Hasse Wind

Olham, the DFW is no bitch! Widowmaker, the DFW has many excellent qualities. It's easy to fly, but most importantly, it has excellent climbing speed and service ceiling. With the correct fuel management (easiest when you put it to auto), you can climb up to 21000 feet - no Allied fighter will be able challenge you there, and there aren't many AA guns that can shoot so high (much less hit) either. So take your time before crossing the enemy lines and gather enough altitude. I never go into "Indian country" unless I'm above 10k feet, preferably at 14k - 15k feet. And if you do get hit by Archie or lose engine power for some reason, the DFW can glide a long way, but that isn't of much use if you're 50 miles behind enemy lines and flying at 500 feet, so stay high. In late 1916 when the DFW comes into service, the Entente doesn't have fighters capable of really following the DFW in a climb and maintaining their superior speed (and the DFW is not slow for a 2-seater), so you can easily get rid of pursuing Nupes and DH2's and others by rapidly climbing. But you don't want to get into that kind of a situation in the first place, so that's why you gain enough altitude before crossing the lines. Later it will be much more dangerous with strong Allied fighters like the SPAD and SE5a, but even they don't have a service ceiling comparable to the DFW, so you will be safe if you stay high. Above 18k feet the only fighters you need to worry about are the Brisfits (they have a service ceiling of 20k feet), but I've never seen any combat take place above 18k in OFF. The DFW is also the only bomber in OFF with a bombsight (F7). It makes bombing missions very easy to complete successfully. Wait until the target is in the center of the sight and you will more often hit it than miss. With a max payload of 150kg of bombs, you can do some nasty damage to Entente buildings. Don't forget the bomb view (F9) - it's fun to watch where your "eggs" hit. So in a nutshell: stay high and use the bombsight to your advantage, and don't enter into any dogfights, unless you are facing easy prey, such as unescorted Be2cs (the Pour le Merite carriers). Have fun!

I know how it feels when you lose some important files because of HD failure. My first laptop ever (Acer) lost its drive shortly after the warranty expired (yeah, it was probably designed to do that), and of course I didn't have any backups of a number of files that were important to me. That taught me a hard lesson, and now I always make backups of anything even remotely important. And no more Acer products for me... It's possible to recover files, but it isn't cheap if you need the services of some professional lab.

The number of aircraft in the air has a major impact on the fps. I've noticed that when I fly earlier campaigns (1915-1916), I get higher framerates because there's less air activity. But in 1918, if I try to play with too high settings for my computer, those big dogfights turn into slideshows. I haven't noticed the sim plays any slower in Alsace with all its woods and hills though. The number of aircraft close to you seems to be the deciding factor. One trick I've used to make the sim look nicer and also run a bit smoother is to increase the anti-aliasing.

Excellent pics, Olham. Good DFW photos seem to be very rare, especially when you consider that it was a great 2-seater, popular with the pilots and the most produced German aircraft of the war. And it's a pleasure to fly in OFF, too, and if you stay high, no Allied fighter will ever get you. Bomben los!

I hope the petitions help. It's not completely hopeless after all - Electronic Arts (one of the worst major game publishers who usually doesn't know the meaning of customer service) changed their DRM system to a much less restrictive one last year because they had succeeded in angering a huge number of their customers with limited installations and whatnot. And that DRM system wasn't even as bad as the one currently used by Ubi.

It's because you're a great ace compared to any AI in any flight sim. If you were flying the Tripe, you'd slaughter Albs even more easily than you now kill Tripes with your Alb.

It feels almost unfair to fly the Tripe against the Albs, it's so much more deadly. Not much of a challenge to shoot down an AI-flown Alb D.II with the Tripe. Not only is the Tripe much more maneuverable, it's also faster.

OBD, give this man a Snipe. A very nice pic.

The Pfalz D.III and Albs D.II - D.Va have excellent visibility, much better than practically in any Entente biplane fighters. The N.28 is real bad, but the worst forward visibility in OFF must be in the German bomber DFW C.V. Otherwise it's a superb two-seater, so it doesn't bother me that much.

Looks stronger than the real Nupe.

Interesting. I don't suppose they mention the name of the drug he received? I was under the impression they didn't yet have very good medicine for fighting the toxin produced by the bacterium C. tetani, which causes tetanus. Just professional interest in the history of medicine from my part... But they didn't have the vaccine yet in 1917, that I do know for a fact.

Tetanus vaccine became available in the 1920s. During WW1, there wasn't much the doctors could do to effectively help patients suffering from tetanus. The best method of preventing tetanus was to clean the wounds as quickly and thouroughly as possible, but we know how easy that was in the muddy trench conditions. Tetanus is caused by bacteria which were very common for example in the soil of Flanders.

Let's hope OBD continues to do well enough in the future so that there's never need for any such DRM in OFF. But I seriously doubt the right way to fight against piracy is to punish your paying customers. All developers should rather try to make their games such that they reward their customers who actually buy their software, and not make them pay for those jerks who practice piracy. When I buy a DVD and put it into the player, it always feels idiotic to watch through a couple of minutes of commercials that tell me "Piracy is bad, okay? Don't be a pirate!" Why am I forced to watch such idiocy when the guy who downloads the movie free from the net has no such problems? Do they think I bought the movie because I wan't to start making illegal copies of it?

Dowding was a brilliant man, but he was also a rather eccentric person. He believed in fairies and ghosts and was a Theosophist among other things. A fascinating personality, if there ever was one.

Fascinating story, Lou. The human mind is a very complicated system, much more so than any computer, and we've only recently begun to gain some understanding about what goes on there between the ears. I've never experienced anything comparable to your encounter with the bomber. Maybe this is only my first life. As to going back in time, well why not, but only if I'm able to get back home as soon as I want. I couldn't live without all this modern technology. Life in the 1910s for example would be far too primitive to my tastes.

Wasn't it already cracked? I remember reading something about it on some other forum or news site a few days ago. I understand why developers want to use DRM, but what Ubisoft has done goes too far, in my opinion. Customers have rights too.

Must be the more relaxed Turkish Weltanschauung - Germans who were serving in Turkey and the Middle East during the war often complained about how slowly everything was done there by the local people. They had a different attitude toward life than the German officers who wanted everything done as quickly and efficiently as possible. These cultural differences always caused problems for European expeditionary forces in Asia, especially if the troops were led by men who didn't even want to understand the differences. But able and understanding commanders like T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) were able to achieve good results in cooperation with the local peoples. Those pictures are hand-coloured, and they look great. I've never seen anything like them from the Turkish front of the war. A fascinating glimpse into a world that was lost long ago. Thanks for sharing them, Wels. Too bad I don't understand Turkish...

"Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." Railway transport was crucial to the war effort of every major power that participated in WW1. Cars and trucks were slow and unreliable (and most armies never had enough of them, especially the Central Powers), so the best method of quickly transporting men and materiel from one place to another was by train.

These videos are always great.

It's been a long time since I last updated my graphics drivers. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. But I suppose if you have the latest model, you have to update it constantly to make it work with games.

I have both Rise of Flight and OFF. Both have their merits, but where OFF really (and I mean REALLY) shines is the single player career mode. RoF doesn't come even close to that kind of content and immersion. If you ever played and enjoyed Red Baron 3D and its campaign mode, you'll love OFF. RoF is a far way from that kind of immersion, yet. Its strengths lay currently elsewhere. Both are good sims to have, but when it comes to single player content and immersion, OFF is simply the best WW1 sim there is. Its the closest you can get to actually living the role of a pilot in the Great War. So to answer your question Padfoot, why you should get OFF if you have RoF. Because of the excellent dynamic campaign system. And why to get RoF if you already have OFF. Because the physics engine is great and there's a lot of potential for excellent online play, and also perhaps single player campaign play some day, if they improve it considerably from its current state. But as things are now, OFF is very much better than RoF for single player mode - more planes and all of them flyable, more nations, longer period of war modelled, excellent campaign system etc.

Keep trying, Morris. I'm sure the devs make a mistake one day and accidentally reveal new pics or something about P4.

No offence to BAD, but I think I'll stick with the Islay whiskeys.

It was the old Morane Bullet, not this Bristol.

Does your distillery also produce whiskey? BAD whiskey? Let us know if you finish that monoplane some day.