Hellshade

I just got married on June 20th. I spent the next week Honeymooning in Key West. Just beautiful there. The only reason my pilot lasted a week is because I didn't play OFF. Anyways, I'm going to do my best to get married only once. That said, I sure wouldn't mind another week in Key West! As for actual pilot lifespan. I don't think I've even broke 5 hours yet...and I cheat with labels, TAC, unlimited fuel and warping. I do have air activity on Heavy though. That does make for an awful lot of good action, but a short life as well. Hellshade

The sights just get in the way. I prefer the SE5a viper for that very reason. Better view behind you as well without the head rest. Hellshade

I had a pilot last 168 real life hours (7 actual days!) Then I came back from my Honeymoon. I think he died 2 missions after that. Hellshade

Hello Broadside, If you have any worries about the CFS3 engine, please check out what the Devs of OFF have done with it. It's beyond amazing. You will quickly see that the Devs have completely reworked it to provide an immersive, fluid, exciting and complete WWI combat experience. With no disrespect ment to other WWI flights sims, there really is nothing that compares to Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell. Here is the link to the perview movies page. http://www.overflandersfields.com/Movies.htm

Something else very interesting to note about the pictures showing RoF and OFF side by side. The Rise of Flight pics show 1/2 the total number of player flyable aircraft. The Over Flanders Fields pics show just 1/39th of player flyable planes, not including the add on plane pak coming up. Even if RoF could match OFF P3 on the ground, it gets crushed in variety the moment you look skyward. In a war based flight simulator, that's not really a good sign. Hellshade

P4 = Phase 4. The next version of Over Flanders Fields. Between Heaven and Hell is the Phase 3 version. Hellshade

I believe that they do mean the order number for the add-on pak and not OFF P3 itself. At least I hope so. My original e-mail order from them is long gone as well. Also, it's probably too early to answer this question, but is the add on pak going to be compatible with P4? Hellshade

Awesome news about the cloud turbulance and the crash effects. No worries on the registration. 2 e-mails? I think everyone can certainly handle that. I'm looking forward to the add on pak too. Hellshade

I'll tell you what you are NOT missing. $39.95 + S&H. Hellshade

Honestly, after having it for a few days...I like it less and less the more I tried to play it. As others have mentioned, jaggies that won't go away, dead end menus, a flight model that bounces you around non-stop so you can't even shoot straight, the lack of planes, the not very good at all AI. The controls are very non-intuitive and I still can't get my TrackIR to function properly with it. Then I asked myself, why am I even bothering to work so hard to make this work? It's a game that is supposed to be enjoyable and it's not. I hope they fix it all, but really I'm pretty peeved that they released the game in the state that it is in. It's buggy, incomplete and shallow. I'm back to OFF BHaH for all of my gaming time. There isn't a better game out there for any amount of money and it's still only going to just keep getting better. Hellshade

It looks very nice UK. Excellent work. I don't know how you guys have the patience to put in all of that detail but I'm certainly glad that you do. Hellshade

Did NOT know that. So the warp works where no matter what range you have it set to, 2, 4 or 8, as soon as the aircraft clear your max TAC range setting you can warp? Sweet! I will try it out tonight! Thanks. Hellshade

Are you sure aircraft are only shown out to 4 miles? Maybe I'm reading my TAC wrong, but I cycle TAC to ONLY show aircraft and I always see those white dots out to the edge of the TAC, turning red or blue once they get within 2 - 3 miles of me. The outer edge of TAC is 8 miles, right? I'm never able to re-warp until all EA are completely off the TAC screen. At any rate, yes if warp only exited when EA are within 4 miles I think that would rock. Hellshade

I'm not waiting for Canvas Knights and I have already bought, tried and shelved RoF. RoF has, for me at least, turned out to be where I paid Neoqb $39.95 +S&H for the chance to beta test their 2 airplane version of WWI. Beautiful graphics, physics and amazing performance to be sure, but no depth and a bunch of bugs or features that they just never bothered to finish programing. For instance the Options button inside the game doesn't work. You have to exit the game in order to change any options. Other options that you select, such as "Engines warmed up at start of mission" don't work at all. Only 1 server is up for MP games. Etc, etc. The list is a bit disconcerting. I certainly wish Neoqb all the best in getting their product to be fully playable, especially since I've already paid for it, but after 2 days of fiddling with it I'm back to enjoying Over Flanders Fields and appreciating what a highly polished and immersive product it is. I hope Canvas Knights does well, but their Dev team readily admits that it is not supposed to be a Total Conversion like OFF BHaH is so I personally have no reason to wait for it. The screen shots look nice though. Hellshade

I have a suggestion for P4. Not sure if it can even be done, but for those of us fliers who don't fly true "Dead is Dead" because of using Warp, it would be great if we would only get bumped out of warp when EA were within 4 miles of us instead of the full 8. Stuff that is 8 miles away, unless it is flying towards us, usually is too far to be chased down and engaged. But they might stay within the 8 miles and on the "radar" for quite some time, which puts us in the situation of flying along with nothing to do but enjoy the beautiful scenery for extended periods of time because we can't re-engage warp mode until they are completely off the 8 mile radar area. The scenery truly is amazing, but for those of us who would prefer to be able to jump in a lot closer to the action, being knocked out of warp mode at 4 miles from EA instead of the full 8 would probably keep things moving along a lot faster. At 4 miles, we have a much better chance of engaging. At 8, sometimes it can be a fairly long time of just waiting for the radar to clear so we can get to our mission objectives quicker at the faster warp speeds. Is this kind of change even possible? Hellshade

I couldn't agree more. I just had two absolutely AMAZING combat experiences. The first was with my patrol of trusty SE5as that ran afoul of a far larger flight of Fokker DR 1s out over the water. There had to be 20 planes in the sky in this incredible furball! I watched friends and foe alike plummet into the ocean. Wings were shredded, engines and fuselages set fire. Others smoked and spiraled in. Death screams could be heard as men were butchered in the skies with lead ripping through their bodies. The dogfight felt like it lasted forever, but when it was done, the elite RFC 74 squadron won the day though none went home undamaged if they went home at all. The huns took a terrible toll on us. The next mission was no better for our ranks. Escorting bombers over a target, a combination of Fokker Dr 1s (from the same squadron we had just tangled with the day before) and Albatross DVas jumped us. Planes were everywhere! I spent as much time trying to avoid mid air collisions as I did attempting to get a fix on our bosche adversaries. Everwhere I looked, above, below and on every side, men fought furiously for their country and their lives. There must have been 20 planes to start with, but I am sure others of both sides joined in to extend the mayhem and carnage for a good 10 minutes or more! That is a long time to be fighting for your life non-stop. I couldn't tell you how many planes were involved in all, but my guns had run dry by the time it was over. I and 2 squadron mates limped back to base with our planes in tatters and a long list of claims that will almost certainly be eventually denied by that damn CO. If you haven't set Regional Air Activity to "Heavy", go for it. I doubt I'll live more than a couple of missions as my luck isn't that good. But it is the most intense air combat I have ever experienced. This game rocks. Hellshade

Incredible work Jammer, The skin morphing to black on your plane was amazing. I can't imagine how difficult it was to perfect that transistion. Great camera work on the stunning image of the flamming death of a Spad crashing into the lake too. Music score was right on as well. You definately get my vote as the official video maker for OFF. No offense to Pol who has put out some outstanding videos himself. I swear we just need to start posting embedded videos into other flight sim forums so people can see what they are missing. I think once people see how beautiful Over Flanders Fields looks and plays, along with the amazing variety of planes and depth of the campaign, they will get over the whole "I didn't like CFS3" thing. It's not something we can accurately explain to someone. They just need to see it for themselves in videos like these. Anyways, Masterful work once again Jammer. If I could shoot planes as perfectly as you shoot videos, I'd be able to wipe out the entire western front of bosche (except for Olham and OvS, of course!). Bravo! Please keep sharing them! Hellshade

I've had another strange issue with RoF that perhaps somebody else has experienced. My TrackIR seems to have a strong tendancy to shift my view 45 degrees to the right when I try to center it by pushing F12. It's disconcerting to say the least. It won't correct itself no matter what I do unless I exit the program and relaunch it. I have no such trouble in OFF, so it's not the TrackIR software itself. That's another bummer. On the plus side, I decided to start my own multiplayer server (since I saw none were being posted) and run a couple of missions. The tank attack mission is fun, but bullets naturally seem to bounce harmlessly off the tanks so I'm not really sure what my purpose there is. Perhaps I just wasn't scoring enough hits. A few arty hits took out some of the tanks nicely though and that was pretty cool to see. I did destroy the tank that I accidently rammed, resulting in my own death too, of course. I tried some 5 v 5 but my plane gets shredded by the Spads in a heartbeat. I just can't seem to get off the ground and up to speed before they are diving upon us, guns blazing. Another bug (or apparent bug) is that I selected the option where my engine was warmed up and ready to go at the start of the mission, but it's not. The engine is off and I need to go through the entire process no matter if I have that option selected or not. I'd say the Neoqb folks have a number of issues to resolve and perhaps their product was shipped before it was ready to take flight. I hope for the sake of everyone who plunked down the $39.95 plus shipping that they get them worked out soon. For all the challenges that they are having right now, plus the limited content, I'd say the $29.95 + $9.99 for OFF BHaH and CFS3 is a HUGE bargain. If anyone was on the fence before about price / performance with Over Flanders Fields, they shouldn't be. Hellshade

If anyone wants to see more wings being shredded or planes set afire, it seems just setting the Players Guns to Strongest in the workshop has that effect. Too bad it's obviously cheating and understandably lowers your realism score considerably. I switched my guns to strongest while using the Intermediate DM and while by no means do all of the planes have "fireworks", it seems to happen more often. It might have just been a lucky streak though too. The AI know how to shoot up an EA too. I was in a QC testing out the "strongest guns" idea and a Fokker DVa was on the tail of one of my squadron mates, peppering him up pretty good with some of the Kaisers finest. I pulled up my trusty SE5a onto the Huns tail and started to hammer him with .303 rounds hoping to scare him off, but to no avail. I guess sensing a near immediate kill, the bosche pilot stayed on target and set my squadron mate hurtling earthward like a flaming meteor. I sent the hun into the ground mere moments after he got his kill, but revenge doesn't bring your friends back. Interesting how watching another SE5a plane with a friend in it go down can actually make you angry and do your best to take down as many of the other guys as you can. I think war may start because of politics, but it gets personal very, very quickly once the first man goes down. /salute Hellshade

I've heard of "putting a sock on it", but never a shoe. Sounds a bit kinky to me. At any rate, is anyone else having better luck with RoF? What other impressions are we getting? Hellshade

When can we expect this magnificient bit of mod work to be available for download? I'd love to use it. It sounds awesome. Feel free to post some Hardcore DM screenies of the FB TV mod in action. /salute Hellshade

I ordered it and they shipped me a regular DVD. Hellshade

Fair is extremely important. RoF does have some very nice features which I pointed out and gave credit for. In some places, their product is ahead of OFF P3. I wish BHaH would get the performance boost provided by being able to support multi-threaded, multi-core processors, but that just isn't possible with the current engine. Neoqb did an excellent job coding their flight sim to maximize the performance of whatever kind of high end rig you might have. They also did an excellent job on the quality of the plane graphics and the damage models. The fact that they actually model the air flow over the wings to determine the FM means that maybe someday we will be able to do an un-coordinated flat 1/2 spin with a Fokker Dr 1 like Voss. Cool, except there is no Dr 1. I'm just being honest when I say that all the eye candy and very little depth results in a game that's fun to pick up and play for a few minutes but it just can't hold your attention for long periods of time like OFF BHaH can. Too few planes and a "run away then turn and dive past you only to run away again" AI just isn't very exciting. Apparently somebody somewhere agrees with me because the last time I tried to go on multiplayer mode, there were only 2 servers up. One was completely empty and the other had two people on it. Seriously. Neoqb has the potential to offer a truly outstanding product, but first they need to massively improve the AI, drastically improve the different types (and skins) of planes and get rid of the required log in, in order for people to use the product even on single player mode. Not to mention create a huge, fleshed out dynamic single player campaign. If they do those things, I think they will succeed. But all of those things require time and time requires money. Professional developers may indeed be passionate about their product, but their passion is on a leash held by the financial backers. I wish Neoqb all the best. I just feel they have a ton of content that would have to be added before they could even begin to approach the value of Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell. Hellshade

Have either of you played Call of Duty World at War? Beautifully rendered and they did a great job of re-creating the japanese tactics against the marines. I must also say that the flame thrower effects were the best I've seen in any game. Hellshade

You are correct. I think they have like 10 skins per plane. So 40 skins vs 3,200. OFF definately sends RoF down in flames when it comes to skin variety. I'm not trying to trash RoF. It's cool to look at and I'll try and master the air to air combat it offers, but really there is no comparison to P3 other than to say they are both WWI flight simulators. Hellshade