Hellshade

The Damage Model is location based, so it might (I think, I'm not the expert) be possible to double or triple (or whatever is deemed appropriate) the amount of damage that each area of the plane takes except for say, the pilot and the engine, which would definately give players an incentive to aim well when shooting for the very places the real pilots aimed for. For players who find shooting the planes down to be hard enough already, the solution would simply be to change the Gun Strength setting in the Workshop to Strong or Strongest, which should compensate for the extra hit points the planes would have. This is actually beginning to look plausable. What does everyone else think? It would definately server to lower the Player Pilot kill tally to be more in line with History and fewer fights should end in one side being completely wiped out (assuming the AI doesn't have unlimited ammo). Plus for players who didn't like the added difficulty, just one setting change in the Workshop would effectively bring their killing power back to where it is now. Does anyone know for sure if the AI does or does not have unlimited ammo? Hellshade

I agree with this wholeheartedly, however it brings up a question for me. How did enemy aircraft disengage back then without getting blown out of the sky once they turned for home. If they were much faster, or able to outclimb or dive their opponents, then I can see how they might be able to disengage. However in the case of machines that are more or less equal, how did they break off from the fight without getting hammered? Also, I'm a bit worried that implementing a system where more planes try to leave the combat might end up actually pushing the player pilots kill tallys even higher. I know when I damage an enemy aircraft and it starts to limp away from the fight, it's usually a fairly easy kill at that point. I almost want to say that a possible solution could be to up the amount of damage the planes can take, that way you have a lot fewer rounds of ammo left to take down so many planes per mission and it's more likely that planes will fly home badly damaged but out of ammo just like it happened in real life. Perhaps double or even triple the amount of punishment a plane can take before it becomes unflyable, except for the pilot and the engine as even a few rounds in either of those would generally be enough to put it out of action. Also, if the AI runs out of ammo, perhaps the devs could make a switch that automatically causes the plane to turn and head for home? (Unless AI planes have unlimited ammo, I don't know) That might be a lot easier for the Devs to program than changing the "bloodthirsty" nature of the AI. They will still fight, but fewer planes will be able to be shot down because of the extra damage they can absorb and more planes will turn away from the fight once they have expended their ammo, quite possibly without getting a kill. Further, even if you do chase down a plane trying to disengage, because they can absorb extra damage they won't be quite so easy to score a kill off them. If it were possible, and I'm not saying that it is, perhaps the Devs could program the AI so that when they try to disengage they don't simply fly straight and level at cruising speeds. They fly as fast as their engines will take them and they employ some bobbing and weaving so as not to be such an easy mark. Better still if Veterans or Aces can bob and weave more often than Rookies. Herr Prop-Wasche, how hard would it be to make a change the 2.2 Damage Model (call it 2.2HC for "hard core") so that each plane had double the number of "hit points" just to test the basics of the idea? Is it a massive amount of work? I would like to try that out to see if it makes a real difference. Any other ideas on how this dynamic could be changed so it's not a "fight to the last man" every encounter? Hellshade

You'll probably get HitR before I get my new video card. It's on Backorder still. :suicide2: What kind of frame rates do you get with your rig, sir and what resolution settings do you run at? Hellshade

Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven & Hell / Hat in the Ring (expansion) screenshots http://combatace.com...ia-off-posters/ I've personally made about 100 Over Flanders Fields High Definition movies if you'd like to see what some of the flying can be like. Be sure to pause the movie, select 1080 HD, let the red bar at the bottom fill up (the buffer) and then press Play again so you won't get any pauses while watching. http://www.youtube.com/hellshade68#p/u It's an incredibly friendly and informative forum. OFF is an historically accurate WWI flight sim and there are plenty of folks around here who know their history, so if you have any technical or historical questions, this is the place to ask them. Some other fun features of the our Over Flanders Fields community is we have a "Reports from the Front" thread where people share their experiences, a "Dead is Dead - Campaign Standard" thread for people who fly Over Flanders Fields under a certain set of rules to make the experience as realistic as possible. I also highly recommend the "OFF Help Topics" thread and the "Survival in the Air" thread (you'll need it). I wouldn't recommend waiting to buy Phase 4. The Devs assure us it is still a very long ways off in the future. They have teased with a few screen shots though and it certainly looks that the future of OFF is going to be bright with more historical accuracy, planes to fly and immersion. If I were you, I'd buy Over Flanders Fields:Between Heaven & Hell (which is the current Phase 3 or "P3") and the Hat in the Ring expansion which adds a few more planes and a lot of features, including unique skins for your planes. Hellshade

I would happily take one of those if you weren't opposed to it sir. Hellshade

I did buy RoF but I'm afraid I uninstalled it some time ago. Just didn't have the kind of Campaign I was looking for. You'll likely have to ask in a Rise of Flight forum sir as not many here have RoF installed. This particular Forum is dedicated to Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell which is another fine WWI flight sim you might enjoy. I wish you the best of luck though. RoF certainly has some pretty looking planes in it. Always make for some wonderful screen shots. Hellshade

The Z-Bias settings definately have an effect on how things look and run, however it appears to be a bit of a big ball of tangled yarn. When I pushed up all four water sliders to 3 as Louvert suggested, the water did indeed become more detailed, but then my cloud popping came back too. As soon as I put all four sliders for water back down to 0, the cloud popping went away again. Overall though, I definately notice things run smoother when I push Z-Bias Resolution down to 13 from 15 without personally noticing any loss in details. Perhaps that only affects the stuff far in the distance. At any rate, another trick that seems to have a bit of a positive impact is to reduce the range that Fog starts at under the Texture Info menu. It defaults to 100,000 which means no fog. Slide it to the left a little and the next time you fly, you should notice that you can't see all the way to the horizon even on a clear day. Fog sets in, reducing the amount of land and scenery your video card has to draw. With so many different configurations for everyones machines I can't say for sure what any given change will effect, but I highly recommend folks looking to push a little more perfomance out of their rigs play around in the Z-Bias menu to see what they can do for themselves. I'm able to run at 4,4,4,5,5 settings, 1920 x 1200, 16xQ, 16x AA at a very steady 60 FPS as long as I'm not recording a FRAPS video (obviously when you try and write a full screen video to your hard drive while playing, you are going to get a performance hit). I hope others have some good luck in there too. Hellshade

Those are some beautiful pics guys! Great paint jobs too. Olham, how do you like flying for the Crumpets? A couple of quick little fun vids. Sometimes the little bastards really do come right out of the sun at you Beware the Hun in the Sun (0:12) 1080HD I'm not exactly positive what happened here, but we were close enough and slow enough for long enough that I'd like to think we exchanged Christmas cards. As he begins to pull away, if you look closely you actually can clearly see the damn gauges in his cockpit. With better resolution I bet you could even read the damn dials. Close Encount of the Hun Kind (0:22) 1080HD Hellshade

Outstanding. That gives me a great deal of hope that I should be able to run OFF:BH&H just fine and likely P4 when it ships. Now if the card would just come off backorder I'll be in good shape. Hellshade

No problem. I'll send it right out to you sir once I have the new one working. When you have it setup and working to your satisfaction, then you can send the check. Make sure you like it and it works for you first. Hellshade

It looks very impressive indeed Morris, however $1,000 is a bit out of my budget at this time. I should have bought my wife a less expensive car, damn it. That and the noise levels on this are very loud. 52db under load compared to 41db for the GTX 580. Since my computer is in the bedroom and I do a lot of my gaming after the wife is going to sleep I need to keep the noise levels down as much as possible. That said, 4GB of GDDR5 on a dual GPU board will certainly crank out the FPS. It's a beast in every sense of the word. Loud and powerful! Hellshade No, but a check would do if that worked for you. Naturally I have to wait and see when my new card shows up and verify that it all works. Other than that, consider it yours sir. Hellshade

Well my wife's computer doesn't have a big enough power supply to use it and the only games she plays are World of Warcraft and Farmville. Hardly GPU hungry applications, so I was planning on putting it up on e-bay unless someone wants it here. Are you or anyone else interested at, say, $75? It's a 1GB GTX280. Works perfectly. Hellshade

It has 1.5GB of GDDR5 ram with an effective speed of 4050Mhz. ATI boards have more ram but it's still a huge jump up from 1GB of GDDR3 ram. Hellshade

If anyone else has the problem of clouds just "popping" in and out, try the following and see if it helps at all. In the Workshop is of course the CFS3 Config utility. Open that up and pull down the menu. You get 5 choices which are (from top to bottom) Image Quality, Overrides, Texture Info, Texture Limits and last on the list is Z-Bias. Select Z-bias. The default Z Bias Resolution is 15 bits. For now, leave that setting there. Then every other setting below that one, including Z-Bias Clouds, set to 0. Save it, exit out and try flying and looking around at the clouds. Once I did that, I noticed 99% of cloud popping simply went away. Hopefully it will be true for others if they give it a try. Let me know if it does or does not work for you please. It seems to work for tree popping also. Also, I then bumped Z Bias Resolution (the top slider in the Z-Bias window) down to 13. That allowed me to put my Terrain slider up to 3 (AC =4, Terrain=3, Scenery=4, Effects=5 and Clouds=5) but not lose hardly any frame rates. If I lowered it below 13 I noticed the cloud popping issue started back up again and if I raised it much higher (like around 22) I noticed I started getting some laggy frame rates. Again, I don't know how it will impact each individual setup but if you have cloud and scenery popping issues, give that a try. Hellshade

Well, maybe I won't have Christmas early. It's on Backorder!!!! Arghhhhhhh!!!! Hellshade

They went to "Hellshade's School of Air Combat". If you can't shake their hand, you shouldn't be opening fire. Hellshade

I am the finance department. The wife encouraged me to get it because she says I treat her and the kids so well. I bought her a brand new car last year so $500 for a video card is hard to argue. I'm not so sure your 2GB ATI 5870 is inadequate at all. The texture fill rates on ATI cards are faster than Nvidia. Cloth and particle stuff gives the advantage to NVidia, so your card might actually be better for OFF than mine. Unfortunately nobody ever uses flight simulators to benchmark perfomance on. It's all Crysis, Bad Company 2 and games like that. They really need to throw at least one flight sim in there for a better global view of how the new cards handle different types of games. I mean they benchmarked Civilization V for pete's sake. I could be wrong but that hardly strikes me as a graphic intensive application. At any rate, it will hopefully ship on Monday and I'll have it on Tuesday. Even if I get in on Weds I'll be happy. That would give me the long weekend to run the new card through it's paces. Hellshade

Well my GTX 280 is starting to show it's age a little bit so after reading a bunch of reviews (and previews of the ATIs next card) I decided to bite the bullet and order an overclocked GTX 580, which is supposedly the fastest single GPU card on the market. It's faster (by about 20%), cooler and quieter than the GTX 480 (and that was the fastest card on the market before this came out) so I figure it should really make OFF fly even on the highest settings. I was looking at possibly getting the new ATI card when it ships sometime next month, but even ATI isn't saying that it'll be faster than the GTX 580. Just that it will be 30% to 50% faster than their previous generation GPU. Hopefully it turns out to be a great choice. It's on next day shipping but with the holiday season starting who knows when I'll get it. I'll let you all know how it does when I get it. This is the link to the overclocked version that I ordered. http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6942892&CatId=3669 Hellshade

We all have a long list of things we would love to see changed or added into P4. Heavy bombers (which have been confirmed!), more early war A/C (also confirmed) and things like that. But what is the #1 feature that you would like to see added or changed in P4? Speaking for myself only, if I could guarantee any one thing on the list it would be to have the warp / unwarp ability reduced to just needing a 2 mile radius of skies clear of enemy A/C instead of 4 in order to be used. I realize using warp isn't DiD standard and all of that, but it can get pretty frustrating when enemy A/C are high above and nearly 4 miles away so there is virtually no chance of ever catching them, and yet they stay within your 4 mile radar limit and you can't warp to your next flight point. I'm not sure if it's even possible to change that feature, however since those miraculous Devs have done the impossible before, such as making it so we can fly through clouds (cheers!) I figure I'll put that on the top of my list. How about everyone else? What is the #1 feature you would all like to personally see added or changed in P4? Hellshade

Extremely helpful sir. Thank you kindly! Any idea on where I go to edit a pilots status so I can change the date, etc? Hellshade

Outstanding information Lou! Thank you very much. I see American fighter squadrons and french bomber squadrons listed. Did the British not participate in this battle? Does anyone by chance know which German squadrons were hit hardest (saw a lot of action) during the overwhelming attack? Olham, don't worry about the number of planes. I think I can manage those with some tricks. Just don't be suprised if this one takes a little while. I've got an idea... Hellshade

12 Sept 1918 was, I believe, the start of the Battle of St. Mehiel, which also happened to be the largest air battle of the war. Does anyone know which squadrons, bomber and fighter, of both the German and Allied side were the major players in the air campaign? Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. Hellshade

Glad to hear he's doing well and keeping busy. Wish him all the best from me. Hellshade

Is that all? No promises, but I'll see what I can do sir. Great paint job on the SE5a, too. Incredible work sir. What did you think about the "OFF Experience" video, in terms of showing a person who might be interested in a WWI flight sim what OFF:BH&H offers? I tried to make it like a Promo / Informational style video. Basically, do you think it would be likely to generate enough interest and excitement to make them go to the website and learn more about Over Flanders Fields? Beautiful screen shot Tranq! That's a keeper. Hellshade

It certainly has my vote. I would even go so far as to say that the people in the forum are 1/2 the enjoyment of the flight sim itself. Being able to exchange ideas, not to mention humor, stories and mods, does wonders to deepen an already immersive and exciting sim. I have no doubt I get more out of OFF:BH&H simply because reading this forum illuminates many aspects of it that I might otherwise miss or not understand. Come to think of it, this Forum pretty much serves as the "Pilots Pub" that the real WWI pilots used to retire too in the evening after the missions were done. United in a common purpose and experiences, they shared their thoughts and feelings on everything from tactics and adventures to the loss of good friends. If OFF is a tribute to the Great Air War, the Combat Ace Forum is most certainly a tribute to the pubs the pilots socialized in after the days work had been done. I count myself lucky to have found people of such good company. Hellshade