Herr Prop-Wasche

If the mission is ground or airstrip attack, I think the game automatically makes you flight leader because the AI is incapable of performing these missions correctly.

What boxes are you ticking in the Graphics Config overrides section? I have had some success by checking the following: disable terrain lighting, disable scenery lighting, and disable terrain texture ring blend. You might also try checking the boxes for disable water reflection, disable water animation, and disable prop discs. Or, just disable everything and then gradually uncheck the boxes until your system slows down too much again.

I have a dual AMD 4200+ core, but I haven't had to run OFF with my CPU affinity checked to only use one processor. Church, have you gone into the Nvidea control panel to make changes to your video overrides to work with OFF? If not, go to the Nvidea control panel, select "Manage 3D Settings," click the tab to show "Program Settings," click the Add button, and browse to find the offmanager.exe in your OFF folder. Select it, and you will then be able to tweak the Anti-aliasing, texture filtering, vertical sync, etc. options for your Nvidea card. For specific settings, post back here and someone will answer poste haste!

Instead of break, sounds like what is really going on is "Let's break out of here!" You know, as in SCRAM!

Ruh roh. I hope this doesn't turn into another one of those flame-wars that used to erupt on the RB3d Delphi forum about the correct FM for the DR I!

End as many running processes as you can before starting OFF, using a program like EndItAll2 or AlacrityPC. Some users with ATI cards have had to do a fair amount of tweaking to get the game running on their systems. I have a Nvidea card, so can't help you much with that, but there are other users and some threads that may help you with your graphics card. Be sure to click on the graphics config button in Workshop and set the options as recommended for slower systems.

Yeah, between tweaking, posting, and real-life, I barely have any time for flying!

Welcome, Junnu! You don't happen to know someone named Juri Melgin, from near Helsinki? LOL! He was a high school foreign exchange student I knew briefly here in the USA. It was a long time ago, unfortunately.

I think you have to get deflection shots in order to saw off the wings of these aircraft. If you are shooting from dead astern and are on the same plane as the other aircraft, most of your bullets will miss the very thin wings on these WWI aircraft. When viewed from astern, I imagine the damage box for the wings looks very thin, while looking from above, probably is very fat.

Thanks, Widowmaker! Incidentally, while poking around the .xdp files, I have noticed a few, very minor, errors (mainly text errors that have no effect on the DM). I communicated with OBD about this, and in their usual fashion, they quickly thanked and assured me that they would make any required fixes available in the next patch. Great service! Of course, you can make these changes yourself, but the process is a bit tedious. You really get an appreciation for the super hard work of the OBD team when you start to fiddle around with some of these files.

(Looks around, sees no horses). No, I don't have any information from the horse's mouth. Like you, I am working solely on an assumption, and you know what happens when we assume! However, I have based my assumptions based on a loose analysis of the different damage models in the 1.26 and 1.28a patches (I had saved a copy of the 1.26 aircraft folder before I applied the 1.28a patch). Somewhere in another thread (might be the DM thread on the general forum), I posted my observations about the two patches. In the 1.26 patch, I noticed the points values for the wings were roughly 25% of the original DM. In my experience, wings easily broke off after only a little bit of damage with the 1.26 patch. After the 1.28a patch, and using the "hardcore" DM, the point values for the wings was upped to 50% of the original DM. In turn, the wings seem to be more sturdy with the hardcore model. So, I assume that increasing the points values in the damagebox section results in stronger components. But, I could be wrong! OTOH, I think you are right about the Threshold section. Lowering the Threshold levels should result in seeing earlier damage effects. Some damage, like bullet holes, probably doesn't have much of an effect, unless it's a hit to a fuel tank or the pilot. Others, like the sound of wing fabric ripping, probably does have an effect on the flight model of the various aircraft. Based upon your work and mine, I went ahead and made some minor changes to the .xdp files of the aircraft QC folders to see what happens. I'll report back later after I've had a chance to test it out. At this point, I'm not going to delete the .bdp files, as you suggested. If nothing happens, I'll go ahead and do that, too. I'm glad there is at least one other testing geek around here!

Okay, here is a little bit on altering the damageboxes in the .xdp files of the various aircraft. If you do decide to alter this file, make sure to create a backup first! First, please note that the various parts of the planes are each assigned to a particular damage box. So, the engine, pilot, wings, oil reservoir, elevators, etc. are all assigned to a "Parent" damage box. In turn, several damage boxes are nested inside of larger damage boxes. The "main" damage box appears to be the "damagebox_fuselage." All other damage boxes are "children" of this main damage box. The different pieces of each aircraft are, in turn, "mapped" to a specific "child" damage box. Notice that each piece or component of the aircraft has two variables. One is for "Probabality" and the other is for "Points." Most damage boxes have only one component. In this case, the Probability value is always 100, so, if you hit the associated damage box, you will always hit the component inside the damage box. A few damage boxes have two components (I can't recall seeing any more than two components per damage box, although you could probably have more than two if you wanted). In this case, the Probability value is divided between the two components. For instance, the damagebox_fuselage1 box has two components: the pilot and the center_fuel_tank. The percentage chance of hitting the pilot, if you hit the fuselage1 damage box, is 40%, while the chance of hitting the center_fuel_tank is 60%. If you wanted, you could tweak these values to give a better (or worse) chance of hitting the fuel tank as opposed to the pilot. The Points variable, of course, represents the maximum "hit points" that each component has before it breaks (or dies, in the case of the pilot). So, if you want to strengthen a component, simply increase the hit points. To weaken a component, decrease the hit points. For example, to strengthen the wings on your Fokker Eindecker, simply change the points in the right_wing and left_wing from 70 to whatever value you feel is appropriate. Please note that files other than the .xdp file effect other flight characteristics of the aircraft. For instance, changing the .xdp file should not effect the likelihood of your wing shedding in a dive. The .xdp files only effect damage caused by bullets and FlaK, I believe. Finally, note again that changing the .xdp file may cause an "aircraft mismatch" if you play MP, so you may want to maintain two aircraft folders. Keep an unaltered aircraft folder for MP, and use the altered folder for single-player use. You will either have to use a file-switching program like JSGME (available from the subsim.com forum), or maintain two copies of your aircraft folder (one named aircraft and the other named aircraftSP or something similar) in your OFF program folder. Of course, before using your aircraftSP folder, you would first have to rename the original aircraft folder to something else and then delete "SP" from the end of your altered folder so that the game will use it (not as complicated as it sounds, but a pain to do everytime). Good luck and happy flying!

Nice!

No offense taken, Fortiesboy. I was just thinking out loud and trying to make sure you and I had not missed anything. However, now I have to say that I am completely flummoxed about why your DM seems to be messed up. I also have the 2 disk CD (CFS CD has to be in the disc drive) and I have not experienced the problems you are seeing. Although I am now using the hard core DM, when I was using the normal DM I saw wings fly off, engine fires, spins, etc. Maybe you are hitting the engine instead of the wings? I am a lousy shot, so my bullets go everywhere. Try aiming exclusively at the wings to see what happens.

Steve58, Go to C:\OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\default, open the cfs3.xml file with a text editor, and change the MaxFPS="0" to a value around 40 or maybe 50. Depending on your rig, this will limit your FPS to the value you select, but should smooth out the frame rates. If OFF seems slow after this, try lowering the MaxFPS value a little.

Oh, I should probably note that if you make any changes to these files and you want to fly multiplayer, you might get an "aircraft mismatch" error. It depends on which "version" of each aircraft you make changes to and the version that multiplayer uses. I believe that multiplayer uses either the QC, AC, SQ, or Sqd version of each aircraft in the aircraft folder, but I do not know which, currently.

Fortiesboy describes some interesting things to try with the Threshold values in the aircraft .xdp files. I'm not fully convinced that his changes have a huge effect on the flight characteristics of the aircraft, but they do have an effect of what visual and sound effects you will see and hear, and how soon. For instance, if you want to increase the number of bullet holes you see in the wings as you progressively damage an aircraft, try adding this line to one of the <System ID="_wing" > sections: <Threshold Level="40" Effect="Library" Parameter="fx_blt_hit_s" Location="emitter_damage_wing_piece_left"/> Note that the Level="40" is between the values already in the file (30 and 45), so you should get three "bullet hole decals" before you hear the sound of a wing ripping. You can adjust these values any way you wish, within the above limitations already described by Fortiesboy. Personally, I would simply change the line in the wing with Level=25 to Level=20, and not add any additional lines. This should result in the first bullet hole decal being applied slightly earlier in the wings than it is currently in all of the aircraft. In a later post, I will describe some of the changes that can be made to the damagebox section of the .xdp files.

Another thought. This wouldn't have anything to do with deleting or not deleting the .bdp files you mentioned in the mods forum, would it?

I think that when 1.28a is installed, it defaults to the "easy" (now called normal) DM. With the easy DM, you should be able to shoot the wings off of the AI fairly easily. OTOH, you are also easily shot down by the AI. To install the "hard" DM, you have to go to the downloads page, download the hardcore damage model patch, and then install it on your machine. If you want to go back to the easy DM, you also have to download and install the normal damage model patch. The DM you are describing sounds like the original DM that came before any of the patches. I think that 1.26 was the first patch with the easy DM. Although you shouldn't have to, maybe you have to install 1.28a on top of 1.26?

Glad you have received your copy of OFF, Ronbo! OFF requires a fair amount of graphics tweaking before it looks good and runs smoothly. Make sure to read the sticky threads on configuring your graphic card for OFF. ATI cards are apparently more finicky than Nvidea cards. Be sure to use the correct recommendations for your card. To access the in-game settings, go to Workshop and click on the Graphics Config button. I'd show you, but for some reason, I can't get my computer to take a screen shot. One thing I can recommend is to be sure to click on File, Exit and not click on the red X in the right corner, or your changes won't take. If you have stuttering problems, go to C:\OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\default and modify your cfs3.xml file and change MaxFPS="0" to a higher value. If you have a weak machine, you should probably start out with a value between 25-35. That should give you something to chew on before more people come on to give you more help. Good luck!

I shot off an email to OBD support about this yesterday... The same problem appears in the .bdp files of all of the airplanes I looked at. Since there is no entry for the "right" elevator, I wonder if this means that the right elevators for all of the planes are invulnerable?

Of course, as soon as I posted this, I received an email from OBD support, saying they would take care of the problem. No more invincible elevators!

Thanks for sharing, Widowmaker. And thanks to your father for helping in keeping us free.

Interesting... I have been looking at the damage boxes but had ignored the thresholds settings because I thought (note I did not say "assumed" LOL) the threshold values only told the sim what sound and graphics effects to "play" and did not have any actual effect on flight. So you are saying these values DO have an effect on flight as well? If so, do the damage boxes only have an effect on determining when an item breaks? Furthermore, when altering some of the damage box values, I did not delete the associated .bdp file. Yet, I am positive that my changes had an effect. Are you sure you have to delete the .bdp file? Maybe just for the thresholds values? Incidentally, when poking around the AlbDII QC file, I noticed one or two errors. For instance, towards the end of the file, the setting for the elevators names two left elevators and no right elevator. Should I bring this to the attention of OBD? Oooh, after looking at more of the airplane files, this appears to be a problem for all of the planes. I think I will bring this to the attention of OBD! Nice detective work about the thresholds parameters!