Schnitzel von Krumm

There's something I've noticed since the super patch, and I'm wondering if it's real or just my imagination. There were times before, quite regularly I'm embarassed to admit, when I managed to get my Tripe flying backwards. I frequently fly QCs against three or four DIIIs or DVas, so there's sometimes some fairly desperate manoeuvring going on. Sometimes, I notice that not only have I stalled, but I'm actually going backwards, with exhaust smoke pluming out in front of me. I usually see that as a bad sign, although you have to admit, the Huns probably never see that coming. Since the super patch, this problem has gone away. So, either something in the flight model was changed, or my wife was right and I really did need to cut back on my drinking.

No offense to all of you in the Camels and SE5as, but I don't understand why everyone's favourite plane isn't the Sopwith Triplane. It's just so truly, utterly, nifty. Historically, I can understand why it only flew for a limited time, with its maintenance issues and the minor quibble of a wing or two coming off now and then, but still . . . Its lines are clean, and despite the three wings, it has a simple elegance to its appearance. Everything that is there is there for an obvious reason. When you look at it, there's nothing that makes you say "Why did they do that?" I would argue that it was the best looking plane of the war. I don't think a better looking war plane came along until the Mosquito in WWII. On the technical side it was manoeuvrable, climbed well, and had a great field of view. It was also original in its time, unlike the DR1, which everyone seems to gush over even though it was really just a poor man's Tripe. :yes: Sure, the Sopwith only had one gun, as compared to the DR1's duallies, but geez, it's still a machine gun. Surely you can get by with one. One possible reason I like the Tripe so much is that, as a Canadian, I've always been an admirer of Raymond Collishaw and the Black Flight. There were lots of good Canadian pilots, but the thing about Collishaw is that, unlike some alliteratively named pilots I could mention, his claimed victories were probably understated rather than overstated. He had, for example, the habit of taking up new pilots, shooting up an enemy plane, then allowing the new guy to put in the last few shots to claim his first victory. Seems a decent sort of chap to me. On the other hand, maybe I like the Tripe because its peculiarities mesh well with all of my bad piloting habits. I seem to do better in it in OFF than in any other plane, except for possibly the F2B. The AI gunner in the back of the Biff makes me feel like I'm cheating, though. Heh. Honestly, I don't understand why the Tripe doesn't get more love, especially considering the hype that surrounds the DR1. Personally, I blame Snoopy.

It's okay. It's not like you insulted Gordie Howe or something. It's odd the reaction that criticizing Bishop will get you in this country. There is usually a lot of anger because he's a national hero, but typically those who angriest and loudest are the ones who are least likely to know anything about Bishop, other pilots like Collishaw, or the war in general. But I suppose that's the usual pattern. It's similarly unwise to enter a Royal Canadian Legion Hall and suggest that Roy Brown didn't really shoot down von Richtofen. Like the population at large, most of them will likely think Roy Clark was that fella that sang with Buck Owens on Hee Haw, or that Snoopy shot down the Red Baron in that cartoon, but one of two of the brighter ones might just take a swing at you. For my safety, I stay away from the Billy Bishop debate. It's easy for me, anyway, because I've always liked Collishaw better as a historical persona in the same way that I prefer the unassuming Guynemer to Rene Fonck. There was a time in my life, though, when I would have looked at you funny if you told me I would one day come to hold opinions and express preference for one WWI pilot over another. Live and learn.

He's that popcorn guy, isn't he?

Thanks CJ. I'd seen that before, but had forgotten how good it was. The Tripe really was a handsome bird, I think. I like the functional elegance of it. It reminds me a bit of a Triumph TR4 or TR6. Again, comparing the two triplanes, I like the look of the DR1, but too me it's just a little too pointy in places. It's also got that half cowling that makes it look a bit buck-toothed in front. Again, I'm not running the DR1 down because it's one of my favourite planes. I just prefer the Tripe. I don't know if it was the just the sound quality in that video, but that motor sounded a bit shakey, and that was under ideal circumstances. It must have taken nerves of steel to fly a plane from that era into battle, knowing that the engine might give out at any time, or the wings might fall off if you got too frisky. Then there's the little matter of people shooting at you with machine guns while you're protected by nothing more than a layer of canvas. And when you crashed, it wasn't to the desktop. Watching videos really brings home the fragility of those old planes in a way that's a lot more real than just reading about it or playing a simulation.

Olham, I was just kidding with that "poor man's Tripe" jab. I really didn't mean to run down the DR1 so much. It's actually right up there in my list of favourite planes and it's my first choice when I fly on the German side. And I agree with you that they are two very different planes. The DR1 is much twitchier, and more responsive. If one takes the time to learn to control it, it's a fantastic plane. I just like the Tripe better. It's much kinder about compensating for my short-comings. It's also better looking. It just strikes me as strange how well-known, almost iconic, the DR1 is, particularly in popular culture, while the Sopwith Triplane is virtually unknown outside the circles of history buffs and flight simmers. You'd think that if people were focussing on the novelty of the three wings, the Tripe would get some recognition too. Perhaps it's about the association of the DR1 with von Richtofen, even though he only flew it for a short while. Perhaps it's because he died in one. Once again, I blame Snoopy. In a similar vein, it's shocking how few Canadians even know who Raymond Collishaw was. Some people know Billy Bishop (but not nearly as many who would know "the Red Baron") and some remember Roy Brown, mainly because of his tenuous connection to von Richtofen. A handful might be able to name Billy Barker as a Canadian ace, but very few would know Collishaw. And poor Donald MacLaren, who had 54 victories in the Camel, more than any other pilot, is even more forgotten. As a comparison, do many Germans today know Ernst Udet? Or does it begin and end with von Richtofen?

Yeah, I've tried the two-gun version. I just miss twice as much. And sure, the DVII is a nice plane, but to me comparing it with the Tripe is like comparing a modern corvette and a vintage 911. One is more advanced and has nicer seats, but the other is just a lot more fun.

Actually, I was just thinking of changing the control assigments in the joystick config so that instead of turning the plane by rudder, the twist control would pan the view left and right. It might be more hassle than it's worth, though, so I was wondering if anybody had tried it, and what their opinion was. I think you're right about TrackIR, though. I'll likely order that soon.

Thanks for the link Parky. It saved me some searching to get the previous version of the drivers. I have a GTX 285 and I'm having also sorts of quality issues with the new drivers. I also get random resolution changes, usually down to 1024x768 from 1920x1200, at just about any time the screen switches from the desktop to something full-screen, like a game or the screensaver, etc. It really does pay to leave well enough alone. The old drivers were fine, but then I heard about an extra 10 frames a second and thought "Why not?". Now I know why not.

Just found out there's actually a sticky for this.

I had some similar problems when I first tried to install the game on Vista. I tried everything, and I do mean everything, many times over, in every possible combinations, but it just wouldn't run. Polovski was very helpful, putting up with my rage and sorrow, staying up to the wee hours of the night trying to help me. I really do owe him a case of the finest ale for his efforts. Sadly, we weren't able to figure out what the issue was. I do know that it wasn't the game, though. In the end, I did what I should have done in the first place; I reinstalled Windows. I took the opportunity to swich from Vista 32-bit to 64-bit. The game ran perfectly on the first install and has ever since. Somewhere in the grossly over-complicated mess that is Vista, something was wrong. I have no idea what. I'm not new to computers by a long shot, and I did a lot of looking before I decided to reinstall, but I never did figure out what the problem was. I do know one thing, though. It was all Microsoft's fault.

This is a bit of a tangent, but has anyone with pedals ever converted the twist function of the stick from rudder control to a left/right head turn view function? That might make it useful again, I mean for those of us who don't (yet) have TrackIR.

I had similar stuttering issues with a quad core and fixed it by setting the CPU affinity for CFS3.exe to a single core and adjusting the priority to high. There are a number of utilities out there to do this on a permanent basis so you won't have to alt-tab to Task Manager every time. I used TaskInfo because I already have a registered copy. It's a great utility for a controlling and killing processes in Windows. I've been using it for many years. It's here if anyone is interested. There are numerous similar utilities out there you can find with a quick search.

It took 11 days for my copy to arrive. I'm in southern Ontario.

How big were P1 and P2 relative to P3?

I find I have to agree. And I'm really not good at waiting. Patience is not one of my virtues. I think the biggest reason that there's no download is sheer size. The DVD is crammed full, and when you get the game you'll see why. It expands to over 15 gigs on your harddrive. It would have been nice to get it quicker, but it was worth the wait.

Not sure if this is the same situation that you're having, but now and again when I start the game, I get sound as far as the "Contact . . Clear" then the game goes silent once things actually start up. I accidentally learned that if I alt-tab a time or two on the keyboard, it clears the problem. I have no idea why. I'm guessing it's a Vista thing. I also have a USB sound system (a good quality DAC with headphone amp for music) as well as the onboard sound on my motherboard for everything else, so there could be some conflict there. Who knows. Good luck.

I'm still loving this plane. Earlier today, I flew a couple of QCs, with three D.V.s against little old me in a F2B. The first time out, the D.V.s flew away and I actually had to chase them down. Maybe the AI has some common sense with the 1.3 patch. After a few minutes, they turned on me, with one going high and the other two coming straight on. As they closed in, I turned and banked to let the gunner have a go, because he's a better shot than I am. After a very tense 10 minute fight, I'd got one with the forward gun, the gunner got one, and the other one wet himself and flew into the ground as we chased after him. The second time out (starting at 5,000 feet), the three of them came straight at us immediately, doing some damage before I could get us out of the way. In the end, I got one, the gunner got one, and the other was taken out by ground fire. I also flew a couple of turns as the gunner. It was fun, but the AI pilot flew us into the ground in the first one, and the Albatrosses got us the second time, but not before I got really nauseous being flung all over the place. I think I'll either have to stick to the front seat or load up on motion sickness pills. I found myself wondering if the F2B was really that agile, or if perhaps the flight model in OFF was unrealistic. From everything I've read, though, it really was that good. As fair warning, in the event that I ever get brave enough to join you fellows in a multiplayer game, I'll be bringing my Biff.

The tips were (and are) a great help. As a fellow Canadian, I can also recommend you kill time reading The Bandy Papers, by Donald Jack, if you haven't already. It's an hilarious series about a Canadian WWI pilot.

I just tried a few QCs in an F2b after reading this thread, and it was great fun! The game's implementation of the plane is amazing. It feels solid, but still very nimble. It's also really satisfying to hear a gun behind you and know that the bullets are going in an outward direction. I may fly this one for awhile. I'm glad I read this thread. :yes:

Got mine in southern Ontario in 10 days.

Just a quick addendum for those coming to this thread in the future. If you're using Vista, you'll need to give yourself permission to be able to edit that file. Nothing is simple in Vista.

I'd heard that about the dual GPU cards, but not about the 285, which is a single chip card. Thanks, I'll have a look. Maybe there's a workaround.

Yeah, about the only benefit you'd see in CFS3 from a dual or quad core is that any unrelated background processes, like anti-virus, other utilities, or the operating system itself, could be handled by the other cores, theoretically leaving one core to handle nothing but the game. In practice, it gets a bit confused, though, because things are constantly being switched around between the cores. This is by design within the sphere of "symetric multi-processing" and "pre-emptive multi-tasking" on a multi-core machine. The load is supposed to be spread out among cores or individual processors. Spreading the load, though, is the job of the operating system, and that's where things can fall apart. You can set affinity for a program to stay on one core or processor, but I don't know of a way to prevent other processes from also being loaded onto that core as well. So setting a process (like cfs3.exe) to run exclusively on a given core still doesn't guarantee that other processes won't also be run on the same core. If the operating system is doing things right, it should send things to less heavily loaded cores, but having spent a little time watching the action in Vista,that isn't always the case. I started out as a defender of Vista, but after a year and a half I'm pretty sick of it. It really does have a lot of deficiencies in some very basic areas. But I digress. As for multi-threading in games in general, I believe that Microsoft Flight Simulator X has multi-threading. Multi-threading is starting to show up in a few games, what with all the multi-core processors out there these days. Games are not inherently parallel, though, so I understand it's very difficult to find ways to split jobs between cores. In other words, there aren't many things that can be done at the same time because there are a lot of things that depend on something else being done first, if that makes sense. I got the quad core because I do a lot of Photoshop work. Photoshop has a lot of multi-threaded functions. The more I get back into games, though, the more I think a faster dual core would be better. With a Q6600 running at 3.0 Ghz, I'm not doing too badly though.

I honestly have no idea. Going by what I've read, though, the consensus seems to be leave triple buffering off (I don't think it works with DirectX anyway) and don't move the pre-rendering more than one notch. In other words, at two or three, with the exception being if you're in Vista and are playing a DirectX 10 game. Some people say they get less mouse lag with this set to one, but those are people playing first person shooters. In OFF, the movements tend to be a bit more subtle, plus I would imagine there would have been some inherent lag in the response of these old planes, depending on speed and the control surfaces of the individual plane. Personally, I'd accept a little lag to get rid of the stutter. At this time, I'd like to back away slowly from my first post, because I'm not sure I can honestly say this setting got rid of the stutter. It was gone, but now it's back. Sigh. On a happy note, it seems to disappear after a minute or less. Maybe it's the textures loading? Oddly it seems to make no difference what the other detail settings are. If turn off AA and AF and pull the sliders back, it's still there. Maybe I'll try turning all the background stuff off in Vista. You'd think with a quad core I'd be fine for those things, but this is Vista we're talking about. The OS is probably trying to cram all the processes on one core. I'll keep playing around and post my experiences. If other people could do likewise, that would be great. In the meantime, if you Google for "maximum pre-rendered frames" you'll get plenty of arguments on every side of this issue. I'm really not sure what to think any more. I'm used to that feeling though. I will stand by the part of my earlier post where I said I was a crappy pilot. That will never change. There are no upgrades coming for my brain and hands any time soon.