Geezer Gamer

good advice....I actually had switched the exterior to the float view, feels a little more dynamic. Combining the recenter and cockpit view is a great idea. is it something about cfs that it only recognizes the hat channel as a single button? my first attempt was to try to do up and down as in and out on the hat channel but seems like cfs only recognizes pov01 no matter which direction i push

I thought I would post my setups for the joystick and quadrant. For me this is enough hardware to support the WW1 flight sims very well and is sim authentic. I also use chpro pedals and track IR. Strongly recommend the quadrant still very available. I'm using the Cyborg Evo Force....certainly not available in the big box electronic stores. I keep wandering thru Fry's hoping to see the replacement similar force feedback joystick and doesn't seem to be there. Is FFB not that popular anymore? What I like about the Saetek product is the stick is reversable for leftys like me.

Well two things about the rig The smartest thing I did was spend an extra $75 on a Belkin KVM switch that allows me to keep the old computer and share the keyboard mouse and monitor with both. No one touches the gaming rig but me and the only software on it is to support the games. When Mom or Daughter line up behind me for answering e-mail or doing homework a quick flip of the switch and they can get on. Very common to have both running at the same time, hit some snag on the gaming rig troubleshooting something and flip to the other machine to search the internet for the answer. I think of it like the commuter car and the hot rod. Dad polishes the beast and keeps it running and only he gets to drive it. Regarding the performance of the gaming rig, have loved it, but not without some problems. After many crashes on ROF, realized that the game is so demanding (although running fine) that my video card was overheating and shutting down. Discovered that the "auto" setting on the cards fan was coming up to late and once it got hot couldn't recover. Had to use the precision monitoring software and crank the fan up to 75 or 85% to eliminate that problem. Is now part of my "start up" procedure in ROF ( does that increase immersion when you have to keep a digital temperature readout on the screen to make sure your computer doesn't over heat?....just like a plane engine right? Too bad I can't map the radiator lever to the video card fan!!!) The second problem has been more evil, and hopefully I've solved it. Was getting sparadic crashes in 2d inside the games ( like just finished flying and am at the ingame menu) The standard Microsoft message would say (OFF encountered a conflict and had to shut down). After much chasing, the error was a conflict with "dinput" inside directx . This part of directx interacts with all your peripherals ( track IR, joystick, foot pedals). The problem seemed to be worse if you used any profiler software. I am suspect that it was actually Saeteks profiler software that somehow corrupted directx. Anyway much grinding of teeth, reloading of operating systems, running of chkdsk and right now I am crash free...........knock on wood. Looking forward to having a single player campaign running in both BOBII and OFF so I can have a foot in WWI and WWII at the same time. For ROF I will just keep reading the forums, since they are almost more entertaining than the game right now. Future goals would be to gradually move into the early jet age, something from the Korean War era.

I bought OFF for a machine that could barely run it, if I had more than three planes in the sky it slowed to a craw. Well after months of research and gathering components I finally completed my first build am back to playing this game. I only have three sims on my rig...BOB II, ROF and OFF. ROF being the newest toy it was getting most of the attention, but I finally got everything configured for OFF and just completed a one on one dog fight. Against the moody dark skies my little Sopwith Pup was going head to head with an albatros. We went round and round, got a few good hits in, but than got too close and snipped my lower wingtip. The albatros was slowed down too, staying low to the ground, but still lining up on me and getting shots in. I struggled against the joystick to keep in control and came around for one more pass. I was able to force the albatros into the tree tops and heard a loud explosion as I passed over. Just as I cleared the crash the clouds finally broke loose and it started to rain. I found the airfield and barely managed to land the plane, making it home in one piece. Wow...I forgot how good this game is! The mix of the soundtrack, the dark skies, pounding of the artillary in the backround, the immersion factor on OFF is something else. It also seems like the AI has improved a lot from when the Phase 3 first came out. Anyway thanks to the OBD folks, now I'm going to have to figure out how to get time in on all three of these flight sims. Processor -Intel Core i7-920, Cooler - Zalman CNPS 99900, MB - EVGA X58 3X SLI, RAM - 3GB RAM CorsairDDR3 1600 Dominator, GFX Card- 896MB DDR3 EVGA GTX 260 Core 216, Soundcard – X-Fi Titanium, HD - WD Velociraptor 300 gig, PSU - Corsair TX750W, Case-CMStorm Snyper, OS – XP SP2

This got posted at A2A.....in case you didn't see it. A nice line in there where OFF players asked to leave the room.

Well with everyone giving the thumbs up to IL-2, I have to put a plug in for BOBII ( Battle of Britain II Wings of Victory). It may not have the same graphic quality as IL 2 but it's close. Where it shines is in the AI and the full simulation of Battle of Britain combat. One on One it will run you thru the ringer trying to keep up with your opponent (sure beats the IL2 cha cha line) and if your system is beefy enough you can fill the sky with several hundred planes. http://a2asimulations.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=10

Okay....heres mine, old drafting table Made platforms for foot pedals and subwoofer Vintage "Goodform" aluminum chair, factory made plane airframes during WWII A later modification to speaker placement to improve sound

Wow!.....love the sound track, sets the tone. I'm right in the middle of reading "Bloody April" by Peter Hart.....filled with diary entries. One story described trainers that were under such pressure to get pilots in the field and were so concerned about their own safety that they would keep their hand on the dual controls to make sure the "new blood" passed just to move them thru. One trainee go so annoyed by this that he removed his hands completely from the joystick during a landing. When the trainer complained about the roughness of his landing he let him know that he actually landed the plane! Great vid, enjoyed it

Finally got around to flying PD-1's Boys of 60 mission #5 ( I think) that has you pursuing Zeppelins. Amazing mission! One of the best uses of dynamic time change during the mission. You take off in moonlight and the sun just starts to rise as you come up on the Zeppelins. Like any good newbie, I didn't get near the altitude that I needed and blew off all my rockets half stalling at 10,000 feet like some high school kid going out on a date with a super model. Once all the rockets were gone, than I discovered Zeppelins at a lower altitude, but without rockets didn't have much of a chance to light one up. It was great seeing the sides of the zeppelins glowing orange as the sun rose.....maybe next time I can make them glow a bit too! Bravo PD-1!

One more comment Wilhelm....I have a Pentium 4 Dell computer from 2006 with 1 gig of ram. I upgraded the graphics card a year ago to an 8800 GT. I can run OFF and BOB II reasonably well with the graphic settings cranked down a bit. I have to be careful to not set up scenarios with too many planes in the sky, but many a hairball with three to six planes runs very well The tough part is load times, with the old processor it takes a long time to load up. Good luck with your build!

In case your interested in the details.....welcome all comments ( my first build, so still in the hunting mode)

Slick Wilhelm.....you and I are just about building the same rig. I think you can definitely build a fine system in that $1500 to $1700 range. I came to the conclusion the Windows XP 32 with 3 gig's of ram made the most sense. My strategy ( and I hope it works ) is to put in the three 1 gig sticks (DDR3 1600), wait a year or two for the bugs to settle on Windows 7 and than by three more 1 gig sticks to get to six gig's of ram Pros and Cons Windows XP 32 bit is the most generic, sometimes issues with 64 bit or difficulty finding drivers current drivers Windows XP 32 can only recognize up to 4 gig ram ( reads as less) and really doesn't need more than 3 gig to run very well Vista really wants 4 gig or more of ram, guessing Windows 7 will be the same, a system with 6 gigs should be more than plenty My real hope was that I could build a very funtional system and never have to run Vista on it! Anyone out there see big flaws in that logic?

Thanks for the more detailed directions. I downloaded the "boys of 60" pack and put them in the training folder ( I couldn't figure out how to get them to show up in the "what if" folder). Had great fun dogfighting in a crowd over the ocean. Thanks for the help!

I think I must be looking in the wrong place..... if I go to BHAH main page http://www.overflandersfields.com/info.htm the download button on the right takes me to the patch downloads, and screen savers, but I don't see any mission downloads I definitely don't see a six part mission pac....should I be going somewhere else?

I know this is a newbie question, but there are a limited number of training missions in the default install and I didn't see a place for mission builders to post missions for downloading. Is that something that you can do in OFF and if so where do folks post the missions they have built