Hasse Wind

The high command thinks you're in need of help and sends their best planes to support you? But yeah, that's definitely strange. Never happened to me, or at least I haven't noticed any extra aircraft in addition to the ones I choose from the QC menu.

Just for fun, I fired up RB3D (heavily modded) and flew a couple of quick fights with the Alb D.II and D.III. The D.III felt much more maneuverable, just like I remembered, and the D.II was quite heavy, making it better suited for vertical maneuvering than turn fighting. This is how it should be in OFF too, in my humble opinion. (But geez how ugly RB3D is compared to OFF! There's no going back to that anymore, that's for sure.)

I think it's called setting the priority of a program, Olham. So for TrackIR you can put its priority to high, but I remember somebody somewhere (here?) saying it shouldn't be put to real-time.

That's what the ghosts of the countless pilots I've lost keep telling me every night.

I agree with Olham. You can instantly notice how the Albatros D.III is clumsier and more difficult to handle in combat than its predecessor, the D.II. And yet the changes the Albatros designers made to the model (the most important being the Nieuport-style lower wings) were meant to improve its maneuverability, which is what happened, if the history books are to be believed. There should be a difference between the D.II and D.III, but not the way it is now, when the D.III is actually worse than the D.II. While changing the Alb FM, you might as well fix that wing damage issue. You know, make the best WW1 flight sim even better than it is now? And where's P4, my Visa is getting anxious?

I keep the ground object density to low. The scenery looks very good even then, and when I'm in the middle of a dogfight, I don't have time to admire how many trees are in the forest below me - a good framerate is the most important thing.

My guess is the air activity levels. At least they have a major impact on FPS. You can easily test this by starting an early war career, when there are only a few aircraft here there, and then compare the situation to a late war career, when you can't go anywhere without meeting flights of enemy and friendly aircraft. Maybe you should try lowering the settings a bit and see if it helps? I have some stuttering too, but not very often.

Excellent post, Olham. I'm sure there were some cold-blooded killers among the pilots of the Great War, who didn't give much thought to the fact that they were killing human beings, but there must have been quite a few more sensitive airmen, who had trouble with delivering the killing blow. Udet is supposed to have been a very sensitive man, and he couldn't at first to shoot anybody down, he had to harden his feelings and think about what would happen to his comrades on the ground if he didn't shoot down those bombers, etc. (And probably this sensitivity played a part in his ultimate fate - suicide. He wasn't hard enough to deal with the intrigues of the Nazi regime at war.) Artillery killed the most men in WW1, but killing people from a great distance by firing heavy shells is nowhere near as personal as having to do it on the front at close range. I've often wondered just how on earth the machine gunners handled their feelings (just think about what happened at Somme for example, where German MGs mowed down hundreds and hundreds of the attacking British). In London, there's a memorial for the British Machine Gun Corps with the following inscription: "Saul hath slain his thousands but David his tens of thousands"

I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the early aviation pioneers didn't have balls at all after a few crash landings. Speaking of the Morane Parasol, I really hope Pol is not only teasing us with his avatar and we do get the plane in P4. If you browse through Entente squadrons in the OFF enlist new pilot screen, you'll instantly notice just how many of them used the Morane-Saulnier, and many for very long periods of time. It would be a very important addition to the early war planes in OFF.

Widowmaker, you're being too harsh on yourself. I couldn't do skins half as good as those even if my life depended on it. PS. Though that SE5a skin certainly isn't your best work ever...

This is great reading! Thanks for posting it, and please keep them coming, if you want. This is the closest you can get to what ordinary people were experiencing back then in the war. Such memories are always more interesting reading for me than the self-serving explanations and excuses of politicians and generals.

It depends very much on how the game depicts the conflict we will be participating in with our player-controlled characters. A simulator like OFF strives to be as historically accurate as possible, and such games can even teach people about history and spark their interest into studying more about the history of crises and conflicts, which is a good thing. Conflicts like WW1 and WW2 had such a huge impact on millions (billions) of people and practically every nation of the world that it's a great shame many people today know almost nothing about them. It's easier to understand the world if you know about its past, and good quality games can help with that education, and of course give their players a lot of enjoyment. But there also games, mostly shooters, that use historical wars only as a background for mindless slaughtering of countless enemies. I wonder what kind of message people unfamiliar with the history of warfare (apart from playing "historical" shooters) get from them?

I have a couple of active bomber pilots (one German, one British) who both have about 60 flight hours and have both survived for a couple of months in 1917. The British one doesn't have any kills though, but the German does. Would these be of any help to you? If you want, I'll gladly send their files to you.

Welcome back, Lou. Everybody seems to be upgrading their PCs - I will soon have to do the same so I won't feel like an outsider.

That abomination of an aircraft in Catch's picture makes the Morane-Saulnier look like a state-of-the-art killing machine.

A-ha, and now the Entente is resorting to vile necromancy! Their propaganda claims our glorious Imperial German Army is burning churches and eating babies, but when they believe nobody is watching, the Allies are bringing their dead pilots back to life!

You must be doing something wrong. Morris collides all the time and the DiD manager always lets him live.

Beautiful, as always. We have enough great "skinners" here to populate a medium-sized village.

I was going to start a new pilot in Jasta 18 in the fall of 1917 when I noticed the manager saying the Alb D.III (OAW) is not available for them from October 5, 1917 to October 13, 1917. I'm just going to enlist the pilot after that period, so it's not a big deal for me, but I'm sure you'd like to fix this in the next patch, devs.

Yeah, version 5 software sometimes seems to confuse TrackIR 4 so that you have to start it more than once to get it working properly - I've had that problem, but it's not too much trouble really, and I don't want to switch back to the older software, because my TrackIR 4 works much more smoothly with the new drivers.

Here, Olham. Have a couple of these blue pills, they will help you.

You probably need your very own nuclear power plant to run those super computers.

Now that is a beauty. Excellent work!

People don't realize how revolutionary TrackIR is until they try it for themselves. Then they'll be left wondering, how on earth they've played flight sims without it in the first place... TrackIR is a must-have with OFF, because the CFS3 view controls can be a bit... limited.