Herr Prop-Wasche

Completely understandable, OvS. Still, a sad state of affairs.... I look forward to seeing the "previews."

Good one, Olham!

I don't hang out at many of the other flight sim forums, but I have to assume we are talking about a recent WWI competitor whose name shall not be mentioned on this forum. If what you say is true, it is truly despicable! There is a name for lifting intellectual property and ideas from a competitor. It's called industrial espionage! No wonder your posts over at "their" forum were promptly discounted and deleted. To do anything else would be for them to admit their guilt. This really burns me bum! OVS, Winder, and Pol, among others have gone out of their way to avoid letting threads on this forum turn into "other sim" bashing threads, and have taken every opportunity to emphasize that they are not in competition with any other sim, etc. Unfortunately, their courtesy has not been reciprocated. If OBD were composed of "wealthy" game developers, bwahahahahah, I would advise them to turn their crack legal team onto those wankin' thi**es! I'm sorry, but I had to vent. Mods, if you wish for me to delete this post, just let me know.

Thanks, Olham.

'allo Dave. Try this. Edit the .cfg file for the plane you are working on. Save the .cfg file. THEN, start Airwrench and load the .air file for that aircraft. Briefly look around to see if your changes "took" and then exit Airwrench. This should update the .air file with the new .cfg setting. If you don't start Airwrench and load the changed file, the .air file does not get updated and you get a "mismatch" or whatever and OFF thinks it is an uncertified craft. This is the process I have been using lately with success in both QC and campaign. Let me know if this works for you or not.

Looks like my suspicions were correct about the "Cdo_fuselage_drag_coeff" variable. Currently, this variable for the Sopwith Triplane is set to .60. I raised it to .135 and observed a reduction in the dive speed from 270 mph down to approximately 190 mph. OTOH, it also lowered the climb rate, so more tinkering will be necessary. Curiously, the two triplanes are near the front of the pack in terms of lowest drag coefficients. I would think they should be higher, given they have an extra set of wings with braces and struts to slow things down. I think the next thing I will try is to lower the drag on the N28 and see if I can overstress her in a dive.

I have sent the program out for testing.

Soon....I hope.

There is a setting in Workshop you can use to delay the game exit until you crash. Actually, there are two settings. One is named "Auto Exit CFS3" and the other is "Auto Exit Mission." I'm not sure if you have to set both to off or only the Auto Exit Mission one.

Hi Dave! Odd that you can fly in QC but not in campaign. I have found that the altered planes either fly in both or not at all! Are you saving your settings using Airwrench or are you making your changes directly in the .cfg file? I found that doing only the latter will work.

You are right, hairyspin. However, while you can't use Airwrench to save certain information while in evaluation mode, you can always use it to observe what happens when you make any changes to the .cfg file. You are also right about AirEdit being an airfile editor. While the .cfg file and the .air file both have entries that control identical variables, each file also has unique variables. For instance, using AirEdit, you can edit a variable in the .air file called "Cdo_fuselage_drag_coeff." This variable does not seem to be available in the .cfg file. Might this be key to controlling dive speed?

Odd that Airwrench is only allowing you to edit the contact points, BH. What plane were you working on, or was it one of your own creations? I have noticed that some of the planes in OFF cannot be "opened" in Airwrench.* For those, you have to directly edit the .cfg file. There is a section for contact points in the .cfg file, unless you are building one from scratch. If that is the case, I would suggest looking at the .cfg file of a roughly similar plane to yours and using that as a template. *I believe the reason some planes are not editable in Airwrench is that they have had their engines set as turbocharged in the .cfg file. Non-turbocharged aircraft can be edited in Airwrench. This is probably due to the limitations of the free version of Airwrench, as described by hairyspin, above.

Close call--never attempt to land during an artillery bombardment.

You are welcome, Bullethead, san. Thanks for the drinks!

As promised, here is part one of my basic flight model tweaking tutorial. Basic Flight Model Tweaking Tutorial, part one. Recent discussions about the flight model for the Albatross D III got me interested in whether the individual user can tweak OFF's flight model to one's personal tastes. The simple answer is, yes! A more sophisticated answer is yes, but it's not easy. There are at least three reasons for this: 1) While you do not need to be an aeronautics engineer to adjust the FM, it helps if you have a basic understanding of physics, and more importantly, you can use Google and are willing to learn stuff. 2) The FM settings in CFS3 are not intuitive and do not allow you to easily see the results of your changes. Fortunately, there is a 3rd party tool you can use called Airwrench which helps tremendously in this regard. Unfortunately, Airwrench itself is a source of a third problem. 3) Airwrench has a glitch which make it frustrating to use to alter OFF's FM settings. Ultimately, I had to stop using Airwrench to change the files and instead use it only to observe the changes I make manually. Fortunately, it does this rather well. N.B. HairySpin has pointed out another flight editor called AirEdit is available and is the "standard" in FM editing. I have no experience with AirEdit and so will confine my comments to Airwrench, at least for now. Now, on to the tutorial! 1) If you decide to go ahead and toy with the aircraft FM, you MUST first back up two critical files: the aircraft.cfg file and the *.air file. Both of these files are found in the Windows folder of each individual aircracft in OFF. Failure to do this may result in an aircraft that OFF will refuse to load. Make a copy of both of these files and rename them so you can use them again if something you do causes OFF to throw a hissy fit. 2) Download Airwrench (or AirEdit). In order to see the effect of your FM changes "on the fly," you have to use one of these tools. Airwrench shows not only the many different components and parameters that can be altered in OFF, but also calculates and displays the result of these changes on such things as turn radius, cruising speed, climbing ability, and many others. Here is a picture of the main screen in Airwrench. You can find Airwrench here: http://www.mudpond.org/ 3) Okay, we are now ready to tweak! Virtually all of your tweaking will take place in the aircraft.cfg file for each airplane you are interested in tweaking. Open up the file with a text editor. I use Textpad, which is easily obtainable on the web and works much better than any of Microsloth's text editors. Next, start Airwrench. Click past the "activation" prompt, and click on the "Select Air File" button in the upper left. In the dialog box, be sure to pick EXACTLY the same aircraft whose .cfg file you just opened in your text editor. The boxes should now fill up with data. These are the FM specs for your selected aircraft. Go ahead and look around. Click the tabs to see data for all of the components of your aircraft, including weight, aircraft dimensions, engine type, wings, etc. Although there are 12 tabs, we will be concentrating for the most part on only three: the Specs, Dynamics, and Tuning tabs. A word of caution. NEVER, EVER answer "yes" if prompted by Airwrench to save your file. The only major glitch with the program is that saving your airfile with Airwrench can cause your .air file to get out of sync with your .cfg file. If this happens, OFF will get very angry with you and refuse to load your aircraft, making it unuseable. Obviously, we do not want this to happen. So, even if Airwrench begs and pleads with you to save your file, politely decline and ignore it if it complains. Instead, all of OUR changes will be made in the .cfg file. We will use Airwrench simply to read the results. 4) Okay, let's go back to the Airwrench Specs tab. Although there are a lot of boxes with data in them, there are only a few which can be changed if Airwrench is in "evaluation mode." The most important are listed on the left, under the Performance Specifications label. There we have settings for Vmax @ sea level, weight used to calculate climb rate, and weight used to calculate estimated stall speed (which mainly effects turning radius). There are other boxes, such as clean stall speed, Max Load (G's), and Static Margin which can be changed, but we will not fool with them now. Notice that you can toggle between mph, knots, and kph by choosing the appropriate radio button near the top of the page. Also, leave the "Edit" button alone for now. You don't need it to change values and it can mess up your .cfg file, causing a mismatch if you are not careful. 5) Although we will not be using it, go ahead and click on the "Dimensions" tab. Basically, this page controls all of the settings for the control surfaces of the aircraft. Unless you know something about the dimensions of the aircraft that you don't think OBD already knows about, I would leave most of the settings on this page alone. There is one setting that you may consider adjusting, if you are careful. That is the setting for the "Oswald Efficiency Factor," a calculation that estimates the lift ability of the wings on your aircraft. Airwrench will automatically estimate this for you, but I have noticed that most of the airplanes in OFF have this setting set manually higher anywhere from as little as several hundredths to as much as one or two tenths higher than that recommended by Airwrench. I think that's enough for now. Later, I will go over the contents of the Dynamics, Engine, and Tuning tabs, and then will describe where you can find all of the variables we have already talked about in Airwrench in the aircraft.cfg file for each plane. Until then, happy flying! HPW

First, welcome to the OFF forum, Animator! I'm sure you will enjoy your time here, as we are a very affable bunch. New board members buy the first drinks, however! Look in the stickies menu for information about how to set up OFF, tips and tricks, etc. The problem about not being able to make claims probably stems from an old CFS3 limitation. You may have noticed that a "Goals completed" or a "Goals Failed" message probably appeared while you were flying your campaign mission. Once either of those messages appear, CFS3 stops recording information to your personal pilot folder, so any combat, kills, etc. will not be credited to you, although they do show up in the mission review. Crazy, huh? Fortunately, the goals completed message only comes up if you follow all of your waypoints and fully complete the assigned mission. I think if you warp or skip any waypoints you can avoid this problem 90% of the time. Perhaps in P4, the devs of OFF will have found a way to have worked around that problem.

Thanks for all of the replies, guys. In no particular order: I will definitely be in need of testers. There are too many planes to tweak and test for one person, so any help will be greatly appreciated! I am unfamiliar with AirWrite. How does it compare with Airwrench? Airwrench is good, but it has a few bugs and snags. I have found that if I save anything using Airwrench, I frequently get a "plane not available yet" message when I try to fly it in OFF. Saving the .cfg file seems to avoid this problem, fortunately. As for the .air file containing a lot more data than the .cfg file, it is hard for me to say. Airwrench seems to cover only a fraction of variables that are contained in the .cfg file, and has few, if any, additional variables of its own. The .air file, of course, is a hex file, and although I have looked at it, I don't have a lot of hex experience and can't make much out of it. Doesn't help, of course, that the CFS3 coders did not put in any remarks in the file to help you identify variables. There is a limited ability to copy FM's, but only from one of the same or very similar types to the other. For instance, you can copy an Alb DII_AC1 directly to an Alb DII_QC1 and only have to change the "AC" to "QC" at the top of the file. You could probably also copy an Alb DVa to a Alb DVa 200 with only a few more alterations. I would NOT recommend copying the FM for a Sopwith Pup to a Sopwith Tripe, however. Although...it might be possible. Dej, PM me and I will send you a copy of the spreadsheet in Excel format. It only contains game data, however. And my avatar is simply a poster for the last WWI fly-in in Dayton, which I didn't get to go to because of work and lousy weather. :nea: Cptroyce, I am very familiar with your FM work on RB3D. I used several different FM's and thought that yours was one of the best. I also helped Bluevoss (remember him) in testing out his FM, which even predates yours! And yes, the DrI IS PORKED!!!!!!!

Glad you are flying again, Greg. I've been working on a program that will automatically backup all of your needed setup files to another location on your computer for easy access if you have to reinstall OFF or something gets corrupted. All I have to do is write a readme file for it and send it to a few people for testing and it should be ready. It's been delayed because I started playing around with some of the FM files and that has taken a lot of my time because it is much more complicated.

I can confirm that the altered planes do work in campaign mode. However, you have to be very careful when editing the files with Airwrench. It's better to make adjustments directly in the .cfg file and just use Airwrench to observe the effects of your changes. NEVER save a file with Airwrench, even if it begs and pleads with you to do so.

Something else I have noticed about the FM, particularly for German planes. Although super or turbo-charging was not used in any operational aircraft in WWI, many of the German aeroplanes in OFF have this setting checked to true. I assume this was a decision by the devs to simulate the negative effects of increasing altitude on engine performance and how the German engineers got around this problem by intentionally "leaning" the fuel mixture of their engines at sea level (if you are interested in long, technical discussions here is a link to one about this issue from our friend Bletchley at the aerodrome http://www.theaerodr...ght=turbo+super ). How does turbocharging a simulated WWI engine which shouldn't have turbocharging effect the overall performance of German (and some later Allied) aircraft in the sim? Instead of using turbocharging, I was wondering if it is possible to simulate the better German performance at high altitude simply by increasing the rated horsepower of their engines at sea level? Besides falsely increasing aircraft performance at sea level in exchange for more realistic performance at altitude, what might be the drawbacks of this approach?

Good question, Duce. So far, my changes work in QC. I haven't yet tried them in CFS3 QC or in the campaign. I will report back. UncleAl--Contrary to your experience, I was able to recover from a 260 mph dive in the Tripe. True, I did have some "high speed stress damage" and the elevator was sluggish, but I did recover. Compressibility shouldn't be a factor at speeds under 400+ mph. At any rate, the main point is that the Tripe should not dive at such a fast speed with three wings and all of those wires and struts. There is a variable you can set in the .cfg file that adjusts parasitic drag. Currently, this is set to 1.00 for all OFF aircraft. Since CFS3 is originally a WWII flight-sim, I think an argument can be made that this setting should be set to > 1.00 for all OFF planes, as they are much less streamlined than their WWII counterparts. Although I have found that setting this variable higher than 1.00 does reduce dive speed, it also tends to reduce level flight speed a bit. However, that can also be adjusted.

There should be several backup copies of the ViewUi.xml file in several places on your computer. Look first in your OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields folder. It can also be found in your OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\campaigns\default folder and your OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\campaigns\CampaignData\Default folder. Finally, another copy can be found in your C:\Documents and Settings\YOURNAME\ApplicationData\Microsoft\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields folder if you are using XP; or in your C:\Users\YOURNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields folder if you are using Vista or Win7. I don't know why CFS3 stores so many copies in different places, but there you go.

Gentlemen, I think we have just discovered the most powerful and important individual on this forum! Thank you for your service, nbryant. Both past and present.

Greetings, gents and lasses. Anyone interested in a flight model tweaking tutorial? I have been messing around in the files (again) and have a few thoughts about the FM and the various tweaks that are available. For instance, Olham mentioned that he thought the Alb III was somewhat of an underperformer. I created an Excel spreadsheet and made some interesting discoveries about the comparative performance of all of the scouts in OFF. In general, I agreed with almost all of the FM settings, but there were a few "anomalies." I have also noted some oddness while flying some aircraft. For instance, has anyone else noticed that the Sopwith Triplane can dive in speeds in excess of 260 mph? Actually, I wonder if almost all of the aircraft in OFF dive a little too fast for what are basically motorized kites. There is a setting (or two) that can help adjust this, but you have to be careful changing it because changing one variable can have an effect on other variables. I don't claim to be an expert in all (or even most) things FM, but I have played around with some of the settings and found that you can (successfully) alter a few parameters such as max speed, climb rate, and turn radius, among others. I know that messing around with the FM is likely to be a controversial matter and is not likely to be popular among some folks such as people who like to fly in multi-player because they need to have identical FM's. But, since OFF is primarily a single player game, I thought there might be a few folks who might be interested in this topic. If not, I can shut my yap and quietly back out of the room! Besides, it seems to have gotten a little too quiet in here recently. Nothing like an FM discussion to warm things up a bit!

Very simple, really. In XP, go to C:\Documents and Settings\[userName]\Application Data\Microsoft\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields and open the ViewUI.xml file with any text editor. About three lines from the top, look for "RotationRate." Values over 1.0 speeds up the rotation, while numbers below 1.0 slow down the panning speed. Save and exit. Voila!