Lothar of the Hill People

Ah yes, sometimes if patches aren't all applied correctly it causes problems. Glad you're up and running (or is that flying?)!

Thanks for the detailed info on the error. Ah, you don't have HitR installed, correct? The CustomSkins feature was added with that expansion. Thought OFFice was backwards compatible without HitR but perhaps not entirely. I'll PM you a file that may fix it. To get back to running OFF normally, run JSGME and deactivate any OFFbase mod folders and any others you don't want with your campaign.

OFFice should "just work" so if there's a problem, please take a screenshot of any errors in the "REBOL 3 Alpha" console and send it my way. Everyone's machine is... unique, but I'm usually quick to fix things that crop up. As for where to start, I'd personally suggest the French fighter squadron "Esc LaF" in the fall of 1916, when it's at Luxeuil field in Alsace. Great scenery, and not too difficult to start. Great time and place to learn to fly. Plus with OFFice your l'Escadrille Americaine will receive American pilots while having a French ground crew, which is just kinda fun.

Thanks! Makes more sense to go with the unit name rather than the squadron name given how the units and roles change over time: ("sweep" = mission/type) and (true? any [ found? find squad/unit "FA(A)" found? find squad/unit "AFA" ]) So for example FFA 9b will get scrambles while fielding Eindeckers, but no longer when it becomes FA(A) 296b. Whereas while the unit names progresses from AFA 209 to FA(A) 209 its role doesn't change. What about MFFA 1? Presumably this stands for Marine Feldflieger-Abteilung, but the included graphic says Marine Flieger-Abteilung (Artillerie) (should be MFAA?).

The mods here at CA are a great addition to OFF as well, scram. Digging in can be a little intimidating, but the OFFice incomparable campaign engine is a good place to start, as it integrates the best of the community's mods in one easy-to-install-and-use package. Makes what's special about OFF even better, if I do say so myself.

Bletchley and Buddy1998's mission mods (included in OFFice) remove Scramble missions for two-seaters. In the next release, your OFFbase adjutant won't assign Scramble missions to Flieger-Abteilung, Artillerie squadrons either. Very simple rule, drops missions where ("sweep" = mission/type) and (found? find squad/name "FA(A)") Open to suggestion for other rules to make mission planning smarter and more realistic.

Haha Lou, you forgot OFFramp, OFFput, and OFFset! Though I think OFFworld will be the most fun... but that's a secret for now.

TrackIR profiles are a science as well as an art. For true simulation viewing, set up manually or with my field-of-view manager OFFfov, the goal is to render the scene so objects appear at their true size and distance in the gameworld. To achieve this, TrackIR's Z-Axis should be disabled. Thus if you move an inch closer to the screen, your gages and guns in front of you should also appear to come an inch closer. The Olham and elephant profiles linked above are set up for an arcade view. Move your head an inch closer to the screen, and your gages appear to move two or more inches toward you, distorting the scale of the scene. Enemy planes may be closer or farther away than they appear! If you sit close to a big screen or multiple monitors and use OFFfov to configure a simulation view, you can disable the Z-Axis, for these profiles or your own, by just unchecking it on the Motion Adjustment section of the TrackIR profile:

TrackIR's not required to use OFFice. Don't clean sweep just yet! When OFFbase hangs on the "generating squadron" window, can you copy the text or send a screen shot of the "REBOL 3 Alpha" console that's running in the background? I should be able to fix the error and get you up and running.

Basically, but you'll also first need to disable the OFFbase JSGME mods by running JSGME manually. And as the FAQ says, you may also want to disable the Advanced Ammo system in OFFramp as this affects the ammo used by all aircraft. Then you can play OFF just like OFFbase isn't there. Run the "Play OFFbase" icon, then select your nation and squad. Press "Play Squadron" then choose your pilot and click "Play Pilot". Once the squadron finishes loading and synchronizing, it'll open to the squadron window with an orange OFFramp button on the bottom: Nope, OFFput uses the OFFbase pilot personalities to rebuild the XML files.

Yep, zoomzoom, you can basically switch it on and off. See the FAQ, specifically the question "Do I have to play all my OFF pilots OFFbase?"

OFF Manager often corrupts the UnlimitedPilots.xml file. Basic things like deleting pilots can cause problems. Fortunately, my OFFput pilot undertaker can rebuild the XML files and restore your pilots to functionality. It is included in the OFFice incomparable campaign engine. Just run OFFbase, and it may detect and call OFFput to repair the problem automatically. To repair manually, once you're in the main OFFbase squadron window, click the OFFramp button to run the mod manager and you'll see the OFFput page on the left.

The OFFice incomparable campaign engine includes HPW's AI empty weight mod, which makes AI planes more realistically account for the weight of fuel and ammo to help you keep up with them.

Actually, a more realistic view is generally closer in than default for typical-sized monitors. Zooming out like Pol prefers increases your peripheral vision at the cost of heavy distortion: the fish-eye effect that was one of the biggest complaints in reviews of CFS3. While you can see more of the sky, it's impairs spotting aircraft at a distance because they are rendered to appear smaller than they actually are in the 3D scene. So the fish-eye view's more useful in combat for tracking enemies who are already close, but still they are closer than they appear so deflection shooting is more difficult. Maybe that's why he's always colliding with other planes in the WOFF previews haha! A realistic field of view does limit your peripheral vision. A large screen or multiple monitors helps most but is also the most expensive solution. TrackIR is somewhere in the middle. Cheapest salve is to sit as close to your screen as physically possible; I move my monitor up to the edge of my desk to fly. Think of the screen as a window into the gameworld--ideally you'd want to wrap it around your eyes like goggles. I guess 3D virtual reality goggles is the best and most expensive solution. Give my FOV manager a try (run OFFbase, and from the main Squadron window click the OFFramp button to open the mod manager, and select the OFFfov page). It's pretty intuitive, and does all the fancy 3D math to calculate the rendered field of view and line it up with the actual field of view of your screen. I know a lot of people are used to the zoomed-out fish-eye experience, but once you get used to "being in the cockpit" you'll start to find inhumanely zooming out a little nauseating. It's like flying through the passenger side mirror of a car. A final note about TrackIR in all this: In a simulation view, you should set the z movement to 0cm:1cm, effectively disabling z movement. Thus if you move your head an inch forward, what's on screen shouldn't change--it just gets an inch closer to you so everything stays the same perceived size. You are physically in the virtual cockpit, controlling the virtual plane. But if you can't sit close enough or have a big enough screen to comfortably play as a visual simulation, set TrackIR z movement to 1cm:1cm. In this arcade view, you sit outside the virtual cockpit, on your couch or whatever, and you control the virtual pilot, who in turn controls the plane. Moving your head an inch forward moves the virtual pilot's head an inch forward. Your gages and everything else in front of you actually appear 2 inches closer to you, but your mind is translating itself into the virtual pilot's position so this is okay. This translation process is the same as flying from spot view--we know how to move a plane to the left even if it doesn't look to the left from where we're sitting. Same translation process happens flying a radio-controlled plane, as another example. It's what makes most "first person" games playable, but adds a barely imperceptible lag to our mental processing that breaks true immersion. "Second person" is a more apt description of virtually all such games, while true "first person" simulation as described above is almost never achieved in the consumer space. AFAIK, my OFFfov program makes OFF the only true visual first-person flight simulator available for the home computer.

Done! Not sure where the email will end up, but it's more than just a bug report. If you or someone else at OBD could get back to me about the other matter, Polovski, I'd really appreciate it.

The virtual pilot's eye, Pol. To achieve true simulation viewing, the human eye and virtual camera need to be in the same spot in 3D relative to the real/virtual screen. Then gages and instruments in your cockpit are rendered to appear in actual size, your gunsight appears just as far away from your real eye as if you were in the cockpit, distant enemies are more readily spotted by eye at actual size, your real-world spatial intuition can be applied to deflection shooting, etc. My OFFfov program helps achieve this, along with other features. Need a big screen or multi-monitor set-up to really take advantage of this kind of immersion though. FYI, the FOV controls in the OFF Workshops are mislabeled. Instead of horizontal and vertical they actually control FOV UP and DOWN above and below CFS3's virtual camera. Sum them to get the total vertical FOV, while the rendered horizontal FOV depends on the total VFOV and the aspect ratio of the screen. I'm sure the controls can be corrected in WOFF if they haven't already for people who aren't using my FOV manager, which gives you a nice set of easy-to-use sliders to configure your view while hiding all the scary 3D math under the hood.

My OFFfov field-of-view manager (included in OFFice) really really puts you in the cockpit with TrackIR. It can configure CFS3's 3D engine to place the virtual camera where you actually sit in order to render the scene so angles are preserved and objects appear at the actual distance in the gameworld. That enemy plane 50m in front of you actually looks 50m away, not 40m or 60m, so you can intuitively apply your real-world spatial reasoning.

Looks like the result of a very non-human field-of-view. To keep your OFF flights from looking like that, use the OFFfov field-of-view manager built into OFFice.

No sense manually re-recording the samples with lower quality. The OFFice installer actually distributes the sound files as lossless .flac files (to get under the 500MB file size), uncompressing them to .wav files after install. It was easy to modify the installer code to not just uncompress the .flac files, but also use SoX to convert them to 22.5kHz mono on the fly. Those of you with old slow machines experiencing problems: try this installer, and check the box for low quality audio. If that doesn't help, then Andy can think about mucking with the sounds.xml.

Try this preload version. Andy, you can add it to your real upload if you'd like.

Welcome, MudWasp48! Since you're enjoying the campaign so much, you may appreciate OFFice: the incomparable campaign engine for OFF. It's a big download but well worth it, especially for new OFFers. HitR and OFFice together are about a gigabyte to download. As for reports, the more specific detail you can add the better your confirmation chances. It's commonly accepted practice to pause the game out of combat and turn on labels to identify craft, then turn off labels for combat itself. But of course you can play however you want. OFFice lets you edit your claims reports after the fact.

Modern "on board" sound is pretty good these days if you get a decent motherboard, so you should only need a separate sound card if you're doing something exotic like sound mixing/recording. The Windows audio architecture was reworked with Vista pretty much taking away hardware-accelerated audio processing for games in order to improve stability and security. When you're ready to upgrade your computer, gaw, you'll find knowledgeable folks around the forums more than happy to help. Andy, let me know if you'd like to include the preloads in the stand-alone (non-OFFice) version of your sound mod and I'll slap together an updated installer.

Andy, I based that quick and dirty preloads mod on this one for CFS3. Seems the stuttering is an issue only really old, low-spec machines need to worry about.

http://overflandersfields.com/Buy.htm

But spending £50 million now as apposed to 2018 can bring the inevitable consequences of bad fiscal management to head sooner! It's not like the EU's a power keg waiting to blow...