Hellshade

I guess it's just me then. Or maybe a lucky string of a few QC flights where the AA happens to get quite a few near misses. I'll try a campaign and see if I notice any difference there. Hellshade

Well there you have it, my friend. Allied aircraft were built to keep the wings on as long as possible for the purpose of helping to help extend out from the point of impact and block the maximum amount of enemy runway per vertical plant. Now, no offense intended, but had you bloody Huns been that clever, things might have turned out differently for you. Instead, while you focused on fighting in the air with your twin gunned areoplanes, I have been busy making sure they never get off the ground to fight. Between that and BigJims prisoner pilots eating all of the food, you never had a chance. It's ok to be in awe of such a rare combination of "brilliance" and dedication. No hard feelings, right? Hellshade

Oh but it WAS better piloting my friend. How else could I vertically plant my crate right smack in the center of the bosche airfields? That's part of the secret to our success. We make you feel overconfident while simultaneously lowering your ability to fight. Hellshade

I couldn't tell you. I stopped playing it because, respectfully, I found OFF BHaH to be a far more fulfilling experience. I think most of the folks here are either in the "never play it" or "wait til they fix all the bugs, introduce a bunch of new content and remove the required internet connection to play" boat. I suspect you'd have to ask on the RoF forums to get a good answer to your question but I will say that it certainly sounds like a good theory. Hellshade

Add to that my strategy of permanently vertically parking my aircraft all through their airfields and soon they won't be able to have enough room to take off with any of their own planes! Brilliantly sneaky, if I do say so myself. Hellshade

1. There were no breaks on these kites. I believe <shift> M shuts off the engine once you've touched down. 2. The graphics recommendations should be good for any game. You can always experiement, but I think you'll be in good shape. 3. Set your TrackIR so that you can look down and see your gauges. Believe me when I say though that to survive 95% of the time you need to be looking around for Enemy Airplanes. If you have a Force Feedback joystick (I don't anymore, *sigh*) then you can actually feel when your plane is about to stall out which helps significantly. 4. I think you can adjust your default Field of View (FoV) in the Workshop settings. 5. I went into TrackIR and turned off all of the axis except 1 at a time X, then Y, then Z, etc and adjusted each setting to my perference. It's less confusing to do it when you are only dealing with one axis at a time. 6. I use Alt Tab myself so if there is a better method I'd like to hear it. 7. According to a recent poll, the majority of people use the Hardcore Damage Model. 8. Yes. Perpare to die a lot, especially if you fly "Dead is Dead" rules. It's not the worst idea in the world to start a Test Pilot, change your Workshop settings to "Easiest : Pilot Never Dies" and run a lot of practice Quick Combat flights to get used to the different types of planes. You just have to fly an SE5A and then a Sopwith Camel to get an idea of how different the flight models for the craft really are. All that said, prepare to have the most complete and immersive WWI air campaign experience you have ever had. There is so much to do in OFF, you'll be discovering stuff for years. Welcome to Over Flanders Fields. Hellshade

That is true. We are living in the XXI century, but we're trying to simulate the early XX century. I hate the speak for the Devs on this because I am certainly not one of them, but I believe the reason digital download isn't available is because they tried that with Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Over Flanders Fields and it ended up costing them more money than they made. That said, I think I heard the add on plane pak will be available via digital down so perhaps "the times they are a changing." Hellshade

Try pulling at least 1 GB of RAM out (temporarily) and see if that actually speeds up performance. It did for me when I was running 4GB RAM and a 1GB GTX280 video card until I re-built my machine and used Vista 64 bit. Now I'm running 6GB RAM, same video card and it runs smooth as glass. 32 bit OS have a 4GB total memory address limit. That includes RAM, video RAM and registers. Congratz on TrackIR 5. I'm still using 4 pro but it is a blast. Definately adds realism to the game. I couldn't answer you on how they got you from 1000 yards away. That's very odd because I know the Devs got rid of that type of sharp shooting when they released phase 3 (Between Heaven and Hell) of OFF. If you make a Test Pilot, change him to invulnerable in the workshop and setup a QC with you against any enemy planes you want, put yourself on autopilot and watch how close the AI needs to get before it opens fire. I believe it's only around 100 yards. Can even set the TAC to 1 mile so you get a better idea of the range they are at when they start shooting. Hellshade

I'm running it on Vista 64 great, but I couldn't say about XP 64. Hellshade

Perhaps if I read this right I see what happened. If you only did a shallow climb, I could definately see the quicker turning Dr 1s getting on your 6 and climbing fast enough to get within gun range. Hellshade

1. If everything was working fine and you installed a new motherboard and ram and then things got messed up, I'd say to check that memory to make sure it's good. Also, if you are over 4 GBs RAM total (including video memory) in a 32 bit operating system, that can actually cause problems. You need a 64 bit OS to address more than 4 GB total. 2. If you weren't Flight Leader in the formation, they might have just been following orders. Did you have Always Lead Flights checked in the Workshop settings? 3. Nobody said speed was the DR 1s strength. LIFT, Climbing and manuverability are. With more lift, the Dr 1 doesn't need to be as fast as the SE5a to climb quicker. 4. If the enemy flight contained some Ace pilots and they climbed to meet you, I imagine they would have taken some shots at you as they nosed up and you got closer. They generally don't open fire unless they are quite close to a target. The AI can't perform 1000 yard sniper shots like in some games. One of the Devs could tell you the actual range but it's quite close indeed. I'm sorry to hear about your technical troubles with the game. Perhaps you could check other games to see if they are still playing properly since your hardware upgrade. Hellshade

Southwest Florida, USA here. Apparently living here makes you a bit jaded. Other folks save up all year for a trip to lay out in the Florida sunshine. I just close my curtains because it puts a glare on my monitor. Hellshade

No game is perfect and no AI is as good as a real pilot at the stick. That said, the AI in Over Flanders Fields is the best I have seen in any flight sim. RB3D was a GREAT flight sim, but it relied on multiplayer combat to make the dogfights exciting. I've never seen a reviewer rave about "realistic" AI from it. It's true the OFF AI aren't currently affected by all the same forces the players plane is but it still manages to produce the most varied and effective combat AI most people have ever seen. But more importantly to the point, the Dr 1 had 3 wings which produced an incredible amount of lift. It wasn't fast, but it could climb out of a dogfight against SE5as almost at will. I seem to recall in Season 2 of Dogfights on the History channel where the battle of Voss in a Dr 1 against 6 SE5as made that very point. Voss chose to stay in the fight despite the fact that he could have climbed above it at any time. Have you tried flying a Dr1 against some SE5as to see if you can out climb them? Just curious. Hellshade

Here is the history on Enemy Ace. It seems like he always had a following, but just never quite big enough to launch him into his own comic book for very long. http://www.toonopedia.com/enemyace.htm Hellshade

I remember Jeb Stuart and the Haunted tank. Good stuff. I also read a couple of issues of Enemy Ace. I love it but never could find any more at the time. You'd think it would all be posted on-line somewhere on the internet. Hellshade

My beautiful wife says she will get me flight sim pedals for my birthday in August. Does anyone have any recommendations as to the best kind to get for Over Flanders Fields? I definately married the right woman who really does love me for who I am! Hellshade

I went for the pedals and my wife ordered them tonight, even though my birthday isn't for over a month. I definately married the right girl. :yes: I'll get the force feedback joystick eventually, but with the pedals on sale for 30% off I figured now was the best time to snag a pair. I hope once I master using them they will provide an even more immersive and exciting flying experience in Over Flanders Field. I thought I read somewhere the responsiveness of the pedals was twice as good as using a twisty stick. I'll find out in about 10 days. Uncleal, I plane to try them in the Sopwith Triplane, the Camel and the SE5a. I don't know that I will master 3 planes with them, but I'm going to have a hell of a lot of fun chasing Huns down! Hellshade

A Dynamic Damage Model so the amount of hits it took to take down a plane would not always be exactly the same? That would be an outstanding way to simulate different quality worksmanship or if a plane had already suffered some structural weakness due to stress, lack of proper maintenance, etc. Obviously no promises have been made, nor do I expect any. But that is a remarkably amazing idea to add further to the immersion of the game. Am I facing a rookie in a poorly built aircraft or an ACE in a top quality machine? I guess I won't know until the bullets start to fly. That just adds to the excitement of each encounter. Hellshade

I can certainly appreciate that speed is important, but doesn't all of that beautiful high resolution terrain and scenery textures eat up a lot of video memory too? It must. I thought I read somewhere that if you turn your head too fast in TrackIR and see some white squares on the edges of your screen it's because you ran out of video memory to fill it in with the right textures. I bought a 1GB GXT280 with GDDR3 RAM and overclocked the hell out of it just to be sure I never ran out of either speed or ram. Core clock at 676 Mhz and RAM speed set to 1353Mhz. That requires a pretty beefy power supply though. In any case, while 512MB is probably enough, wouldn't more video memory help you display higher res scenery with less "stutter" since it can pack twice as much into memory before needing to pull the next batch of textures off the hard drive? Hellshade

I have seen a little bit about that. I must say I do like the name. Quite catchy. According to their devs it's not a Total Conversion project like OFF. For instance they aren't developing damage models for the a/c and have no intention of doing so. I'm sure whatever they decide to focus their efforts on will turn out great, but for a well rounded and very deep, historically accurate WWI flight sim I just don't see anything that will pull me away from OFF BHaH. That said, I'm always eager to cheer on anyone having a go at creating a WWI flight sim experience. I think in the long run it only helps broaden the number of people who hear about them and gets more folks interested in this time period. In the end, we all win for each of these "visions" of WWI air combat and I applaud all efforts. Hellshade

Married. All of her friends are married too. It's not a fair world, is it? For what it's worth though, she can't bring herself to watch war or action movies at all. I generally have to wait until she's at college to pop in a good movie...and by then I'm usually at 5,000 to 10,000 feet and scanning the skies looking for a fight in my trusty triplane. I have BoBII, CFS3 (obviously) and CFS2 but I just don't get nearly as much enjoyment out of them as I do OFF BHaH. I might play CFS2 if it supported TIR but it doesn't, so that pretty much kills it for me. Besides, the WWI dogfights, though slower, are more exciting to me anyways. You have to get close to score solid hits usually. You're often on the razors edge between lining up a kill and stalling out your plane or dropping into a spin. The pedals I think will only make that more exciting. So anyways, I'm not worried if it has issues with other flight sims. I'll remember the pedal and stick command changes. Thank you. Hellshade

Yes, she has two but I got the only pretty one. Sorry. Starting to sound like the CH Pedals are the way to go then. I have a plastic mat under my rolling chair to make it roll easier than on the carpet. I could just double side tape the pedals to that then and be off and flying. It must add a whole new dimension to the immersion factor when using them to line up the targets. The twisty stick sometimes gets to be a pain in the wrist after awhile. This would eliminate that while making the game more exciting. Does the sensitivity change depending on which aircraft in OFF you are flying? Hellshade

I flew through clouds as a combat strategy!! I lost my bearings but I also lost the Dr 1 on my tail and I came out alive and prepared to fight instead of in an unrecoverable spin. I assume clouds set to 5 helped me actually lose the Dr 1. You guys just opened a whole new set of air combat strategies. Instead of avoiding clouds like the grim reaper, now I can USE THEM to escape overwhelming numbers or a particularly fierce opponent. Nothing is off limits in the sky anymore, just a bit more dangerous. Simply amazing. The default view, complete with workshop settings is also just brilliant. Best money I ever spent on a game. Period. Hellshade

This is also something I am wondering. How comfortable is it to fly with pedals for extended periods of time? Do your legs always feel cramped up or tense trying to hold them in the right place? Do you end up micro-correcting every second you fly? How much better is the turn performance? Panama - I already have the TrackIR4. I got it for OFF and I can't imagine flying without it. I also have a nice big 28" monitor to really fill up my view! I just wasn't sure if FF joystick or pedals was the next best step for immersion. Hellshade

I guess I should ask first if I would be better off getting a force feedback joystick so I can feel the plane about to stall out, etc or the pedals so I can turn better? I presume the pedals would allow for more accurate and responsive turning than a twisty stick would? Hellshade