on edit> Please, gentle OBD readers: ditch that forward firing gun and put in the obtrusive backward firing gun - that would certainly be more historically correct, surely. And I promise not to call you Shirley again.

Right! This is the first new "effect" I'm going to check for in Hitr. I've lost count of the number of times (being a crap shot) that I've got to about 1/2 way through a patrol and had to turn back due to the amount of ammo I've used up. I will, naturally, sit on the ground for a respectable length of time prior to taking off again. About 8 seconds should do. Cheers, Si

"Maybe that they are not so aggressive anymore - but the fight and the outcome seems still far more realistic to me." Or maybe they all now fight within their capabilities with a due regard to their mortality? The only gripe I've ever had with the AI is that it is insanely aggressive, and dogfights - invariably to the death - develop at the drop of a hat (in the ring, natch). I've just finished rereading 'No Parachute' and it's quite apparent that that degree of derring do (aka, no sense of self-preservation) simply didn't happen. If it's finally been fixed, then I'll be very pleased. Downloaded Hitr at lunchtime. Now home. Make sickly wifey her snap, then I'm off to load it up and have a good look round our new - and I hope more realistic - universe. Cheers, Si

Hi Pacman, Thanks very much for that recommendation - I'll check out their website. I assume it's in the UK (ie, where I am)? Cheers, Si

Hi all, Well, I've rebuilt various bits back onto my newly reformatted and XP'ed up PC. It looks like years of hammer finally caused XP to expire in a messy and rather terminal fashion, but them's the breaks. I've lost all of the gubbins - WFP2, FE extra kites and campaigns and all that sort of stuff - that I've collected over the years, but it's simply God's way of telling me to stop fannying about with RB3D and FE for once and for all. So whilst I'm about rebuilding the machine to be more streamlined and realiable, I've decided that the dreadful, prone to failure, piss-poor connection strength, forever searching for my sodding router, WiFi connection is going to bite the dust. I've started looking at a replacement to this, and I note that for about £49 (and probably less after Xmas), PC World are knocking out various kits by Devolo that allow you to use your common or garden mains socket for data transmission, thereby obviating the need to wave one's PC around in a desperate attempt to get a signal. And, what's more, customer reviews are mostly very positive. Has anyone got down this route? What product did you buy? Would you recommend it? Cheers, Si

"Okay, then you only have the Bristol Scout, or the DH-2, which I'd prefer." hang slack a second - I thought that Pups came into service late 1916?

"that'd be great to be rearmed at a friendly field and carry on.." Lordy, my eyes must be tired. I read that as 'reamed' instead of 'rearmed'. That's a level of immersion that would make me shudder.

You're lucky, RD. My PC seems to have died big time, so I'm girdling my loins at the prospect of a full reinstall having reformatted. Oddly enough, the CFS3/OFF install is giving me no qualms, but I'm finding myself quite saddened by the impending loss of all the First Eagles add ons that I'll lose. Weird, insofar as I haven't really given it the time of day since I bought OFF. I guess I'm just a bit of a sucker for those very early war kites like the Martynside Scout. I'm also shuddering at the amount of stuff I'll have to download and reconfigure before I can get back into MP. Oh well.

We can fly Spits in 1917? Way cool!

However scary a shark that size must be (and I'm not going looking for it), it's more relevant to point out that sharks are getting hunted down to extinction. At which point, no more scary stories - go and check it out in a museum. We should actually be doing an awful lot to protect sharks and their habitats, so I always get a bit pissed off when I see stories like this that promote the maneater thing. Still, when they're gone we can move onto man eating slugs.

Hi Mac, Don't you be waiting on me - the system restore is only about 50% there after at least an hour. I'll have to do this some other time. Sorry. I'm buggered if I can figure out why my PC's doing this. I added a 512mb Radeon ATI vid card about 3-4 months back, but didn't have any problems after fitting, but now I've also noticed the ATI control panel popping up occasionally and telling me there's been a problem. Do I need a more butch power pack I wonder? Shoudl I simply sack the damn thing off and start saving for a new rig? Bah!

This is f***ing Sod's Law... My PC has sprung a major error on me (without have the courtesy to tell me where/when/what it is) so I'm doing what I hope is a quick system restore from an image from early November. My apologies - I'm hoping I'll be with you on TS in short order. Si

Hi RD, OK - I should be on TS in about 10 mins (shovels wifey out of door toot sweet), so we can catch up in a bit. Cheers, Si

IP addresses needed Mac - yours and Teamspeak's! It's a few weeks since I've done any MP, so my settings will be woefully out of date. Cheers, Si

Hi kan, OFF is primarily a single player game and is enjoyed at its best as a full campaign game - 1915 to 1918 - although it'd be a miracle if you managed to have a pilot survive that long. Once you have the disk, the game's yours in perpetuity, even if all of the OBD team were to perish in a freak knitting accident. There is MP, if you ever get curious enough, but it's not really a selling point for OFF, although I can attest that it's quite fun/deadly. Welcome to the ranks!

Hi Red-Dog, Well, I see no reason not to join you! Please let me know the following: The Teamspeak server IP and port, and Your IP address. Come on all you UK/mainland Europe OFFers! This is the most fun you can have of a Monday evening whilst remaining in your trousers!