Herr Prop-Wasche

Thanks for your kind offer, H***shade! The DM is 98% finished, I think. For the most part, all that is left is testing and tweaking to make sure everything works as designed. I can send you a beta DM that works in QC for use in a demonstration video right away. A campaign version is still a few days away as I have to make sure there are no major errors in the QC version first because the campaign version is made up of multiple copies (eleven for all 47 planes in HITR) of the QC model. That takes a while to do, unfortunately.

Thanks, Olham. Yes, roll rate is one of the things I improved a bit on the Albatros--but just a bit! I also aimed to reduce the chances of a wing coming off in a tight turn. One way to test for sure if the revised flight model is working in campaign is to make an "emergency" dive of your plane from higher than 10,000 feet to near the ground to see if you get any lower wing damage. You should with the revised FM. Most of my FM changes are similar. I didn't radically change any of the flight characteristics of most of the airplanes. Instead, most changes correct slight inaccuracies or inconsistencies in the performance of various planes, such as cruising speed or wings coming off of an Albatros or Nieuport in a tight turn instead of a dive. The most noticeable differences in most planes' FM is probably in dive speed (reduced in most), and cruising speed. My overall goal was to make a few changes while adhering as closely as possible to historical performance (of course, often a matter of serious debate), while maintaining overall game balance. For the most part, I think I have done that, although I will have to leave it to others to be the final judges of my overall success.

Yeah, my spreadsheet is getting larger and larger! Everyday I add a couple of new columns with more information! I'm getting excited about the new DM! In testing, I think I am noticing more difference in outcome in 4 on 4 battles depending on the skill of the enemy. I have also noticed a couple of aircraft with torn wingtips actually trying to retreat from battle! Currently, I'm working on decoupling engine hit points from the liklihood of catching fire. I think I'm having some success with some engines with higher hit points being less likely to catch on fire, with other aircraft with the same number of hit points being more likely to catch on fire. Currently, the more fragile engines tend to catch fire more quickly than the larger and sturdier engines--which is not necessarily accurate.

To anyone interested in helping out: please send me a PM if you are interested in a modified campaign FM for testing purposes. I can't absolutely guarantee that the FM will work on your machine, but it has worked on 2/2 of my other testers. I need others to confirm whether the problem is on my end or somewhere else. Plus, you get to try a different FM--one that I hope is more realistic and a little tougher than the old FM. Thanks.

Thanks, Pol. I'll give that a try to see if it works. I'm still getting feedback from my testers that the campaign changes seems to work on their machines. Weird.

Hi, Pol. Thanks for the quick response. I agree that it doesn't make much sense, but it seems to be the case! The two testers are both very reliable and knowledgable members of the forum and I am fairly sure they are installing the mod correctly. Perhaps only the .cfg file or the .air file, but not both are working for them? Please let me know by PM or on this thread your wishes about duffers like me playing around with the FM. I can certainly understand if you don't want people to fool around with it. I will be glad, however, to share with you anything I have found about changing the FM. In particular, I am concerned about the dive speeds and cruising speed of some of the aircraft, and feel I may have figured out how to correct these for some aircraft, if I can only get the change to apply in the campaign!

Hello again, fellow OFFers. I know I haven't been posting much on the forum lately, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been busy thinking about BHaH and its devoted group of WWI simmers. In fact, I am very nearly finished with a completely revised and updated version of my damage model for HITR. Although the new model is based on previous editions of the damage model, I feel it has been significantly improved because of several factors, including in-game experience, hindsight, and most importantly, statistical analysis aided by the use of a very large Excel spreadsheet I have put together containing all of the data concerning the dimensions and "hit points" of all of the components in all 47 aircraft currently available in HITR. In essence, what this means is that instead of relying mainly on my own personal feelings about the performance of all of the aircraft in OFF and how they should behave when damaged, I am now also using statistical analysis to help me to initially determine how many hit points to allocate to each component of each individual aircraft in OFF. Usually, this is based upon the relative size of the component of interest. Basically, I am operating from the principle that larger components should have more hit points than smaller components. Therefore, in general, the elevator of a Fokker D VII should have more hit points than the elevator of a Fokker E III. Of course, I also consider other factors, such as the time period, whether the airplane is a scout or a bomber/recc, and the reputation of the aircraft for unusual strength or weakness, for example. Starting from this figure, I then test and tweak each aircraft until I am happy with the result. So many changes to the damage model have been made in this new version that it is almost impossible for me to describe each one. In general, however, the hit points and "threshold values" which control the display of damage effects in the new model are not that far off from how they appear in the original version of OFF or in any of my previous damage models. Overall, the most significant changes should be somewhat greater variation in the durability of different aircraft types (stronger D VII's, slightly weaker Albs), engines that are more resistant to initial damage but don't burn quite as quickly (with the exception of DH2's and Harry Tate's ), stronger wing roots but weaker wing tips, and stronger horizontal stabilizers. I hope to have the new version ready for release in about a week or so. I will make the announcement on this thread in addition to placing the mod in the 3rd party mods section of the OFF forum. Until then, happy OFFing!

I wasn't sure whether to place this in the general forum or the help forum, but since this is a problem with an FM mod I am trying to develop, I thought the question most likely belongs here. If anyone or a OBD developer can help me, I would be most apprecciative. You may PM me instead of replying publicly if you wish. Basically, I have been working on a mod to improve certain aspects of the FM. While I have not made too many major changes to how individual aircraft fly (with the possible exception of the Nieuport 28 and several versions of the Albatros), I have been able to make several improvements to the FM "environment" that effect the general performance of the aircraft in OFF. The most significant changes I have been able to make, I guess, is to reduce the dive speed of several aircraft to more reasonable levels, correcting the cruising speed of several aircraft like the Camel and Sopwith Tripe, changing the "g's" so that Albatros' do not break up in a turn so easily, fiddling with the climb and turning radius of most aircraft, etc. My problem is this: although I can get my changes to work in QC, when I try to apply them to my campaign, I get an "unavailable craft" message. The extremely weird part of this is that when I sent my FM campaign changes to a couple of people to test out my mod, they said they were able to get the full campaign version to work! Although I haven't ruled out they may have made a mistake in installing the mod, they say they think they have noticed a difference in the FM! When I try to apply the same campaign version of my mod to my machine, I still get the error! I would like to release the FM mod for others to use if they like, but I don't want to do this until I am sure I have solved the mystery. I'm guessing the problem is most likely in the .air file. I have tried a direct copy of an altered QC .air file and .cfg file (with appropriate file name changes, of course), but I still get the mismatch error. Do I need to do a direct hex copy of the contents of the .air file instead of the whole file, or what? Thanks in advance for any help.

Umm, I hate to follow Robert Frost, as my words no doubt pale in comparison. Nevertheless, those are a couple of wonderful and touching stories, especially Widowmaker's. I wish I had something like it to share with everyone, but alas, no. Unless you want to hear about the time I fell off a jet plane and lived to tell about it! Of course, the jet was in a park playground and was cemented into the ground, but it was a (retired) korean war era jet fighter!

I have a couple surnames for you, Olham. On my mother's side, we have the name Keefer. Not really sure if this is German. Might be more English. On my father's side, my last name Staub. This is definitely German and either stands for dust or dirt, I believe. Hopefully, my ancestors were millers or breadmakers and not "dirty" peasants or dirt farmers, or something similar. There is a Staubach falls in southern Germany, I believe, which I guess means "misty falls," so perhaps we aren't involved in dirt, afterall!

Thanks for all the hard work, Erik. We appreciate your efforts--and your obsessive nature!

Hellshade, the triple threat! The scream from that pilot early in the video made the hair on the back of my neck stand up! Good shooting!

Looks extremely interesting, Lou. Can't wait to hear more battle reports.

Bird 1, RC aircraft 0.

Yowsa! Thanks, Olham!

Open the file with any text editor, such as Notepad or Wordpad, by right-clicking the file and choosing "Open with." Then search for the entry you want to change. Good luck.

Be glad that your are not a Blues hockey fan! The Blues are the Chicago Cubs of hockey--probably worse.

Should be doable, since there is a "grunt" sound when you are wounded, or wound another pilot, in the game .

I am working on what I believe to be at least a partial solution to this problem. I have found that there are at least two situations which govern wing failures in OFF. The first situation is damage from overspeeding in a dive and is controlled by the max_mach variable in the .cfg file (technically, wings did not shed their fabric from overspeed, but from pulling up too quickly during a fast dive, but OFF does not currently model this well so we are left with overspeed damage). Multiply the value you find in this variable by 936 and you will get the speed in mph that the plane must exceed to eventually get overspeed damage. How fast a plane can dive is governed by several factors, but primarily by its drag factor, with lower drag meaning generally faster overall speed as well as dive speed. Drag, in turn, is controlled by a variable found in the .air file. Note that the .air file can only be read by a program developed for CFS2 called AirEdit. You can find this program on the web. I have been able to succesfully get an Alb DIII (in addition to other aircraft) to shed its bottom wing tip in a steep dive by altering these values. The second situation is damage caused by pulling excess g's in a turn or manuever. This is also controlled by a variable in the .air file. There is a setting for positive and negative g limits in the .cfg file, but I have found that changing the .cfg file has no effect on the ability of the aircraft to take high g turns. You have to change the g setting in the .air file to do this. IMO, the g settings that allow planes to make tight turns in OFF is set too low for several aircraft, primarily the Albs. Again, I have been able to increase the g settings on the Albs so they do not crack up from excessive g's in a turn, so there is at least a partial remedy for BH's complaint. Furthermore, I did not have to increase this value very much in order to get the desired effect, so the plane will not necessarily become a "turn-demon" if you alter this value. I am still working on tweaking the FM's of the Alb DIII and Nieuport series to reflect these and other changes, but if anyone is interested in sampling what I have come up with so far, just send me a PM.

You guys are very welcome. Glad to be of assistance.

Welcome back, Olham! It's nice to clear the lungs with some good sea air so that you are better prepared to breath engine oil and petrol!

Version 1.2 of the backup program is now available at the download forum here: http://forum.combatace.com/files/file/10890-offuserbackupfiles-program/ This version adds Pilot[]Claims.txt to the list of files that are backed up when you run the program, thus saving a record of all of your pilots' claims. Remember to run the backup program on a regular basis in order to backup any claims you made since you first ran the program. Please report any questions or problems with the program to me on this thread. Thank you.

Ahhh, wern't nuthin'! Actually, it was very simple to write, once I got the DOS terminology down. The update should now be available on the downloads forum.

Clerks!!!

Eureka! Well, not really eureka, but I have found you can backup your claims file after all. Each pilot should have a file called Pilot[x]Claims.txt in the same place as the other pilot files. I will have a revised version of my backup program with this addition available for download on Monday.