Bullethead

Yeah, what he said. What you do instead is to make 2 test pilots, 1 German and 1 Entente of your choice. Name them something that brands them as test pilots (mine are Testdweeb Kraut and Testdweeb Crumpet) and use them ONLY for QC flight testing. NEVER use a real pilot in QC. Note, however, that when you start a QC mission, there's a checkbox to make your pilot undying for that QC session. I use that so I don't have to keep making new Testdweebs. But even if I forget and they buy it, I at least don't lose a real pilot. BTW, welcome aboard

Yup, reducing weight is a HUGE help at all altitudes, not just up high. I've gotten to where I only take the round trip distance plus about 20 miles, even when I have to do some sort of patrol. I figure all I have to do is get back across the trenches, not all the way home . Also, when I fly planes with only 1 Vickers, I've started taking only 75% ammo. I only rarely expend even 1/2 my ammo in those planes because I've found the only way to kill efficiently in them is with point-blank snapshots of 6-8 rounds each. If those hit, they go into the cockpit and down he goes. But there are also some stick-and-rudder things you can do to vastly increase your high-altitude performance. Initially, I had the same problems as you at high altitude, but this is how I solved them. Hope this works for you. The obvious reason you can't maneuver is that you're not going fast enough. Sure, you're plane is a bit slower at high altitude than down low, but it can go a lot faster up high than you might think. The object, therefore, is to trim it so it will go as fast as it can. The underlying problem is that these WW1 planes climb best at about 80% of their max level speed for a given altitude. It's like if they get any significant angle of attack, the increased drag from the belly being exposed more to the airstream overpowers them. If you came to OFF as I did from WW2, this takes some getting used to because there the planes climb best at like 40-50% of their max level speeds. In OFF, if you try to climb at a lower speed, you get left by your AI wingmen both horizontally and vertically, at least at low altitudes. At high altitudes, the planes won't climb AT ALL unless they're about 80% of their max level speed, and otherwise just mush along with a big AOA, slower than they're capable of and not gaining any altitude. Then they don't have enough speed for ACM. I bet this is your problem. Most OFF planes spawn on the ground with lots of up elevator trim. If you don't get rid of that by the time you reach high altitude, you'll soon be mushing and unable to keep up or maneuver. So here's what you do. Use the HUD ASI, VSI, and AH, and make a bunch of test flights in QC Freeflight, noting the speeds that climb the best all the way up, and noting how much elevator trim you need to do them. Most OFF planes seem to maintain their max speed almost entirely up to about 10,000', but the ROC starts dropping off at about 5,000'. Above 10,000', the effect of too much up elevator trim becomes pronounced, so you'll have to make more frequent down adjustments from there on up. However, while the ROC begins to approach zero, the max level speed doens't decrease that much. Most OFF planes can still do about 75-85% of their low-altitude max speed at their ceilings. So keep that in mind on your way up and try to trim so your speed is what you think about 80% of your current max speed is. Eventually you won't be able to get any higher, but look how fast you're going! Take a good look around and try to develop a mental picture of what this angle of attack (only slightly positive) looks like. You'll mostly have to compare against clouds and the sun because even without clouds it's hard to see the horizon from up there. The idea, though, is to learn what this looks like from your built-in instruments and what you see outside, so you can do it without the HUD. Now try some maneuvers. You'll lose altitude with ever turn, but note that you're no longer anemic and the AI doens't seem supercharged. If the other guy is turning inside you and you don't think he'd be able to, or you're not able to turn inside planes you think you should, the answer is probably that the other guy is making better use of the vertical. WW1 planes are VERY sensitive to drag. And in ACM, one of the huge sources of drag is moving both elevator and aileron at the same time. Always try to move your control stick in +, using one or the other, but not both. Avoid moving the stick like an X. You'd be amazed at how much difference this makes. Now in OFF, this isn't always possible. The Fee, for instance, is SO damn stable that the ONLY way to maintain a banked turn is to hold in aileron all the way around. But OTOH, the Fee's too arthritic for much real ACM anyway. And sometimes you WANT to do both at once as an evasive maneuver. But otherwise, avoid X motions like the plague and you'll see a dramatic improvement in your ability to maneuver, because you'll have more speed and won't be inducing accelerated stalls nearly as often. Yeah, rudder is quite different in OFF than elsewhere, AND it differs greatly in how it works from plane to plane within OFF. Thus, there's no easy explanation here. Some planes actually have to do most of their turning with their rudder, while in a few you only use it to improve your aim. Some planes can crab along with full rudder at like 45^ to their direction of travel, some planes immediately stall and spin if you try this. You just have to get used to what your current ride does. I have never tried to do a flat turn in a Dr.I. There was a big thread here some months ago on that subject, apparently mostly folks complaining that they couldn't do it. I don't know if anybody ever posted the method or not. I didn't read it all because it was becoming a flamewar and I don't fly the Dr.I much at all anyway. But I'll give it a go one of these days. Anyway, this has strayed rather off topic. My initial point was merely to say that before we accuse the AI of cheating, we must be damn sure of our own flying abilities. I'm only close to mastery in 4 or 5 of all the planes in OFF, and when I fly them, the AI doens't seem to cheat a bit. When I fly something else, the AI often flies rings around me, but still never appears to cheat. If it does, it's not enough to notice. It just looks like a very good human getting the most out of his ride. I've got like 15 years of fairly intensive MP simming under my belt, where I've been instructed by and flown against real-life fighter jocks and even Top Gun instructors. So I think I have a pretty good understanding of what's humanly possible. I know very well what it looks like to fight a human who is very good at flying his plane, and how that compares to how a real cheating AI looks (remember those?). They don't look at all alike--you can tell right off from the defiance of gravity that cheating AIs get away with. I submit that the OFF AI flies like an expert human.

I don't see any real difference here anymore. When P3 1st came out, the clouds were horrible, plane-eating monsters, at least to humans. They have since been tamed, however, so IMHO that's now a wash. Also in P3, there aren't really any short-term gusts, just sudden changes in the long-term strength and direction of the wind. This seems to affect the AI as much as me, or at least if it doesn't, it doesn't make a noticeable difference. Are you talking about your own wingmen or the enemy? Altitude performance is very much a function of the specific plane--some handle it much better than others. So say you're an Albatros pilot who is used to having way more macho than Pups, but all your fights so far have been at 10,000' and below. Then one day you meet Pups at 16,000' and they're swooping around while you're gasping for breath. That happens in the game and is what happened in real life, so no problem there. OTOH, if you're gasping for breath and your AI wingmen are zipping around like at sea level, then that would be a legit problem. I haven't seen that happen, however. AI pilots have the ability, at least at the higher pilot skill levels, to get the ABSOLUTE max performance out of their rides. They can be set to know EXACTLY where the edge of the flight envelope is for any given regime and to hold 0.0001whatever units just on the safe side of it. I'm convinced OFF has such an AI, at least for the aces. It can do things I usually can't, but I've never seen it do things that are blatantly impossible and which I know I could do at least once in a while if I wasn't drunk. But even sober, us ham-fisted humans can try for that level of perfection but, at best, even with lots of practice, we can only approach but will never quite reach it. The best AIs will always beat us in pure stick-and-rudder work. IOW, if the game was merely about performing a set pattern of aerobatic maneuvers judged on the circularity of the loops and the sharpness of the 4-point rolls, etc., the top-end AIs would win every single time because they can do them perfectly and we can't. Humans beat such AIs in combat, however, by knowing or inventing countertactics, by spotting patterns in its behavior over repeated exposure no matter how often we die, etc. AIs, no matter how good they are at pure flying, only have a limited bag of tricks. There will always be some move for which they have no effective answer, or some move you can use to exploit some habit of theirs. Anyway, the more I fly OFF, the less super-human the AI looks in terms of what it can do with its plane compared to what I can do. In those planes that I fly the most, I can now do almost everything I've seen the AI do. Not quite all the moves, and I still screw some of the more extreme ones up fairly regularly, but I chalk that up to the AI having better control and built-in consistency, as opposed to super powers. So at the bottom line, and I hope you don't take offense here, if the AI is flying circles around you, I submit that you either don't have enough experience in your chosen ride. That's already in the game. I've bounced quite a few AI flights. It's even possible to make quick diving passes, even killing the AI tail-end Charilie as you go by, and have the AI not notice, so you can repeat the process.

Anybody heard from him lately?

Well, it was on The Onion, so yeah, I'd say it was a joke <BR><BR>But you gotta hand it to the bastids. They hit so many nails on the head with 1 swing it's almost not funny <IMG class=bbc_emoticon alt= src="http://forum.combatace.com/public/style_emoticons/default/good.gif">

I don't doubt you're honestly reporting what you've seen. But I've seen what I've seen. All I can say is that Vista has gotten a far worse reputation than it deserves, and is much more common than many folks here would like to admit. As I said, this forum is the last and strongest bastion of XP I'm aware of. Sure, Vista's got problems, but they're nowhere near as bad as rumor makes them seem. Vista is in fact a substantial improvement in many ways over XP, and has served me well for a long time. Given the choice, I'd pick Vista over XP. And I'll surely be on Win7in the near future. It's true that some things that ran under XP won't run under Vista, and even fewer XP things will run under Win7. But IMHO that's not a reason to cling to XP as your main OS, anymore than hanging onto Win95 was for running DOS apps. Get an emulator. Now, I agree that WW1 flightsims worthy of the name are few and far between. However, if OBD chooses to keep OFF shackled to XP instead of moving with the times, then OFF's days are numbered. XP is ancient, it hasn't been supported in a long time, and is now 2 generations old. It was good while it lasted by it's gone gone gone.

I take it you run a shop that builds custom rigs? OK, I can see where you're coming from. But I submit that a far greater number of folks buy from Best Buy, Dell, or whatever, where their choice of OS is far more limited. Just because somebody's a serious simmer doesn't make him a serious hardware guru. So he reads the reviews, which naturally are only on commonly available systems and compenents, and buys something off the shelf. All I can say is what my tech support tells me. And Vista is by far the most-common OS out there.

I have to disagree. Remember, I make PC sims for a living, too. I know that the majority of my customers have Vista 32, closely followed by those with Vista 64. In any case, Vista in whichever form is the vast bulk of my customer base. A few diehards still have XP but those with Win7 are rapidly catching up and I expect them to outnumber the XPers by the end of this year (as in 31 days from now), and become the majority over Vista by the end of next year at the latest (personally, I'm betting on September 2010). Needless to say, the last thing we want to do as a small indy is support 3 disparate OSes, so we're hoping for a speedy death for XP. I sure won't mourn it. This forum is the only stronghold of XP holdhouts that I've encountered in the last year or 2. Granted, this forum is important to you all at OBD because it's a significant fraction, and definitely the most vocal faction, of your customers. But let's face facts here. As we all know from bitter and expensive experience going back a couple of decades, the service life of a gaming rig worthy of the name is only about 2-3 years, depending on how much you spend originally and how much you spend to upgrade it over its short life. That's if you're serious about simming, but only the serious simmers buy either of our products. So, Vista has been out 2 years and 10 months to the day as we speak. Thus, practically every serious gamer still playing games on a PC (as opposed to a console) has bought a new rig since Vista came out. And damn near every new rig purchased in the last 2 years and 10 months has come with Vista. I'm willing to go all-in with just the last 2 years, and leave the odd 10 months to the period where you had a choice between XP and Vista, even conceding those who preferred XP but went with Vista because they knew which way the wind was blowing. Remember, we're talking sim (aka performance) junkies here. Bottom line, I submit that the only folks still clinging to XP are those who are either too broke to have bought a new system in the last 2 years and 10 months, or are among the tiny and steadily shrinking number of customers who build their "new" systems around their old HD with whatever OS it has, biting the bullet on its inability to maximize performace with their new, high-dollar hardware. But even these folks will, within a matter of months, have to break down and buy a Win7 machine. There's no escaping the march of technology and the planned obselescence of old stuff. Us devs can't hold back the advance of technology, but have to keep coming out with new features to exploit the new hardware. Otherwise we go out of business. This forces our customers to buy the new technology to play our games. As we all here should know by now. All that aside, I have to admit that I've used Vista for the past 1.5 years, and like it WAY better than XP. Sure, it's got its problems, but it's so much better than XP in so many ways that I can't understand at all the fear of it amongst folks here.

Works for me. It's red airshow smoke coming off your plane. Looks very cool, SD :).

Right now I have Vista 32, which ain't on the above list. I plan to get Win7 64 sometime next year, when the initial batch of bugs have been squashed, the drivers have been fine-tuned, and I buy a new computer.

Always glad to be of service in helping make OFF better. I eagerly await all these new features, perhaps in P4? . I must say, they had some very good technical advisers in making that video. It was all SO TRUE, even the parts about coming home.

Here's a cautionary tale on including too much realism in a game. All devs should take heed http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ultra_realistic_modern_warfare

Very pretty.

The biggest problem with the current game engine is the strangeness that happens at very low and/or slightly negative airspeeds. In this regime, the flight mechanics completely fall apart. It appears that if there is the slightest negative component in the wind direction relative to the wings, such as after a wings-level, nose-high stall. In such cases, it appears that ALL "atmospheric" air effects are ignored, but gravity and propwash over the tail surfaces remain in force. Planes in this regime tend to fall vertically with increasing velocity, maintaining their nose-high attitude without the slightest tendency for the relative wind coming up from below to weathervane their noses down and thus recreate a positive airflow over the wings. The ONLY way to recover from this is to gun the motor to create the most propwash over the tail, and hold full down elevator to force the nose down. As soon as the nose gets below the horizon and positive airspeed resumes, the plane instantly returns to flying normally. A related problem is the tendency of a number of planes (Pfalz D.III, Fokker E.III, etc.) to fall out of the air sideways. Despite the center of gravity being well forward, the air supposedly blowing by the side of the fuselage and the vertical tail has no effect on pointing the nose down. This tends to happen even at otherwise flyable forward speeds, but I'm sure it's all part of the same hole in the flight mechanics. These things kill a lot of players, but they also kill the AI very frequently. I'm sure the whole thing about the AI at low altitudes and speeds just pancaking is merely the result of the AI not knowing how to deal with the flight model problem. Instead of doing down elevator to exploit the propwash effect as the only viable method to regain control, it holds up elevator because it knows it's going down and the ground is close. Hence, it's never able to return to a flyable regime in the flight model. As a quick fix to the AI, therefore, maybe you could make it try some down elevator in such situations until such times as its plane starts flying again, then have it do up elevator. Besides the above AI tweak, I'd like to see the following: 1. AI 2-seat with no conventional rear guns (at present, just Quirks and Fees, but hopefully others in the future) should do Lufbery Circles automatically, and there should be a player command (regardless of aircraft type) to order his flight to do a Lufbery Circle. 2. AI tractor 2-seaters should weave from side to side when attacked from below and behind by scouts, at least if they're aware they're being attacked. This is to give their gunners a shot. Same if they're under Archie fire. I remember modders made this happen in RB2/3D, for example the FCJ package. If the player is flying the 2-seater, his wingmen should do this without being prompted. 3. AI planes should hold their fire if there's a friendly plane (human or AI) between them and their chosen target. Even better, if this condition persists, the AI planes should pick a different target instead of following along uselessly with a closer friendly in the way. I'm rather tired of getting shot in the back by my own guys, AND losing wingmen this way. Otherwise, I'd like the following things: The ability to specifiy my own mission waypoints if I'm the flight leader. Especially if I do this in the knowledge of where known AA concentrations are. The ability to specify my own altitudes for waypoints WHILE IN FLIGHT, so I can still warp even if I find, once I get to the airfield, that the cloud is much lower than the briefed mission altitude. Otherwise, have the pre-set mission altitude take the weather conditions into account. The ability for TIR to work in gunner positions. The flight not to end until the wreck of my plane actualy hits the ground. And for the black-out and red-out effects NOT to happen in external views, so I can take good shots of my horrible death.

I don't have enough time for 1, let alone 2, and I wouldn't want to steal Siggi's thunder. However, it would be fun if the Crumpets had to fly Fees as their fighter ride

Another sign of the coming Apochaclypse--Ohlam in a Nupe Anyway, I think you'll find your Alb flying better for this. As you've noticed, the Nupe requires a light touch. Getting the hang of that will carry over into more finesse with heavier birds. Just watch turning left too hard for too long, or you'll find yourself in a right-hand spin

I know the feeling. A few months back, I hung my RB2 CD (I needced its "superpatch" to make it RB3D) on my trophy wall side-by-side with the most blood-soaked mementos of my real life. I suppose one day, perhaps when P4 comes out, I'll replace the RB2 CD with my P3 CD.

Thanks to lots of help, especially from Stumpy and Hairyspin, I'm making slow but reasonably sure progress on my 1st model, as time permits. The airframe is now pretty much complete except for bracing wires, which I haven't yet decided how best to do. I've even built a Vickers in a separate file, which I've been able to add to the plane and it even came out at the right scale , although it still needs the butt pad and the ammo belt chutes. While I'm cogitating over the bracing wires, I'm going to start on the engine, prop, and spinner. Anyway, I thought I'd post this up to show all those who have helped me that they're not completely wasting their time answering my questions. Something IS slowly being hammered together at Bullethead Aerospace Development, where our motto is, "We only make BAD airplanes." It's still months from completion, but the more I do, the more I enjoy it, so the more likely it is that it will eventually fly after a fashion. Thanks again for the help

Thank Dark Gods for Stump

Would it be possible to make a mod where you have to shoot King Kong off the top of the Eiffel Tower? Maybe animating him to swat at you can't be done, but I still think it would be cool to see him up there when touring Paris

Seriously, how do they expect me to do any arty spotting in this crap?

Thanks for the encouragement and the tips. I think I've learned about as much from this pig of a Bristol as I want to for something I'm really not really that interested in anyway (especially considering it was only used in Macedonia and other such outremer places). So I'm moving on to something a bit more complex and closer to home, and will try to do better. Being a wuss, I'll try another monoplane. Anybody ever heard of the MS Type AI?

The Zeppelin in Combat: A History of the German Naval Airship Division 1912-1918, but Douglas H. Robinson This might sound like an Osprey title, but it's not. It's a real book, originally published in the early 1960s from research done in the late 1950s. It has tons of information, ranging from stats and operational histories of every naval zep, to narratives of all raids and each loss, plus all the patrols that made enemy contact. There's also a glossary of terms which not only provides the bare meanings, but goes into context and thereby largely explains how the airships were constructed and actually functioned as flying machines. This latter subject is actually a lot more technical and counter-intuitive than I had thought, so I really learned a lot from this book. There are also beaucoup excellent photos. But what really makes it special to me is that it was written when many zep vets were still alive, so has a bunch of their 1st-hand accounts in it, too, including that of one of the very few people to survive being shot down in flames in a zep. I, like probably most of you all, had always thought zep crewmen had cast iron balls even by the standards of WW1 aviators, but until reading this book I had just been thinking in terms of riding 2 million cubic feet of hydrogen over enemy territory. As it turns out, that was actually one of the least of their problems. After all, being burned alive was pretty common in all forms of WW1 aviation. What makes the zeps more extreme is that they were essentially the space program of their day. They were on the bleeding edge of many different new, untried, and unreliable technologies, all used to explore the uncharted territory of the upper atmosphere. And on top of that, most of this R&D was rushed through under war-emergency conditions and was tested under hostile fire. So taking this all into account, the big surprise to me is that ONLY 40% of zep crews were killed in the line of duty, in combat and accidents. The book highlights the many problems the zeps had operating for extended periods (like most of a day) at 15-20 thousand feet. Everything from the crew freezing and becoming useless from lack of oxygen, to the immense navigational problems, to the many different types of hardware failures and inadequacies revealed up high, are all covered, besides the unpredictable and violent nature of the winds aloft. which ruined many missions and zeps even on those relatively rare occasions when the other factors could be dealt with. Think about how duralumin contracts more in cold than steel, so that all the control cables would jump off their pulleys. Think about radiator water freezing and splitting radiators during the time it took cold-numbed and anoxic mechanics to clean oiled-up spark plugs. But while until mid-1918 zeps could fly higher than any airplane, and could easily outclimb the late models, the relative saftey of high altitude came at the price of mission inefficiency. The higher they went, the more clouds were between them and the ground, so the less they could see on scouting missions, the less accurately they could bomb, and the less certain their navigation. The Germans developed radio bearing navigation systems, but it wasn't until after the war that anybody realized how far off these systems were, and what was needed to correct them. All in all, the book shows that zeps were a fascinating mix of high and low technology. The above technical snags are to be expected given our OFFer's understanding of the era in general, but until reading this book I never realized several amazing things. For instance, despite being at the then-apex of aviation technology, it only took about 6-8 weeks to build a new zep from scratch. Major repairs, such as rebuilding about 1/4 of the ship's length after a landing accident, could be accomplished in a matter of days. But what really gets me is that the Germans, from first to last, relied on a battalion of ground personnel to manhandle the zeps in and out of their hangars. There were no mechanical devices used apart from sliding mooring bitts on tracks in front of the hangars, to which zeps were secured against crosswinds. But actually pushing them in and out of the hangar, plus holding them to the ground, was all done by the muscles and weight of about 400 guys pulling on ropes. In fact, when a zep landed off the field, these guys would march over and literally carry it back, sometimes several miles. This brings up images of building the pyramids, but remember that the zep service was naval, and this was the early 20th Century. Most naval personnel of any service length in those days had been raised on square-rigged ships, where using a few hundred guys to pull ropes was part of the daily routine. Thus, I suppose this didn't seem so odd to them at the time. Anyway, this is a great book that all here should read.

I recall somebody mentioning that the Zep mod currently available can only be flown dynamically. There's no mechanism to handle the static lift of the gas, nor do the complex balancing act of venting gas and dropping ballast from selected regions along the length. Without this part, it seems having a zep in the game would be very incomplete and inaccurate. I wonder how you'd go about doing this? Another complication is that in real life, the control functions were located in different places around the control car, worked by dfferent people. Rudder in the front, elevator and ballast to port, and throttles to starboard. IOW, in OFF terms, it would be like having to hit F6 to jump between all these places, and I don't know if it's even possible to set it up like that. Still, it would be fun to have zeps in OFF, that's for sure.

To me, it looks more like he's reacting to the miasma just emitted by the dysentery-sufferer he's talking to