Interlocutor

I lost this thread for awhile when it slipped to page 2 ... Anyway, back in February when I was tinkering with graphics settings, I seem to recall a post on the old board, by Pol I think, that explained the OFF/CFS3 aa/af. But my aging brain can't now recall what Pol said, sorry.

Sitting Duck, Yes, I think you've got it right. For my part, I've had my CFS3Config slider settings where they are right from the get-go, so I've never observed differences from lower settings.

Wow Rickity, the fact you can stay alive at all without TIR leaves me awestruck . TIR has made all the difference for me. At first I still tended to "tunnel vision", looking forward all the time instead of looking around. But now I feel like my head's on a swivel, I look around so much I get cricks in my neck after flying . I've been noticing this week that I can get into a turn-fight scrap, and never even need to glance forward. Yesterday I went round & round with an E3 for about 10 minutes, gradually reducing my angle off his tail, my head always turned to the right to watch him as I cut the angle, or glancing back to check my six. I think flying the same a/c for long stretches really helps with this, I can fly my Bebe now by sound and feel with little need to worry about stalling or spinning. Yes, I love the Bebe, too, it really outclasses the E3 I think.

Yes, I certainly agree with all that's been said above about the immersive aspects of the campaign, and about the strange sense of caring for one's virtual wingmen :yes: . For my part, I'm well into a LafEsc campaign now, flying N11's over Verdun in May of 1916. My AI wingies can now fly the N11 well (thanks, Winder et al for the AI N11 1.26 fix!). I always lead my flights, and my evolving practice is to "stay high" when a dogfight first develops. Given that AI enemy a/c tend to dive for the deck right away, I can watch over my wingies below in the first stages of a fight, then come down to help as needed. Is anyone else noticing that an improvement in their own flying skills as time goes on? In the old RB3D days, with the POV hat views I could never stay alive long, nor achieve many kills. Here, with TIR, I feel that my SA is growing by leaps & bounds. When I first started flying OFF3 with TIR a month ago, I always kept the TAC screen up, and used the enemy cone, otherwise I had trouble staying alive. Now I've stopped using the enemy cone at all, and I use TAC only to locate enemy formations so I can fly toward them, taking it down when I get in a scrap. And I think that soon I may stop using it at all. Reading Shaw's Fighter Combat, as recommended by many in the forum, has helped as well, though I find that with these low-powered aircraft, particularly the earlier ones like the N11, many of Shaw's options are closed to me. But boy, the N11 is a great little turn fighter ...

Hi Sitting Duck, Yup, that was me . It has all led me to get a new PC and TIR as well. I'm working my way toward MP someday I think. My goal right now is to get a pilot to survive for 17 campaign hours; if I can't do that against the AI, I figure I wouldn'y be much use to any human wingmen . My best survival time so far is 16.92 hours; one of my AI wingmen crashed into me & killed me to end that campaign ,,,

BirdDog, To be honest, I've found all the graphics options to be something of a "seven, plus or minus two" situation (someone once said that the human mind can only keep "seven, plus or minus two" concepts in play at once ). What happened to me was that I got OFF3, my new PC and TrackIR at about the same time. Once I had it all set up & running, my FPS seemed low to me (20's & 30's), so I read various threads about tweaking frame rates via altered graphics settings, and also went out to the web & read up on ATI's Catalyst Control Center settings. From all that I made the adjustments listed in my post above. That gave me good graphics and decent frame rates, so I just went with it. So I haven't actually tinkered that much. I suspect I just hit a lucky combo of settings early on. Either that, or else I have lower standards than others in terms of what I find acceptable . I can't be sure. But I get no tearing of edges, and everything looks good to me!

Is OFF3 actually keeping track of our AI wingmen's in-game scores and such? I hadn't realized that. Maybe I've been imagining it, but I think I've seen my wingmen shot down, only to be back with me on the next flight?

Sitting Duck, My system is similar to yours: Windows XP, SP3 w/ 4GB RAM Intel Core2Duo E8500 Wolfdale @ 3.16GHz (each cpu) ATI Radeon HD 4830 w/ 1GB Seagate 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive I run P3 with TrackIR, have a Logitech Force 3D Pro stick. I'm getting fps in the 30s & 40s, say an average of 40 but lower (low 30s) at the airfield or near the ground, higher (high 40s) at higher altitudes, say 4K' or above. My current CFS3Config settings: Monitor to higherst possible resolution, in my case 1680x1050x32 Anti-Aliasing set to "none" Graphics sliders at 5-5-4-4-5-3 CFS3Config OVERIDES (ticked boxes): Disable Intro Movie High Resolution Z-Buffer Terrain Detail Texture Disable Vertex Buffers Disable Index Buffers Disable Validate Device Disable Write-Only Vertex Buffers Disable Write-Only Index Buffers Disable In Cloud Effect CFS3Config TEXTURE INFO (radio button settings): Composite Terrain Texture Pool = D3DPOOL_MANAGED Composite Terrain Texture Usage = D3DUSAGE_RENDERTARGET Composite Aircraft Texture Pool = D3DPOOL_MANAGED Composite Aircraft Texture Usage = D3DUSAGE_RENDERTARGET Vertex Buffer Pool = D3DPOOL_MANAGED Index Buffer Pool = D3DPOOL_DEFAULT Fullscreen Swap Effect = D3DSWAPEFFECTFLIP (note: I did not change any of the sliders from their defaults, can list them, too if desired) My ATI Catalyst Control Center Settings: In the "Graphics Settings" tab, with "3D" expanded and "All Settings" selected, in the "Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing" pane, I unticked "Use application settings", chose "Edge-detect" from the pull-down options in the "Filter" box, and set "Level" to "4x", yielding a sample rate of "12x"; Also in the "Graphics Settings" tab, with "3D" expanded and "All Settings" selected, in the "Smoothvision HD: Anisotropic filtering" pane I again unticked "Use application settings" and set AF to "8x"; Going down the "All Settings" list to the "Catalyst A.I." pane I left "Disable Catalyst A.I." unticked and set the slider to "Standard"; In the "Mipmap Detail Level" pane I set the slider to "High Quality"; In the "Wait for vertical refresh" pane I set the slider to "Off, unless application specifies"; In the "Adaptive Anti-Aliasing" pane I left the "Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing" box unticked. That's all I did in Catalyst. Note that I get my AA & AF effects through the CCC, rather than from within the game. Sorry for the length of the post. I suspect that results may vary for different folks; even the hard drive speed may affect things I think. Note that I did not turn off messages notifications as mentioned by Trek; I tried it and got no appreciable increase in frame rates; go figure...

Mais oui! I can see that some one else is a Falcon of France . BTW Hex, back in the RB3D days, I was a member of LafEsc, recruited by Uriel circa 1998. I flew with the squad in the great MP "Wars" of that era under the name LE_Mac.

For what it's worth, I flew about 10 missions yesterday in Tripes and N17s, after applying 1.26 but before applying the 1.26 Hotpatch. I warped a lot, and never observed this pitch problem. In other words, for me at least the warp function seemed unchanged, and worked fine. I use TIR and fly with a Logitech Force 3D Pro stick.

77Scout, was the Tripe campaign you refer to flown with the new 1.26 patch?

I agree with tttiger's observation on the Tripe. I fly the Tripe & the N17 almost exclusively, and though I'm pleased that the Tripe's tendency to speed up too quickly in a dive has been corrected with 1.26, it now seems almost unflyable to me, stalling in the blink of an eye, and falling off readily into spins. In his great WW1 book Sagitarrius Rising, Cecil Lewis, a combat pilot and test pilot in WW1 who flew almost every plane which served with the RFC/RNAS/RAF, said the Tripe was the most pleasant plane to fly of them all. He said you could set the throttle about 3/4 open, pull back slightly on the stick, then let the stick go and the Tripe would loop continuously of its own accord! The Tripe, it seems to me, should be a very stable aircraft in flight. The adjustments made to the N17 seem fine to me. As for the gunnery changes, to my taste the new "Normal" setting makes gunfire too effective, so I'll fly with the "Hard" option (i.e., the same gunfire effectiveness as we had pre-1.26), which always seemed about right to me. I wish I could shoot like Tommy Slater , but I can't and I know it, so my need to use lotsa bullets to down a plane seems right to me.

Just checking in, and yes, thanks, Combat Ace.