Hellshade

These pictures from a recon flight show indisputable evidence of why Germany lost the war, despite excellent aircraft and the will of a great nation. There can be no doubt that instead of flying routine patrols, Hun Pilots have been spending their time surfing off the coast of France! Maybe Charlie doesn't surf, but evidently Fritz does! Reports have it that he was able to fit two bikini clad beach babes in the cockpit before heading back to base. Hellshade

Frankly, the scenery alone will be worth the full price of the upgrade. Simply amazing work gentleman. Can't wait to see what you've done with the AI but I'm guessing it'll be no less spectacular than the graphics overhaul. Hellshade

Interrupter gear and flame throwers are one thing. But cheating at a fishing tournement?!? That's just a little too far. Hellshade

Exactly. I knew somebody would catch the reference. Hellshade

Yes, the extra spread of the bullets was exactly what I was looking for. I agree very much that the guns back then were very accurate and Richtofen himself was known to have shot down so many planes because he was an excellent marksman and an only average "flyer". But my justification (in my head) for using the less accurate gun spread is because the sim cannot possibly account for the effect of zero degree temperatures in an open cockpit at 100Mph on a human pilot. It can't mimic the true emotional stress of real air combat. As great as any flight sim might be, there are simply factors beyond it's ability to produce that have a genuine effect on combat effectiveness. I don't disagree that the guns are accurate or even if shooting while flying is more difficult. It's the intense cold. It's the paranoia of it being your 30th combat mission in 10 days and you haven't slept well in 2 weeks because you've lost a friend every day since the begining of the new offensive. It's the fear that at any time, the enemy could show up in a new type of plane that yours is no match for and you'll have to figure out how to survive. All of these factors have an effect on your marksmanship. Without ever being hit by a bullet, the human psyche can still crack under the pressure and as the stress gets greater and greater, it can't help but throw off your skills. The extra bullets spread comes close enough to mimicing that for me, so thats why I use it. Hellshade

If you're like me and looking to make it even harder to shoot down aircraft, I highly recommend the following combination of mods and settings. HPW's Ultimate Damage Model 1.0 HPW's Allied & German FM 1.0. HPW's Front Guns and Rear Guns mods. Creaghorns Tracer Mod(s) and Dead is Dead settings, but with both Front and Rear Gun accuracy set to Less Accurate. Here's how these settings and mods make it harder (notice I didn't say "more realistic", because that is a very subjective thing.) HPWs Ultimate Damage Mod does a lot of stuff, but in a nutshell, it makes it so you need to hit vital areas of a plane in order to have any chance of shooting it down quickly. Engine, Pilot and Fuel tank. You can put lots of holes in wings and fuselage before it looses any real agility or suffers structural failure. With this mod, you can empty your guns into an enemy plane and it's still possible to come home empty handed. HPW's Allied and German Flight Models just make some changes so that the enemy AI is less likely (it still happens but not as bad) to pull up into a climb and then just hang there as a sitting duck for your guns. HPW's Front and Rear Gun mods reduce the accuracy of both the players and AI's front and rear guns. It makes attacking a 2 seater from behind a little less dangerous, but it also makes your bullet stream less accurate as well. You need to get closer in order for more of your bullets to hit their mark. Creaghorns various Tracer / Smoke Trail mods replace the default tracers in OFF:BH&H with either thin white smoke trails or very small tracer rounds that are harder to see. It also removes the falling debris effects for when you hit the enemy, making it harder to see if your rounds are even hitting their target. Creaghorns Sound Tweak II doesn't have anything to do with making it hard to shoot down planes but it's a wonderful mod for adding even more immersion into OFF:BH&H. Even with all of that, if you have bullseye like accuracy, it can still be possible to rack up a score that would make Mick Mannock blush. After all, we flying the sim are not in zero degree weather at 100Mph in an open cockpit. We are not afraid of real death and we have 1,000's of hours in a flight sim, etc, etc. It's unrealistic to expect fully realistic kill results when so many factors that normally work against a true combat pilot are not any concern at all to we virtual pilots. Plus Richtofen never pressed pause during combat then went to the kitchen to make himself a sandwich and get a beer. Some of us may have. It's obviously not just OFF:BH&H. That's true of every sim. In most flight sims,(WWI and WWII) I am a Tour de Force of Air Combat. In real life, I'd kill myself attempting to take off. That's just the truth. So in addition to all of this, I found changing the Front and Rear Gun settings in the Workshop to Less Accurate makes it very hard to kill an enemy plane in a single pass, even if they are stalled out and hanging there at the top of a climb. To me, this adds greatly to the excitement and difficulty of air combat in OFF:BH&H. It used to be that if I ever saw a plane pulling up in a climb, I was all but guaranteed a kill especially if I was flying something that was easy to manuever my gun sights right onto them, such as in a Pup or Triplane. You may have noticed that in some of my videos. By setting Front Guns in Workshop to Less Accurate in addition to all of the above mods, getting a kill takes a lot of work. There's rarerly if ever a single pass kill now. In a campaign setting I can expend all of my ammo in combat and while I will probably damage a number of planes, I might only bring down one or two. Also, because getting a kill takes longer for me, it gives my wingman more time to get kills of their own, leaving less for me to mop up. If you're already running the above mods AND if you normally have a very high kill rate that you'd like to see brought down a bit, I highly recommend making a test pilot, changing the Front and Rear Guns accuracy in the Workshop to Less Accurate and trying out the difference in combat. Before, when I took off for a mission on a campaign, I was pretty certain I was going to come home with a number of kills. Now I am not so certain I will come back with any at all. And oddly enough, that's a very exciting thing to me. Usually I post videos of the stuff I do. This time I'll just recommend you try it out for yourself and let me know what you think. Thanks to everyone in the community and OBD who has worked so hard to make OFF:BH&H a first class WWI air combat sim. Hellshade

Well thank you gentleman. That's the whole reason I started making videos. The videos that Polovoski had put out prior to Phase 3 being released had me totally sold. I figured some HD videos showing actual player pilot experience in OFF:BH&H would be the perfect counter-weight to all those old "But it's using CFS3 engine" arguments. People could just show someone some of the videos and say "look at the quality. Look at how much they have put into this in terms of details and historical accuracy." I was even able to get a couple of videos approved for displaying on the official TrackIR website showing how OFF:BH&H supports TrackIR. A nice little recruiting tool I hope. By the way, this particular video was actually shot before the "Failed Balloon Mission" video that has such spectacular AI fighting skills. "Reflections of an Unknown Airmen" is not using HPWs Front Guns Mod and the Workshop Gun Accuracy setting was at Accurate, instead of Less Accurate. You can clearly see the difference between the two videos on how much more challenging it is to shoot down an enemy aircraft when using HPW's Front Guns mod and the Less Accurate gun settings in the Workshop. I almost didn't make the "Reflections" video because of that but I decided I could hopefully come up with a compelling enough script that maybe it wouldn't seem as noticable. Hellshade

Yes, I have still been using easy. But worth a try to change it and see how that works too. Always good to try all of the options sir. Hellshade

I'm working with HPW to test out something that should reduce the likelihood of the "suicidal winglame duck" issue substantially. We can't change the AI but we can try to make it so they don't lose agility as quickly in some instances. Hellshade

Totally understandably Winder. We appreciate you focusing on making P4 the best possible experience all the way around. For most of us, P3 will be a distant memory the moment P4 shows up on our hard drives. Your time, efforts and talents are put to best use on P4. Hellshade

Thanks for the compliments guys. Yes, Herr Prop-Wasche, I am using all of the mods that I posted at the start of the thread, plus I have Gun Accuracy set to Less Accurate . It makes a huge difference in the performance of the AI, both your wingman and your opponents when they are not crippled so easily by shots. I was also using Bletchley's Active Sector mod for early 1917. I know Creaghorn prefers the gun setting to normal, but I have found I'm still able to "snipe" pilots and engines too easily that way. Thats purely a personal preference. I know the guns were very accurate then, but I like to think the "Less Accurate" Workshop setting (coupled with HPWs Front & Rear Gun Mods) is a reflection of the fact that, while the guns themselves are very accurate, a real life pilot has freezing cold winds, rain, vertigo, fear, etc to deal with that certainly all can have an impact on your reactions and how well you can shoot. I encourage everyone to try out the mods and settings above if you want to make the fights even more challenging. The beauty of using the JSGME software is that you can try many different things and not worry about ruining your OFF:BH&H game. If you don't like something, just change it back by unselecting the mod within JGSME. What do you have to lose? Hellshade

Speaking of stories to tell your grandchildren from your days serving in the air campaign... On May 16th, 1917 a flight of RNAS 10 Sopwith Triplanes were tasked with protecting Observation Balloons during a heavy summer storm. A squadron of Albatros set upon us and an epic dogfight ensued. Neither side was willing to give up or give quarter in this no holds barred, vicious furball. Hellshade

Yes, yes sir. Control cables only. Those little things that should hardly ever really be hit. I don't want helpless enemy pilots who can only watch as I pull in slowly behind them and unload my guns at my leisure. With the control cables rarely ever hit, the planes agility (in HPWs Ultimate Damage Model) only loses agility very slowly based on the % of damage done to the wings and control surfaces themselves. That means they fight hard until the end! Those are the noblest of victories for me to savor and the ones you wish to tell your great grandchildren about someday. Hellshade

Winder had confirmed in a previous thread to Uncleal that QC would in fact remain. Have no fears gentleman. Hellshade

And that's why I've been looking for ways to reduce the number of kills that I can make. HPWs mods have been invaluable. I can't wait until his next version is ready for testing. Cable hits will be dropped to 5%. That will give the enemy AI a much better chance at putting up a longer, more intense fight. Hellshade

Somewhere around what Mick Mannock got sounds good to me. Hellshade

I've seen a number of Albs do barrel rolls. Might have even caught a few of them in some of my videos. Immelman? Nope, I can't say that I have. But I haven't seen any other WWI sim doing them either, nor have I seen an AI so advanced that it could literally "train" a player on how to be a flight leader or fight in combat by example. That'll be great when it happens, but I suspect it'll be a very long ways off in the future. Also, WWI sims have a unique challenge in that the planes simply don't have the horsepower to recover large amounts of altitude in short order. I can be on the deck in a Spitfire and zoom damn near straight up into the clouds just by sheer horsepower in Wings of Prey. So can most WWII sim AI pilots. That gives the AI programmers a lot more flexibility in how to program what their AI pilots will do and that inherently adds to the difficulty of the fight. In WWI, the fights tend to stay at current level at best and generally work their way lower as planes burn off energy and lose the ability to recover lost altitude. Long before we ever get to see flight AI leaders excercising true leadership abilities, I think we'll see code that helps keep the fights at higher altitude for much longer because the programers will get better at energy management of the AI planes, making them less likely to feel the need to dive towards the deck as soon as a few rounds hit home. I'd love to see a lot more barrel rolls, sharp evasive and unpredictable turns to shake players off the AIs tail and even attempts to loop over and get on the six of the player. That will add a whole new dimension to the combat. The day will come and I wouldn't at all be suprised to see OBD leading the way. All that said, we're farther ahead in flight sims than I ever imagined we'd be 10 years ago. So who knows what another 10 years will bring. Hellshade

HPWs & Creaghorns mods are invaluable, IMHO. Thank God the Devs also saw fit to make so many options in the Workshop to custom tailor the experience to each of our personal tastes as well. Anyways, I used to be able to take down a hun in a single pass, especially if they were pulled up into a stall. Here's a quick 1:30 video taken from an actual campaign mission. In the end, I still got him but it took a lot longer and I used a lot more rounds than I used too. That gave my wingmen more time to get some kills of their own and left me fewer rounds to make additional kills with. Plus, with HPW's latest Ultimate Damage Model 1.0, you can see how much agility the enemy Albatros has even after I pour several bursts into his wings and fuselage. In fact it's not until after a long burst that makes the pilot scream does he begin to fly straight and level as if wounded. It's quite good. There are a lot fewer wounded 'sitting ducks' up in the skies now. Thats just how I like it. Hellshade Die Hard (1:35) 1080HD

I don't know about them never teaming up to work together. I've learned from experience that if you follow someone too far down into a dive, it's not unlikely that he's pulling you on a wild goose chase just to give his wingman time to sneak onto your six and do some serious damage. It's happened more than enough times that now I usually like to check my six even in the middle of a dive now and then. Of course none of it's real AI. It's programmed and it has it's limitations in CFS3 just like in any flight simulator. But with no ding to any sim out there, I find myself needing to check my six more in OFF than any other flight sim I play. Making them co-ordinate as a team regularly probably is beyond any flight sims ability to do at the moment, but without trying to raise expectations too high, who the hell knows that the wizards at OBD are cooking up for us in P4. I'm guessing an even more like-like AI is on their list. Hellshade

What's in store for you with HPWs Ultimate Damage Model? Watch Barmy Films Overview to find out! Herr Prop Wasche's Ultimate Damage Model (5:25) 1080HD Hellshade

I'm looking forward to shooting some P4 movies, hopefully sometime in the not too distant future. Hellshade

Setting guns to normal won't take care of the flammers. Creaghorn is just saying that the most realistic combat experience takes place when your guns are set to normal. HPW is indeed working on an update to try and get rid of some of the eternally flying flaming planes along with making cables stronger, etc. I look forward to it very much. Hellshade

A man after my own heart. If you can't spit on him with a good wind on your back, then he better be hanging there motionless in front of your guns for a good few seconds in order for you to have time to line up a shot that's going to matter. Preferrably both! Within 200 feet and motionless relative to the guns on your plane. If you're patient enough to wait for those events to occur before you open fire, you'll have a good score to take home with you. Hellshade

Yes, agility is slightly reduced, but at least how it is modeled in OFF:BH&H, it's an easy trade off to make. Here's a short video of straffing the front lines in the twin gun version of the triplane. Straffing Gound Units on the Front Lines (1:24) 1080 Hellshade

I was flying along with RNAS 8 in our recently deployed new Sopwith Camels when off in the distance I spotted a small furball. I zoomed in on the combatants and lo and behold I spy a twin gun Sopwith Triplane. If I remember correctly, only like 6 of them were deployed. Simply amazing that the Devs included them in the campaign. I never got close enough to see what squadron he was in as we got jumped by Alb DIIIs from up high. I wish I found out what squadron he was deployed too. I'd like to try flying one in the campaign sometime. Hellshade