Bullethead

That's where I looked, but it ain't there, which I why I asked. The most recent file in that category was uploaded 4 April. Maybe it takes a while to get the file to show up here?

Being "within human sight" is itself a big variable, depending on the person's eyes and weather conditions :). So first, you'd have to make a decision on a "typical value" for this on a good day. But in most flightsims, this distance is way longer than the distance at which aircraft become visible on the monitor. This is because, even today, most computers just can't handle drawing every airplane in real time that you can potentially see, while at the same time having the detailed ground extend out a realistic distance, the undetailed ground extend out to the horizon as seen from high altitude, and having the sky full of clouds, not to mention any airplanes you have up close to you with guns blazing. And besides that, different users run at different screen resolutions, so have a big difference in how many pixels they have per foot of object length at a given distance. And the guys who made the game have to expect some people to be running at a fairly low resolution. So what ends up happening is that airplanes don't become visible on the screen until well inside the range that the average pilot could see them. And when an airplane 1st appears on the screen, it's going to range from only 1 to perhaps 3 or 4 pixels wide, depending on resolution. You can't tell anything at all about the target's identity from just 3 or 4 pixels. But remember, this thing is actually much closer to you than you'd be 1st seeing it in real life. Thus, in real life, you'd probably be able to identify and even tell the color of the target at the range it first becomes a visible dot in the game. This is why most flightsims have "cheats" like TAC, labels, and target-player external views. They exist to give you the information you'd really be able to see in real life with your real eyeballs, but which the game is incapable of giving to you with just a few pixels. This is why I refuse to call these things "cheats"; they're actually aids, and quite necessary ones if you want to be realistic. Playing without them is basically the same as saying your supposedly eagle-eyed pilot is really very near-sighted. How realistic is it to think he'd have even been accepted for flight training?

Thanks, man! I don't know how the rest of us would survive without geeks who have both time on their hands and similar interests EDIT: BTW, where can I find this marvelous program?

Sorry if this has been mentioned before. I've only just been able to return to flying OFF after taking several weeks off due to real life becoming busy. In my previous experience with older versions, AAMG fire was a bother but not something likely to cause you much harm unless you went looking for it. IOW, if you strafed an airfield, or went after a balloon, you'd likely be shot up, sometimes badly. However, if you just flew across the trenches at several hundred feet without hanging around or looking for trouble, you weren't likely to be hit by anything. You rarely even saw AAMG tracer unless you were pretty close to them. Only the bursting archie bothered you. In fact, in all the time I flew OFF before my break, I don't recall ever seeing AAMG fire hit reported in the mission replays, unless there was an apparent airfield or balloon strafe going on, and those didn't happen very often. But now I've got 1.30b. And the biggest change I've noticed is that AAMGs now rule the skies. Anything below about 4000 feet gets shot to pieces by them. I had a mission last night where AAMGs, according to the replay, accounted for about 25 of the 30-odd aircraft on both sides that were shot down while I was flying. This included 11 out of 12 DFWs, none of which got below 2000 feet AFAIK, and they got a lot of hits on the 12th one too, although I claimed it :). Most of them were shot down when not over any real target, but flying between them at 4000 feet or so. I also noticed an entire flight of Quirks at 3500 feet got wiped out by them just behind the lines, between the troops there and the 1st line of ground targets. And I myself was well riddled by friendly AAMGs while flying within about 200 yards of a Hun. It took forever to watch the replay because of the near-constant stream of messages about AAMGs hitting planes. Is this happening to anybody else? I think it's a bit extreme, and I'm wondering if I can tweak the settings to make this stop. It's been a while and of course it's now impossible to check, but IIRC there used to be a Workshop setting in older versions of OFF for ground fire effectiveness. This setting is no longer there in 1.30b, if it ever existed at all. So I'm guessing the AAMG effectiveness is now rolled up into various settings for airplane guns. Here's how I have my guns set right now: Player Guns Only: Normal AI Gun Fire (Range): Realistic Main Guns: Normal Rear Guns: Hard Would changing any of this keep AAMGs from being the sky-sweeping deathdealers they are now? It's rather frustrating to go chasing after Huns only to have their whole formation wiped out by AAMGs before I can close in on them ;). BTW, I'm using the standard damage model, too. Also, I'm not sure about the AI Gun Fire (Range) being so realistic. I find them continually shooting at me (and hitting) from 300-400 yards. Any help would be appreciated. I'm trying to be as realistic as possible. Thanks.

Guys doing actual ground strafing missions and such took pretty heavy losses. I just was reading how Arthur Gould Lee was shot down 3 times in 9 days during the Cambrai battle due to strafing German troops just behind or right on the trenches . Another book (I think it was another) mentioned the pilots making bets on how many holes they'd get during ground attack missions, and says that 30 was about average. Both squadrons took pretty heavy losses doing this work, and I understand the Schlasta also suffered badly. So it seems to me that if you get down low and spend much time in AAMG zones, messing with ground targets or balloons, you're going to get hurt. That's fine with me. That would be the natural and expected outcome. What's not natural or expected is that, at least when using "AI Gun Fire (Range) = Realistic", just passing by minding your own business at 4000 feet will usually get you killed before you've gone more than a couple of miles. And not by exploding shells, but by AAMGs. Plus, of course, AI planes continually nail you from 1200-1400 feet away during dogfights. So I'm thinking the "Realistic" here is rather better shooting than reality :). I doubt I'll be using it again any time soon. Of course, I'm getting these ranges and altitudes from the replay. And I've noticed that this sometimes doesn't report numbers accurately. For instance, I recently saw it say that a plane shot down about 20 miles away from me was at a range of "very close to player" . So it could be that I'm basing my opinions here on bad data. Hell, it might be explosive archie and not AAMGs doing the damage. But OTOH, I've been close enough to observe whole formations getting wiped out by what looked like AAMG fire while at 4000 feet (per my own altimeter), so I think I'm probably pretty close here.

I'm not sure this would lead to fewer encounters, but it might make things more interesting. Right now, the situation is like this: If the AI was a human player, he not only is using TAC to spot you at 8 miles, but is also using padlock and target-player external view to determine your identity and altitude the moment it spots you. As such, it immediately makes up its mind whether to fight or flee. This, IMHO, is why we usually meet far more scouts than 2-seaters. Having flown a few careers as a non-leading 2-seater pilot, I've seen many times that the usual response of AI 2-seaters is to run away the instant a higher enemy scout (identified via target-player view) appears at the 8-mile TAC range. If you're not using these same cheats/aids, you'll never know they were there at all because they'll run away long before you see them. Thus, if you limit how far the AI can see you (and identify you and know your altitude), you'll probably run into more 2-seaters than you do now, especially if you don't use the cheats/aids. It would be nice if the AI was stuck with the same settings you use. But this would doubtless require a major overhaul of the whole player padlock and external view systems to limit their range or even totally disable them. IOW, no more using "padlock nearest enemy" as you fly along to scan for and IFF planes you can't even see yet, even if you're not using TAC. You'd have to be able to set the ranges for these things so the AI would know what its own limits are. When I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about tweaking the AI so it doens't fight to the death of all on 1 side so much :).

As the old saying goes.... Give a man a fish and he'll eat for 1 day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat all day drinking beer. Widowmaker, if you want to fish for striped bass, you might want to go to Texas in the spring. In the March-April timeframe, they usually (unless there's been a drought) open the floodgates of the reservoirs. All sorts of little baitfish get sucked through into the spillway creeks and flop around all crippled and stunned. The white bass, their big cousins the stripers, and their hybrid spawn all swarm at the bottom of the dam snapping them up. When you hook one, he takes off downstream in the white water. Even a little white bass in that water is a real fight, but when you hook a striper it's a truly epic struggle :yes:

OK, I dood it. Thanks :). I see that dropped my realism from 110 to 100, though. Seems strange, because if it tones down the AAMGs, it would make things more realistic IMHO

Didn't know they used magnesium back then. From what I gather, in WW1 they thought the smoke was more important than the light, and I believe phosphorus smokes better. Or maybe that was just a Brit thing. But even in WW2, Brit .303 tracer left very visible smoke trails, at a time when other folks' tracer was leaving little or none. It's my understanding that was a holdover from WW1.

I don't mind. The greatest feeling in the world is to be shot at and just missed. There's just no other sensation like it. Everybody should experience it, it's that good. And no harm done, because it missed you The ones I've seen myself were mostly solid lead slugs (7.62mm), and they looked all big and bright. That's why I'm thinking it's the shockwave glowing like a lampshade, regardless of what's inside the bullet. I've also had some 12.7mm and 14mm come my way, and I'm sure some of those were either explosive or incendiary, but they all looked the same. They did, of course, look rather bigger than the rifle-caliber types, like the size of softballs or grapefruit, but all of them in the burst were the same size :yes: . As I understand things, WW1 tracers were practically incendiary bullets anyway. Most of their lead filling was replaced by phosphorus exposed at the rear, which burned and created the light and the smoke trail. This made them lighter than ball rounds, which is why they flew differently and were thus only an approximate aiming guide. IIRC, an incendiary round was fully enclosed phosphorus that didn't burn to the target but relied on breaking up to expose and ignite the phosphorus. But if they did burn en route, they would have been pretty much indistinguishable from regular tracer.

The overall effect of this mod is quite excellent! Great work and thanks :). However, the above quote is a nit I feel the need to pick at. I'm sure we've all read memoirs or heard stories where the narrator described incoming tracer as the size of tennis balls. I used to think that was just exaggeration used as a way to convey the pucker factor of being shot at. However, that was before I went off to war myself and had quite a few tracers whiz by my head. And I saw that yes indeed, tracers look friggin' HUGE from the front. Incoming rifle-caliber tracers are easily the size of tennis balls--bright, glowing, evil tennis balls. It's very strange, because they appear much larger from the front than from the sides or rear. The stock tracers in OFF conveyed that very well and looked quite realistic to me. With the mod, they look much better than before from the sides and back, but the front view is unfortunately not as realistic as it was before. It's puzzled me for a long time as to why tracer looks so big from the front. After all, the actual burning bit isn't much bigger than a match head and the body of the bullet blocks your direct view of it. But it's certainly not psychological because I've had a few cases where I knew I wasn't the target but was just close to the line of fire, and they still looked as big as when they were shot at me. Besides, everybody who's seen the fronts of tracers always says the same thing, even though they all have different mental states and were affected differently by the experience. So I did some poking around. It's not a subject that's drawn a lot of research, but what little I could find suggested that it was a perfectly natural, although seldom-seen, lighting effect. The bullet is travelling way faster than sound so has a shockwave coming off its nose. Shockwaves do strange things to the air, such as causing the water vapor to condense and re-evaporate nearly instantly. I'm sure you've seen photos of supersonic F-14s sticking out of cones of fog. Well, it's the same sort of thing here, only of course the fog cone is much smaller and less dense. But what happens is, the brightly burning tracer illuminates this cone of otherwise invisible fog from the inside, thereby exposing its extent. It's rather like how a lightbulb illuminates a lampshade. Thus, from the front, you're looking through the shockwave towards the bullet, and the shock front is all lit up by the tracer. Hence, the tracer appears much larger than the bullet itself, about the size of a tennis ball. But from the sides and rear, you're just seeing the tracer element itself without the "lampshade effect", so it appears to be a small dot of light. Or at least, that's the best explanation I could find out there. So anyway, if possible, it would be nice of tracers could keep their nice, new, beautiful smoke trails but go back to looking like tennis balls from the front :).

Guns using the Maxim action (both Vickers and Spandau) ejected the empty brass out the bottom of the receiever. So on most planes armed with these guns, where the guns were on top of the fuselage, the brass fell into a receptacle underneath. On some planes it remained there, on others it fell through and out the bottom. Those with the guns on the side of the fuselage, such as the N.28 or RE8, usually lost the brass overboard. Same with the German observers' Parabellum, which were Maxim-types. As mentioned above, Lewis guns mounted at cockpit level, such as in the DH2, usually had a bag to catch the brass so they wouldn't beat the gunner or pilot to death. They didn't bother with this when the gun was on the upper wing. Belt-fed guns used cloth belts, which for fixed guns were collected in receptacles in the fuselage. The Parabellum's belt, however, dangled back in the slipstream and gave the attacking scout pilot an idea of how much ammo the observer had left.

I find the Camel not to live up to its sinister reputation. It's not crank at all, flies hands-off quite easily, and doesn't like to spin unless you tell it to. OTOH, that "upwards spin" you can make it do if you try hard enough is quite useful sometimes. The thing about the Camel is that you've got to watch your speed. If you get too slow, especially when nose-up, you can get yourself confused if you suddenly try to turn, because you can go into that "upwards spin". This isn't something you're likely to be used to, and not knowing what's happening can cause you to think something's horribly wrong. Then you can panic and kick the controls around, just getting yourself out of control. So, just use a lot of bottom rudder in turns to keep the nose down so as not to lose too much speed. Then, if she goes flipping around unexpectedly, just relax and she'll come right out of it, usually without enough altitude loss to worry about even down in the treetops.

Actually, I think there is need for more explanation. We here in the West are fixated on the Western Front's trenches, Verdun, the Somme, Paschenndale, Meuse-Argonne, etc. But on the Eastern Front, it was completely different. Over there, they really had a war of maneuver with the front moving hundreds of kilometers at a time, despite attacks facing the same MGs and arty as in the West. Cavalry was actually quite useful, and indeed essential. I guess it was a question of the density of troops on the ground. Anyway, I just say this to show that WW1 generals weren't completely wrong-headed; what they did at the outset COULD work under the right conditions. And where it didn't work, they kept trying hard to invent new ways of doing business. Poison gas, tanks, and innovative uses of arty, MGs, smoke, and aircraft to aid the attackers, not to mention the changes in infantry tactics, the invention of the LMG, the SMG, the flamethrower, etc. Most of these things are still used today, so their innovations weren't too shabby, either. It was the great misfortune of the WW1 generation to be there when all this had to be done trial-and-error, with the error being paid for in unimaginable amounts of blood and suffering.

Aufwiedersehen ins Massengrab Wir sehen uns wieder ins Massengrab I drink to all their shades. :drink: Anybody who was in that mess deserves Valhalla. I'm twitchy enough from my own little war, and I play poker with the last handful of WW2 vets, many of whom had it worse than I did. But none of us can imagine how WW1 vets dealt with it.

I've had to put OFF aside for a couple of weeks due to real life. Basically, I lost touch when 1.28a and the optional DMs were coming out. So what have you all decided is the most realistic while I've been gone, in terms of gun settings and DM? That's what I'm after, the most realistic. If I die, I die, but I want to kill folks as they did back in the day.

My AI gunners have run out of ammo many times. So I would assume that AI fighterpilots do, too.

It is suicide. Back in my MMOFS days, my favorite thing in the world was being over an enemy airbase filled with a bunch of idiots trying to take off. I'd get in a traffic pattern with my buddies and we'd just circle around taking turns strafing every fool who appeared on the runway. Their wheels would rarely last long enough to leave the ground. We'd each get half a dozen kills in what we called a vulchfest. But then some idiot bomber pilots on our side would come along and blast the airbase, spoiling our fun because then the enemy idiots could no longer take off :(. In all my 15-year MMOFS career, I only got vulched 2 or 3 times. I had more sense than to try to fly from a capped field, having many times gleefully illustrated what happens to those who try. I'd fly from somewhere else, even if it meant spending 10 minutes getting to the action, even back in the long-ago days when played for $5/hour instead of a low monthly fee. I've only played 1 scramble, when I 1st got OFF, before I knew what it entailed. I thought it meant go intercept something inbound some distance away. When the screen cleared and I found myself being a vulch victim, I thought, "You've GOT to be kidding!" But this was back when I played from the lowest rank didn't question orders, no matter how absurd, and I didn't even know how to END FLIGHT yet (hadn't had a need--always died), so I went with it. Several tactical gambits flashed through my mind. Sitting on the ground didn't appear to be an option because I was taking hits while my motor was starting. And I was unable to sneak away for speed and altitude because a couple of badguys followed me down the runway. I soon found myself in a low, slow, lamed Albatross in a sky full of angry Nupes, so my flight was nasty, brutish, and short. After that, I swore, NEVER AGAIN! Every time I go to the briefing room and see it's a scramble, I just back out of OFF completely, restart the game, and come back to find a different type of mission. I spent 15 years avoiding being vulched, and I ain't gonna change now :)

Thanks, guys. I agree, it would help to know what the various gun settings actually do.

I NEVER do scramble missions. Taking off while your airfield is being strafed was tried by a few fools in real life, and they pretty much all died horribly before leaving the ground. What most folks did was sit in dugouts until the enemy was leaving, then perhaps go after them. Or not. A real scramble mission was taking off under no threat against inbound enemies many miles away who were reported by whatever early warning system you had at the time. Plenty of time to get altitude before the fight. If that's what scramble missions were, I'd have no problem with them.

Who says there's REAL intelligence yet? All it takes is a short walk out your door and you'll be convinced there's zero intelligent life on this planet

When starting a career, always remember that the vast majority of air ops on both sides in WW1 were in support of ground forces. This ranged from tacitcal CAS to operational recon and supply interdiction, and the fighter patrols and escorts arranged to make these "mud-moving" missions possible. Thus, air activity closely followed ground activity. When one side or the other was mounting a "push", it concentrated its squadrons there to help its ground troops, so the other side concentrated its squadrons there to interfere as much as possible. As a result, there wasn't a Hell of a lot of air activity beyond the operational axes of the current major land battles. Both sides left just enough planes (and infantry) in the "quiet" sectors to "hold the line", mostly to make sure the enemy wasn't planning a surprise attack there. The major battles fully occupied the entire military-industrial complexes of the Powers, because their existence depended on it. The casualty lists certainly reflect this. Thus, if you're not in a "hot" sector, you're not likely to see much action. BTW, this shows the name of the OFF P3 was well-chosen, no matter what some folks thought at the time back on SOH. What do you consider Heaven? What do you consider Hell? To most normal folks caught up in a war, Heaven is a quiet sector. To psychos, it's the opposite. Which are you? Look me up at www.valhalla.gov Anyway, the Germans had the smaller airforce and the whole Western Front so shifted their squadrons around to the hotspots pretty frequently. As a result, it really doesn't matter that much what unit you're in. If you want to see action, you will, with only relatively short breaks. OTOH, the Brits and French divided the front between them and didn't usually move each other's squadrons to where their own land battles were. As a result, if your section of the front is quiet for months on end, you can stay there even though a major battle is raging down the line elsewhere. And if you're a Brit, you might even be called back to defend London during the various WW1 blitzes. And then there's the US, which went on the offensive pretty much from the get-go, so you're likely to see action with them. Bottom line: learn the history of the land war of WW1 and get yourself in the right place at the right time.

If you get that Pro Clip thingy, you shouldn't have to worry about your glasses because no IR will be hitting them to confuse the system. I think that was one of the reasons they developed the Pro Clip. My old pappy came to visit a few days ago. He loves flightsims but hates having to use hats and buttons to look around. He's also "Over80" and wears impressively large and thick trifocals. I put my Pro Clip on him and he had no problems at all. As soon as he got home, he ordered himself a TIR4 and Pro Clip. I don't wear glasses, but since you started asking these questions, I've tested the Pro Clip as best I can using safety glasses and shades. Not the mirror kind, but very shiny black. No problems encountered at all. So while I'm not willing to pay you for TIR4 with Pro Clip if it doesn't work for you, I still think for you it would be a pretty safe bet :).

That one with the spiraling smoke trail in the distance is my favorite so far :).

When picking my country, timeframe, and unit, I always go for areas where the action is hot (over whatever major land battles are then in progress) and fly for the side at the disadvantage. By disadvantage I mean inferior planes and usually the burden of the offensive. A short life and a merry :). When picking my rank, I've gone to being the 2nd highest to start with. This is because, after much pain and suffering, I've decided that my AI squaddies can't be trusted to lead the flight. This really isn't a knock on the game, because in real life it's well-known that the greatest threat to ground-gaining forces is a lieutenant with a map and a compass Why should I expect AI ossifers to be any better? But I had enough of that in real life and this is MY entertainment, so I want to go where I think we should. Hence, I have "player always leads" set, and play as the 2nd highest rank to have a realistic justification for this. Besides, I personally have a lot of flight experience, so should have a pretty good rank. I role-play this by assuming that my character is on his 2nd or 3rd tour of duty, having picked up his rank and experience on quiet fronts elsewhere. I usually try to accomplish my given mission and I almost never try to get an easier alternate target. The only real exceptions are "scramble" missions, which I NEVER do because they're unrealistic, and if the target is too far away for the fuel I can carry. This said, the longer I survive, the more cynical my characters always get, so they tend to abandon misisons with less justification. They think, "Go ahead and court-martial me! What are you going to do to punish me? Send me to combat?" My primary objective is always to survive as long as possible, and to keep as many of my AI squaddies alive as possible. I don't care about scoring kills and in fact have had many enjoyable careers where I shot down nothing at all. It's just fun "being there".