Schnitzel von Krumm

I do the same thing with TaskInfo which both allows me to use a nifty gui to set the process priority and the core affinity for various processes and remember them each time they're started. Setting core affinity stops OFF from switching form one core to the next. The switch time, handing off from one core to another, can cause latency. You wouldn't notice it normally, but in an environment like a flight sim where normal human reaction time is speeded up into milliseconds, it's noticeable. I've put CFS.exe on one core, the OFF manager on another, and put told other programs to stay on the other two and mind their own business. Seems to have helped a noticeable amount in avoiding the little stutters. It's actually better under Win7 than Vista. It's easier to give a process complete ownership over a core without letting other things barge in as well. At any rate, the biggest difference between what I'm doing and what you're doing is that I've paid money (for TaskInfo) to do what you clever buggers are doing for free. :) What can I say, I'm lazy (when I'm using Windows anyway). Actually TaskInfo is a very useful program for taming the wilder bits of Windows, and I've been using it for many years. Seems to me there are probably free alternatives out there though. I spend a fair amount of time in Linux (would be all the time were it not for OFF) and similar controls are all there for free as a given. No OFF though. Pardon my tangent. :)

I just picked up FE2. What the heck. For $20 how can you go wrong. And let's face it, every WWI sim that survives is good for the genre. When you support one, you support them all, regardless of which is your favourite.

They're called "ape hangers" aren't they? Born to be wild, baby!

I found this thread interesting, even though I've yet to try the DIIIa in OFF. Over in that "other WWI flying sim", the DIIIa is about the only plane I can reliably fly a complete mission in without spinning into the ground.

Yeah, it gave me the same bad habits. In later more realistic games, it's really taken me a while to unlearn the habit of excessively violent manoeuvres. As a result, I tend to rip the wings off of a lot of planes. More recently, I also spent a fair bit of time playing Red Baron Arcade with my four year old last year. While it is a fun game for what it is, and it is quite possible for a four year old to fly it, prolonged exposure to it does not do wonders for one's finesse on the joystick. Landing hasn't been a problem for me in RoF yet. I hope one day to try it though.

They're very serialized and make a lot more sense if you read them in order. It's worth collecting them all, if you can find them. I have a spare copy of volume six you can have. If you PM me an address I can send it to, I'll throw it in the mail for you. I've owned the complete series three times and given them away to friends every time. Inevitably, a few years later I end up wanting to read them again and have to start hunting them down all over again. It gets a little harder every time, since some of them were first published in the 60s. I'm going to hang onto my set this time, because some of them are getting kind of hard to find. You can have my spare "This One's on Me" though if you want it. There's a site HERE for the small publisher that's taken up the cause of preserving Donald Jack's legacy. Most of the books have been reissued thanks to them. Hopefully they'll get going on Vol. 1, because according to their link to Amazon, used copies are currently going for $998.

Well, I reinstalled RoF last night and then bought their combo sale pack of the Camel and the DR.1. I tried the DR.1 for a while, and it was actually kind of fun. I think I ended every single mission nose into the ground, but I think with time I might actually be able to learn to fly it. It's tricky, though, that's for sure. The flight models in RoF definitely make for harder flying than in OFF. I'm certainly not convinced, though, that it's because they're more accurate, especially given the random nature of occurrences over there. There are RoF fans, I'm sure who will tell me my troubles are just because I'm a lousy pilot. That makes me really mad, because I have no come back. It's true. I suck. In the nostalgia vein, I started with Red Baron on a 286, but my biggest obsession was probably Wings of Glory. I still have the original CD and aircraft recognition poster from that game. Maybe I'll try later to see if I can get it to run in a DOS emulator. What really got me going on WWI aviation was reading The Bandy Papers, which is sort of like a Canadian Biggles, only much better written. Not long ago I convinced my wife to read them, and she went straight through the whole series. As well as great stories, they're also hilarious and full of really clever puns, which my wife appreciates. Donald Jack is the author. Not sure if many people outside of Canada have heard of the series, which is a shame. EDIT: Just noticed who it was who wrote the post above me. Heh.

I love First Eagles! I may reinstall that later tonight. That train busting co-op mission in RoF also sounds like it might be fun too. It might be a busy night. The important thing to remember is that loving one WWI flight sim does not preclude one from loving the others as well. They're not wives. We can have more than one and appreciate the good qualities of each. We also don't need to pick sides, declare the other side evil, and defend our side to the death. This may be an odd thing to say on a forum about a game devoted to simulating war, but "Peace to all".

It's an OCZ Vertex 60 gig model. To be honest, I can't say as there have been huge improvements. To be fair, I previously had the game loaded on a WD Velociraptor, which is fairly fast for a mechanical drive. Before, every now and then, I'd see a little stutter when a new chunk of terrain loaded, or possibly if some other part of Windows wanted to access the harddrive. That's gone now, as far as I can tell. Load times are a bit faster, but because the game still has to access the CFS3 CD when you first start, there isn't as big of a change as I would have hoped. I was hoping for "Contact, Clear" and straight to the field, but sadly there's still a wait because of the CD. Still, once flying, the game is perfectly smooth for me now, so I can't complain. Mostly, I bought the drive for something to play with, and because it was on sale at a decent discount before Christmas. My OFF was already running nice and smooth (Q9550, GTX285, 8GB RAM on Win7 64). The SSD helped by getting rid of the few remaining little random stutters I was getting, but it certainly wasn't a revolutionary change. Ironically "that other WWI flight sim" would probably benefit from it more, because its load times are very long, even if you just want to replay a mission that's just ended because you've spun into the ground or the wings fell off your Dolphin again. If I end up reinstalling it, I'll see if there's room on the SSD. Anyway, I wouldn't go rushing out to buy an SSD expecting big performance boosts. If you're into computer hardware, though, they've come down enough in price that they're worth getting just to play around with. Win7 is pretty much mandatory, though, for the TRIM support to keep the drives' performance up. Otherwise they slow down with time.

I bought RoF and tried it for a while. I've even bought most of the planes. I can't say I regret the purchases, because I think supporting anything that increases interest in WWI flight sims is a good thing. While I support it in prinicple, though, I can't say as I've enjoyed it much in reality. I didn't reinstall RoF when I switched from Vista to Win7 a month or so ago. OFF, on the other hand, has a snazzy new SSD all to itself. :) I had, and continue to have, high hopes for RoF, and I appreciate what its developers are trying to do, but at its current level, I don't find it an enjoyable experience. I bought it thinking it was going to be a good multiplayer game, which is what they were saying before it was released. Well, it turns out the MP is lousy, with no dogfight servers. The single player is also severely limited. Back when RoF was nearing release, my hope was that I'd have OFF for campaign mode, and RoF for quick online dogfighting against other humans. So far, the online aspect of RoF has greatly disappointed me. That leaves as its assets some fairly impressive graphics, assuming your machine can run it okay. I've had great framerates right from the start, and other than the early issues with shimmer, haven't experienced the problems with stuttering and poor performance that some people report. There's also the highly touted flight modelling. Supposedly, according to some real life pilots who've posted on various fora, ROF is the closest to real life feeling of flying they've had from a flight sim. Fair enough. I'll have to take their word for it. I'm not a pilot. Perhaps that's why I could never finish a mission without spinning into the ground. You don't have to be a pilot to see the problems with the mismatch between the damage model and the flight model, though. Just watch for AI planes flying around with some or both of their wings missing. Then there was the Dolphin, which as released, shed its wings if you looked at it the wrong way. It would also frequently go into an unrecoverable spin for absolutely no reason. Supposedly they've fixed that. Maybe one day I'll reinstall the game and see. The AI pilots have no trouble flinging their planes all over the sky, so it must be possible. I also wonder about the developers' sense of priorities. Longstanding issues which would seem easy to address are ignored, while things like river barges are added. Witness the flap in the forums about windsocks not working. How can you have supposedly super accurate flight modelling for the "real pilots" and dismiss the need to be able to gauge the wind? One of the things that bothers me most is the ignorance or disregard of history on the part of the developers. This ranges from the performance of planes are inaccurate relative to each other, to little things like spelling the names of well known aces, including von Richtofen and Voss. To be fair, maybe that's a translation thing. I come at this, though, as a WWI history buff, rather than as a pilot, so I'd like there to be at least some reasonable effort made on the historical side. There's been a lot of criticism levelled at RoF, most of it probably deserved. And there's been a lot of rabid fanboyism from its clutch of supporters. What there hasn't been, IMO, is deserved praise for the game. There are some elements in it that are truly impressive, and the developers are continuing to work on it. Most of all, it's helped to raise awareness of and interest in WWI flying games/sims. In the end, that can't help but be good for the genre. Hopefully those disenchanted by RoF will decide to come over and have a look at OFF, and they'll like what they see. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to follow RoF on the forums. I may also buy one of their combo plane packs in the next few days to be supportive and to hopefully save a few bucks, looking ahead to when there are dogfight servers and the major issues in the game have been fixed. In the meantime, I'll stick with OFF. :)

I have it running on Win7 64 without issues. It's nice and snappy too, since I gave it an OCZ Vertex SSD as a home, all to itself.

While I would never condone such actions, what with them being irresponsible, unsafe, etc. I can't help but be entertained by them. The following is video of some guy, apparently somewhere in the southern U.S., buzzing his children and a group of their friends with an RC plane, while the kids shoot at the plane with a variety of fireworks. The video is shot from an onboard camera. There are some fairly close calls with the fireworks, especially from the one kid with the roman candles. I have to give the guy credit for being a decent pilot, both giving the kids opportunities at the plane, flying close enough to scatter them, and as far as I know, not maiming or killing anyone or destroying his plane in the process.

I just finished Aces Falling a few days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of accounts in the pilots' own words, well linked together in context. Peter Hart is one of those rare writers who can inform you and entertain you at the same time.

Yeah, I think someone's been coaching him.

Maybe it's like the Flying Dutchman, doomed never to return home, appearing unexpectedly. Perhaps it's the train car in which the Allies humiliated the Germans with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles - the very same car in which Hitler forced the French to sign their own humiliating surrender. Yeah, I been drinkin'.