Lothar of the Hill People

You have 1920 pixels across and 1080 high. Use it. Anything else has to distort or crop the image to fit into those 1920x1080 little squares. You've got Windows rendering a desktop that's a completely different shape than your actual display. This will also mess up the FOV settings in the next version of OFFice. For eye strain and headaches, there are two issues I'd examine. 1. Stuff just may be too small. But what you're afraid of is old XP-style DPI scaling--changing the size of fonts and causing those problems you mentioned. That's exactly what you don't what to use in Vista/7/8 which treat your desktop as a 3D texture and can scale that without affecting how any applications themselves are rendered, designed for LCD screens. Make sure you're using the right method and give it a try. 2. Color temperature. I suggest using this program to correct the lighting your LCD screen gives off for the ambient lighting given your location and time of day. Makes a big difference especially with "LED"-enhanced LCDs like yours. Okay, 3. Don't get all out of whack with Nvidia control panel. Could be something there messing things up at your native resolution. Make sure you're using the correct Refresh Rate as well. 1600×900 is the next smallest 16:9 resolution. But how do you think your monitor stretches a 900 pixel tall image onto a 1080 pixel tall screen? Not prettily, at least compared to displaying an image the right size to begin with. And a true 23" diagonal and16:9 aspect ratio is 20.046" wide by 11.276" tall. Haha man, you're the only one doing anything weird!

1680x1050 is 16:10 and doesn't work well at all on your 16:9 Dell. You're either getting a distorted (squished) or truncated (missing top&bottom) view. With LCD screens you pretty much always want to run them at native resolution. If stuff on your desktop is too small, DON'T lower your resolution. Windows Vista/7/8 which were designed in the LCD era instead have options to scale up the render itself . Check Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display, though you'll have to logoff and log back in for the changes to take effect. This should give a much better result than using non-native resolution in the wrong aspect ratio!

Yep that's what it looks like-good ol' CFS3, released in 2002. But it lets me replace the OFF Workshops settings with a simple slider that moves through the full vertical FOV allowable by OFF while preserve the correct aspect ratio for your monitor. Yep again. It's possible to calculate where in the room CFS3 thinks its virtual camera is, so you know where to put your eyeballs. Takes a special someone to put up with Barmy OFFers!

You sure about those resolutions, HPW? Neither 1980x1050 nor 1650x1080 are 'proper' resolutions. 1920x1080 is 16:9, and 1680×1050 is 16:10. What's the model number of you Dell monitor?

That's exactly how it's suppose to be, HumanDrone. Though with multi-monitors you can focus on getting the vertical FOV right for distance and let the horizontal take care of itself with the added peripheral vision. Does take a lot of screen real estate to get the most out of a simulator, but there's more to it. The correct field of view and distance are critical so objects in the gameworld are as close as they appear: enemy planes are actually where you think they are when you're shooting at them, you can judge the distance to that clearing as you're gliding down without fuel, etc. Mostly it's a subconscious effect of whether or not you feel like you're there in the cockpit or flying a radio-controlled plane. The goal is really to put your eyes and the 3D engine's virtual camera in about the same place. Here are a couple of examples I found to illustrate the difference between a proper visual simulation, in this case the Honda driving simulator: and a cheesy arcade game: Notice here how the real and virtual steering wheel and front tires are seemingly meters apart. Perspective is bizzaro, and it's impossible to intuitively judge distances and angles to make turns on the racetrack. Even if only the sitting position is wrong, it hiccups your brain just a little to have to mentally switch perspectives--a subconscious effect that can destroy immersion. All together, the most garish kit has multiple ways of inducing nausea. So it's not just about more, bigger screens, but how you use them. Getting the math right is key (and labeling the FOV settings incorrectly in the Workshops doesn't help!). My FOV calculator is moving to join the OFFice incomplete campaign editor suite in its next release, but oh it will do so much more than just calculate... stay tuned.

No wonder Wings on the Amiga got us both! 35 since October.

Hey AROTH. Wait another day or so for version 3.1, which will come in an automatic installer. You should first install JSGME from here which is needed for most mods, Andy's sounds included. My OFFramp mod manager, part of the OFFice incomplete campaign editor, makes using OFF mods easy--and a whole lot more. Basically it's OFF Phase 3.5. Take a look, and follow the included links to get more easy-to-install mods for OFF.

Good advice, HumanDrone, but don't yet bother as the sheet's all wrong since things are mislabeled in the Workshops.

Forgot to list RAF_Louvert's New Medals mod, JSGME installer version over at simhq.

Bad news for my FOV calculator. The math is right, but the Workshop settings are wrong. The values aren't actually horizontal and vertical FOV as they're labeled in the Workshops. If you look at the XDP files: <Station Name="Pilot" Type="pilot_station" View="0" FovUp="23" FovDown="16"> Up and Down, not Horizontal and Vertical. If you experiment, you'll see that increasing the so-called "horizontal" doesn't widen the angle of view directly, but adds relatively more above you. In the default case as in this example, 23+16=39 degree total vertical FOV, which about fits a 59.1 degree horizontal FOV on a 16:10 screen. So that makes a lot more sense, even though it's not at all how the Workshops indicate things work. Going to have to rethink how it's handing the projection (really, ironing out how it handles the "zoom" levels). It doesn't actually render the 59.1:39 FOV directly, but renders a wide-angle for which CFS3 was oft-criticized then "zooms in" to approximate the right FOV at the right scale. Some back-of-the-post-it-note suggestions for optimal viewing: 16:9 aspect ratio: 20:16 Workshop FOV, sit 75% away from screen's diagonal 16:10 aspect ratio: 20:20 Workshop FOV, sit 73% away from screen's diagonal 4:3 aspect ratio: 30:20 Workshop FOV, sit 67% away from screen's diagonal For example, if you run OFF at 1920x1080 (1080p) resolution, take 1920/1080 to find your aspect ratio. That's 1.77... which is the same as 16/9, so set your FOV to 20:16 in the OFF Workshops. If your monitor has a 20 inch screen, your eyes should be 15 inches away. It turns out we knew what we were doing as kids when our folks yelled at us for sitting too close to the TV--getting the perspective right. And OFF benefits from screen real estate like few other games! Stick with the default "zoom" level for the normal scale of human vision and correct perspective. You're probably used to zooming out more, but if you're sitting close enough to the screen you should be in the best view for firing up close and spotting enemies (with TrackIR--set your x,y,z movements to 1cm:1cm and likely turn down pitch and yaw). At the recommended distance things should appear as close as the actually are in the game world. The bottom of your monitor should feel like the lip of your cockpit--which means you can't reach your machine guns from six feet away on the couch!

Thanks Capt, just took a second to fix and will be in the next update. Yep, it's in OlPaint01's bundle and automatically activated for German OFFbase campaigns. Americans will get HPW's English news in the next update. Anyone want to take a crack at the French? They've sadly been neglected in my expanded names mod as well. A look at your pilot maps, Olham, suggests OFF has a lot more virtual than real française pilots. That's the idea, man. Think of it as an unofficial Phase 3.5. Sure it's all the best mods from the OFF community in one easy-to-use package with all the compatibility issues ironed out. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The in-flight experience is vastly more realistic and immersive (turn on RSS!), and the out-of-flight relationships from the role-playing game add tremendous weight to the consequences of what happens in the air, especially since you can actually track what happens to your squadmates on more historically-accurate missions. This is especially true now that Creaghorn's realistic smoke and tracer bullets will indeed feature in the next update! Since CaptSopwith was looking for the supported additional mods earlier, here's the full list, current as of the date of this post. Download and install them all and OFFbase will take care of everything else. Automatic installers: JoneSoft Generic Mod Enabler Great Bundle Realism Mods JSGME Enabled 1.6 Grand Bundle Sounds Mods JSGME Enabled 1.6 Ultimate Bundle Damage Models JSGME Enabled 1.0 Lothar Names 1.2 Lothar Maps Lothar Classical Piano Germany Manual installs to JSGME mods folder: HPW FM and EW Campaign Mod 3.1 Buddy1998 Modified DM 2.2 Andy73 Sound Tweak 3 + Engines

Gonna hold you to that, Olham! Gotta release an update soon anyway to fix a bug with it forgetting your wingman. I'll be in touch, Creaghorn.

It's already included in one of OlPaint01's bundles, and is activated automatically by OFFbase for British campaigns if installed. Should I activate it for American campaigns as well?

You're just saying that 'cause it's the only way to keep track of all these great mods: Creaghorn German News Creaghorn Homebrew News Creaghorn Homebrew Sounds Creaghorn News Photos Creaghorn Sound Tweak Creaghorn Sound Tweak II Creaghorn Sound Tweak II Patch Creaghorn Spandau Mod Creaghorn StartupBritish Creaghorn StartupGerman And those are just the ones in my JSGME mods folder, never mind your updated names files that I've expanded further. What's the deal with your tracers and smoke mods? Are they compatible with all the other weapons mods? If so, we should make OFFice versions. It'd be easy to program so tracers only become available when historically accurate to the campaign, etc.

Links to the supported mods are all included on the OFFbase download page. I know there's a lot of text there, but scroll down to the JSGME Mods section. HPW's new FM 3.1 is listed along with Buddy1998's new DM 2.2 (HPW's old DM is in Olpaint01's realism bundle I think and hasn't been updated). Best practice to update a JSGME mod is to deactivate the old version in JSGME first, then install the update.

Third update: OFFbase version 0.8.4 implements the RSS Workshop and CFS3 settings in those PDFs automatically, along with a bunch of other mods.

Version 0.8.4 is now available for download.

Second update: the RSS pdfs seem to have gone missing from the thread. Just reposting: Preamble to SIA - Realistic Survival Settings.pdf SIA - RSS 1915 to June 1916.pdf SIA - RSS July 1916 March 1917.pdf SIA - RSS April 1917 February 1918.pdf SIA - RSS March 1918 November 1918 only.pdf

This thread hasn't seen action in a while! First update: the Field of View calculations are a bit more complicated than the linear scaling presented in the above PDF. See the discussion beginning with this post, and I've created a slightly more accurate (still needs to take into account zoom levels) field of view calculator for Excel.

Haha this sure beats arguing about operating systems. But unfortunately I lost my paper dictionary in the divorce... Like life, the linguistics discussion seems to have moved onto fresh 'muff'.

I'd like to--hope WOFF is just as mod-friendly. Look forward to stripping out all the features that WOFF should hopefully implement directly, such as transfers between squadrons, tracking of squadmates in-air activities, etc.

Haha Jim, aren't all computer terms neologisms? Some dictionaries have the the definition in this context, some don't.

You could do it manually as HPW suggested: exiting, activating the mod manually in JSGME, and replaying the mission. But it'd be completely transparent to the user if handled by my scripting engine. Have you tried OFFbase, rjw? Speaking of loadouts, Bletchley's historical ammo loadout mod will be joined by his new machine gun rate-of-fire mod in the next version. Scripting makes possible all kinds of enhancements to OFF, in and out of the air.

That'd be pretty straightforward to do with the scripting engine in my OFFice campaign editor, actually. If the mod handles mission assignment itself, say in OFFbase, players wouldn't even have to exit/replay--the mod would load an XDP bomber JSGME folder and a railyard attack mission JSGME folder at the same time. With Bletchley's help version 0.8.4, which is taking longer than I'd thought to get out, will be doing something similar with a custom transfer mission to fly into your new squadron's airfield for the first time.

OlPaint01 repacked your Sound Tweak II for proper JSGME installs in one of his Bundles, but we've both been away from OFF from a while so I'm sad to admit I hadn't even seen your Tweak III until now! Just downloaded it and it looks like the paths are okay with that one. Definitely interested in a version 3.1. I've built a kit to help make installers for proper JSGME OFF mods, and would be happy to you package that 3.1 and make sure there's proper support for it in the next version of OFFbase. I'll send you a PM.