Lothar of the Hill People

Welcome, OldSimmer. When you get BH&H installed (Hat in the Ring is worth getting as well), give the OFFice incomparable campaign engine for OFF a go as well. Adds tons of new features; no 'reset button' but at least with OFFice when you die you can at least continue on in your squadron with your same squadmates. Lots of other stuff designed to make the experience better for 'rookies' whether y're OldSimmers or YoungSimmers.

Thanks for the tip, Panama Red OFFice does include expanded names files I made for the British, Germans, and Americans--based on historical sources with more popular names more common in-game. But the French could still use some work. Let me know if you'd like to chip in, Tyrconn.

Glad you've had fun with OFF and OFFice, AquilusMentis! Version 1.0.2 is now available for download.

OFFice version 1.0.2, which includes the latest version of Andy's sounds (also his updated machine-gun sounds for the historical rate-of-fire mod), has been posted and is awaiting approval from mods. It also includes and lets you listen to Andy's soundtrack mod in OFFbase. I'm sure it'll be available for download soon, so have fun! It's been awful quiet around here, so to everyone enjoying these mods: don't be afraid to make a little noise of your own around here. How about posting some stories and screenshots and journal entries of your adventures in OFF and OFFbase?

Both mod folders 'Andy73 Sounds' and 'Andy73 Engine Sounds' should be activated, the latter includes all the individual aircraft-specific engine sounds while the former all the general sounds. They're both included and installed for a reason. I'll post an update to OFFice shortly that includes all the latest sounds and activates everything automatically so you guys don't have to worry about this stuff.

Sent you a PM but haven't heard back, majorwoody. Thought I'd fixed the font issue with XP, but apparently not. If anyone else runs into the empty-boxes-instead-of-text problem, please contact me via private message. I'll post an update here when the issue has been resolved. Also, if people could please post questions in the support thread, I can keep this thread focused on providing answers and solutions to common issues.

Version 1.0 is now available for download. Most noticeable new feature is being able to set your own gun convergence distance in the Hangar.

Clearly, an early 8-bit game. Think these guys were playing M.U.L.E.:

Haha, got a bunch of 3.5" floppies from my Amiga, including Cinemaware's Wings--some I've had since '87. Probably all dead now, taking much of the music and such I wrote as a kid with them. Though it could be possible to get some data off with hard work. Took five years to recover Andy Warhol's Amiga discs: http://www.artdaily....91#.USEqtd6Lgag

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Good to hear a few more reports of people having success with OFFice and OFFbase! Great, just posted a FAQ thread over in the Knowledge Base section. If someone could pin it at the top, I would appreciate it.

FAQ for the OFFice incomparable campaign engine and the OFFbase role-playing game at its heart. Do I need an internet connection to use OFFice or play OFFbase? Nope. Select ‘Solo Mode’ in the User Settings to stop OFFbase and other OFFice programs from going online for any of this stuff: Selecting an account at Combat Ace or SimHQ in the User Settings configures access to support, mods, documentation, and other links in the forums from the OFFice interface. OFFbase 0.8.6+ checks online for newer versions Posted at Combat Ace, and adds a tip to the status bar to alert you. See the question below for what to do. Future versions may include additional online features, such as multiplayer OFFbase campaigns. I get a VBScript error when I try to run the software. How do I fix it? If you’re running Windows XP, make sure you install Service Pack 3 to get Windows Script Host 5.7. You can also install it from here: http://www.microsoft...ls.aspx?id=8247 If you’re running Windows Vista or later, most likely the problem arises from 3rd party anti-virus software not properly uninstalling. See the fix in this post: http://combatace.com...ds/#entry613019 See here for more information and the source of the fix: http://www.sevenforu...tml#post1396118 How do I update OFFice / OFFbase? If you see a tip in your Squadron HQ’s status bar about an update, just “Change Squadron” to return to the main menu, hit the “About” button, and click “Update” to download the latest update. Close OFFbase and run the new OFFbase.exe installer. Which OFF pilot Dossiers do OFFbase/OFFice modify? The program won’t touch OFF pilot Dossiers in squadrons you don’t play OFFbase, so you can safely try it without risking your long-standing pilots. Just create a new pilot in a new squadron, which is the best way to start an OFFbase campaign anyway. All active pilot Dossiers within a squadron are synced to the active campaign date when you “Play Pilot” to join an OFFbase squadron and when you return to your current OFFbase campaign. Do I have to play all my OFF pilots OFFbase? Nope, as above pilots in non-OFFbase squadrons remain untouched. You’re free to launch OFF by itself, setting JSGME mods manually, to play the original OFF:HitR the old-fashioned way with these pilots. You should first deactivate the Advanced Ammo system in OFFramp and Save your changes to restore stock guns, ammo, and tracers for non-OFFbase squadrons. After exiting OFFbase, launch JSGME and be sure to deactivate any OFFbase-specific JSGME mods along with your other choices. Then quit JSGME and launch Over Flanders Fields manually. How do I uninstall OFFice and OFFbase? Because of the complete integration with OFF and extensive, dynamic modification of game files (far beyond just JSGME mods), OFFice cannot simply be uninstalled or deleted like a stand-alone product. If you truly wish to roll back your OFF installation to a pre-OFFice state, restore it from backup. Your best bet’s just to stop using it and go back to managing JSGME and launching OFF manually. See the above FAQ question for playing without OFFice and OFFbase. You may also wish to run OFFset and recover your pre-OFFice Workshop and CFS3Config settings. Can I use OFFice for Quick Combat (QC) or Multiplayer? In short, it’s best to use a different pilot for QC and multiplayer flights, flying configuring JSGME mods and launching OFF manually as in the above FAQ question. Pilots launched from OFFbase can indeed enter and user QC, but the mods and settings it configures are only appropriate for your actual campaign and specific aircraft. Other aircraft aren’t properly configured, and switching aircraft in QC may confuse OFFbase. So if you insist on launching QC from OFFbase, do so only with your current craft. Also, OFF Manager continues to advance time and generate mission results for your squadmates while you QC. Best to be a part of the campaign while this is happening! How do I play as an American pilot in Escadrille La Fayette née Escadrille Américaine? It’s a French military unit with French ranks and uniforms, so start a campaign for France in Esc LaF. The other pilots in the squad will have American names (and maybe French mustaches), while the Ground Crew will be France-born or Colonial. You can eventually transfer to other French squadrons as many American pilots did. Perhaps future versions of OFFbase will allow transfer into American squads once the USA joins. What happens if my initial transfer mission is canceled due to weather? That’s fine, just keep trying and letting time advance in OFF Manager until it clears up enough for you to fly and join your squadron. How do I join an existing OFFbase campaign with a new pilot? A squadron is converted to an OFFbase campaign when you first join OFFbase with one of its pilots. To join this same campaign with replacement or other pilots, it’s critical you create a new pilot Dossier in OFF Manager for the existing OFFbase squadron before the date of your most recent pilot in that squadron. If you fail to heed these instructions and join with a newer pilot it, will overwrite all your old AI squadmates. It’s easiest just to create new pilots at the first date given for the squadron by OFF. They’ll automatically join at the later date, so you don’t need to page through time in OFF to join the squad with subsequent pilots. Why can’t I reuse the same name for multiple pilots? OFFbase personalities are assigned to pilots, both player and non-player, by name. In the case of player pilots, this is also used to sync to their OFF pilot Dossiers and CFS3’s unlimitedpilots.xml. For two OFFbase pilots with the same name, one may end up overwriting the other. You don’t want to corrupt your pilot files, do you? As per above, duplicate names are just fine for your old non-OFFbase pilots as their Dossiers are ignored. To help avoid duplicate names for AI pilots, which just causes confusion as they try to share the same AI, use Lothar of the Hill People’s expanded names mod, linked above in the Mods section. When is it safe to delete an OFFbase pilot’s Dossier in OFF Manager? Only with another Active player pilot in the same squadron! Seriously! Each squadron’s campaign continues until the end of the war (or the squad itself terminates in which case you can transfer to another). Deleting the last pilot in the squad will break this system. Active: In Service, Returning, On Leave, Injured, Hospitalized Inactive: Deceased, Captured, Disabled Deleting an Active player squadmate creates an AI squadmate (see FAQ question further below). Deleting an Inactive squadmate is generally unnecessary and even detrimental, but sometimes you may wish to free up the name (see FAQ question below) or photo. Even after your pilot’s career has ended, your deeds OFFbase and in the air continue to shape your ongoing campaign as part of your squadron’s institutional memory. Their journals remain in your squadron’s Memorial, where their records are listed for posterity, but it’s more than that--the hole they leave behind can affect how your replacement pilot is received by those in grief. Once an Inactive player pilot is listed as “Forgotten” in the OFFbase Memorial, it’s safe to delete them in OFF. This means you can quickly clear out rookie pilots who died after not making much impact. How come my changes in the OFF Workshops or CFS3Config keep getting reset? A number of mods and features of OFFice and OFFbase work by directly controlling these settings. Much of this is configurable however, and many options can be returned to your control. See the options in OFFramp, particularly the Realism Profiles. Sometimes OFF Manager seems to take a while, or CFS3 even crashes, while launching a mission from the Campaign Briefing Room. What’s up? OFFramp dynamically rebuilds OFF aircraft source files for Advanced Ammo, OFFfov field of view management, etc. Compiling new binary aircraft files can take a while for hundreds of aircraft, and CFS3 originally only had two dozen to worry about. So should CFS3 crash when launching your mission, just close it, go back into the Briefing Room, and try again. The binaries should be finished compiling by now and your mission will start in short order. I’m not interested in all this role-playing stuff; can I still take advantage of the mod management, injury system, custom missions, expanded post-mission options and reports, advanced ammo, realism profiles, field-of-view management, medal upgrades, transfers between squadrons, etc.? Sure, gameplay has been designed with you in mind as well. Having a personality and some basic relationships are required for some of these advanced features to function (hence why you cannot access OFFramp until you reach Squadron HQ), but you can minimize your exposure to the role-playing elements. After the initial introductory sequence, just stick to the Adjutant’s Office and your Hangar and avoid the bulk of the encounters. You will still receive one encounter with a member of your flight prior to each mission, but this is by design. Just click through without reading if you really don’t care. Having a labeled picture of a flightmate flip by for a second on the way to your Hangar acts to quickly teach you the name of those in your formation. You’ll soon have no problem listing witnesses for claims, even getting the spelling right for those kooky Germans. Your claim confirmation rate will rise thanks to these “flash cards”. The Adjutant will let you know if there are encounters waiting in the Mess, but just avoid them. Not everyone has a roommate, and this is only one encounter per day, so you can often access your Lodgings without bother to further edit your Journal or nap/sleep to advance time to schedule your own missions. Even better, make your character an introverted slob loner killer and no one will want to bother him anyway. You’ll be exposed to much less of the social component of OFFbase, which rewards even this kind of anti-social role-playing. But if you want to play a more socially-skilled character and micromanage your squad’s morale and social networks, you’ll more often have access to detailed info on your squadmates, receive more encounters per day in the mess, and have more tactical and strategic options to employ those encounters. How come the clouds outside my Hangar never move? Because they don’t in OFF! I just parked a bicycle outside a few airfields (careful to avoid any identifying aircraft), turned on time acceleration, set FRAPS loose to take time-lapse photography, applied a simple film grain filter and resized. But there’s a solution if you can do better... There’s no snow / the topography’s not quite right / I know that random crate wasn’t historically there on date XYZ... How do I make my own imagery for my Hangar? The cool thing is, it’s easy to make the view from your Hangar anything you want. In the OFFice\images\field you’ll see folders for different OFF Airfields. If the name matches your squadron’s actual location, it will take the appropriate imagery, otherwise choose one of the existing image sets at random. To make your own imagery, first just make a folder with the exact same name as the location of your airfield. Next, onto the images themselves: The recommended size is 300x357 pixels. The file type and suffix doesn’t matter (.jpg, .bmp, and .png should all work). To just show a static image of your airfield, maybe from historic photos or an in-game screenshot, copy the single image into your airfield’s location folder. Viola! To show dynamic images that change over time of day, look at one of the included imagesets. Within each location folder is a series of time-stamped images. Again the type and suffix don’t matter, but the base file name must be a four-digit military time. Beware you cannot use colons (:) in the filenames, just numbers! The first must be 0000.xxx where xxx is your file type. Then add images that will appear at the named time and show until the next image’s time. For example, 1845.bmp will show for fifteen minutes until 1900.png, though you have to move in/out of the Hangar or encounter the Munitions OFFicer to advance time and the image. Also note that those times are just references. OFFbase adjusts the time of the image it requests to account for seasonal variation. For example, an 0600 dawn photo will show at 0800 in the dead of winter. Keep this in mind if developing different sets for different seasons. If people actually go to the trouble of making the images, I can extend OFFbase to choose from different seasonal image sets automatically based on absolute time across seasons. To make sure your time-sensitive images match the description in the text with the current system, here’s the rule that classifies the seasonally-adjusted times. So your “dawn” photos should start at 0530.xxx and by your 0630xxx the sun will be up, though you’ll actually experience this “dawn” later when closer to winter. case [ time < 3:30 ["late at night"] time < 5:30 ["pre-dawn"] time < 6:30 ["dawn"] time < 7:30 ["early in the morning"] time < 9:30 ["morning"] time < 11:30 ["late morning"] time < 12:30 ["around noon"] time < 14:30 ["early afternoon"] time < 16:00 ["afternoon"] time < 17:30 ["late in the afternoon"] time < 18:30 ["early evening"] time < 20:00 ["evening"] time < 22:00 ["late in the evening"] true ["night time"] ] And yes it sucks the Germans don’t get a bicycle aka exploding tripod. Still, OFFbase image packs can be shared, and even installed and activated with JSGME. How do I create/customize my AI squadmates? Create a new pilot with the name you'd like in your squadron before your current pilot's date (see FAQ above) Play the new pilot in OFFbase, choosing his Archetype and other traits by rank and go through the intro sequence Change Pilot back to your primary character Delete the new (still Active) pilot's Dossier in OFF next time you Fly Mission with your primary Viola! The AI given to the new character will take over his virtual career with the name, rank, picture, and personality you chose, and you get to know him OFFbase and fly with him in the air. Your OFFbase Adjutant may not assign you to the same flights right away, but it's cool as OFF will still simulate missions for the second flight and after some additional turnover flight assignments get shaken up. All part of the drama.

If you receive VBScript errors trying to start OFFice, see this post from Davy TASB.

If you receive VBScript errors trying to start OFFbase, see this post from Davy TASB.

Need to set up a FAQ thread for OFFice. Anyone know how to make a sticky?

Thanks, Davy. Is this a common problem? Can you tell me the exact error message you got? Scary such a basic component of Windows could get messed up like this. Doing a little research it seems the problem is most often caused by 3rd party anti-virus software, particularly McAfee and avast!, often upon uninstalling them. I consider most antivirus software itself no better than a virus, mucking up and slowing down your system and causing unforeseen consequences to application behavior while draining your wallet. I recommend Microsoft Security Essentials, which is free, transparent, easy-to-use, light on your system, and won't cock up Windows. Avoid 3rd party registry "cleaner" utilities as well; these also often cause more problems than they solve.

OFFice 0.9.9 is now available at Combat Ace. You can get the full package or just download the OFFbase update. Follow a link for the full change-log. You're most likely to notice the historical weather system and new encounters. Or both: Some old encounters have been expanded with more dynamic text as well, revealing more of the underlying complexity and drama in the encounter system and more detail about the characters involved. Dogs aren't the only animals that can cause tension in the squadron:

Okay the OFFbase update including HPW's FM mod 4.0.0 is now available, which will patch OFFice 0.9.8 to version 0.9.9. The full OFFice 0.9.9 is currently uploading and should be available soon.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! Please, having two separate versions out there with different names and different install procedures is going to cause vast amounts of the kind of havok I have worked greatly to avoid. Seriously, please do not do this. The installer version works fine for EVERYBODY automatically whether they use OFFbase or not. If anything you should stop providing the manual .7z version. It's fine to put the version number in the installer file name (HPW FM and EW Mod 4.0.0.exe) so people know what version they're installing. And I've talked to Robert about a metadata format that is a good compromise (did you see that message?). We're both happy with it, and it can be expanded in the future to do more stuff like handle mod dependencies.

That's because the documentation doesn't really make sense within the individual mod folder itself--forces JSGME to copy all the documentation into the main OFF install folder every time you activate a mod, and delete it on deactivation. This slows down activation/deactivation unnecessarily (slowing down OFFramp and OFFbase) and litters your main OBDSoftware folder with all the mod documentation. That's why my installers haven't been putting version numbers in the documentation files either. Thus updates don't litter your JSGME mod folders with multiple versions of documentation--only one version of both the mod and the readme occur in the JSGME mods folder, and both go together, and you can read the documentation to check the version. So never mind, going to leave the installers as is, putting a version-free readme in JSGME mods alongside the version-free mod folder. If you use the installer .exe versions of the mods, you'll only have one copy of the mod and its documentation in your JSGME mods folder at a time--whichever version you've installed last. The above only applies to stand-alone installers of the mods. The versions packed with OFFice include the documentation in the OFFice\docs\ folder so they're all readily accessible in one place and OFFice can link directly to documentation from the OFFramp interface. And if you keep your OFFice up-to-date you always the latest version of the mods without having to worry about any of this. But I haven't actually gotten out the OFFice update because of all this worrying about versions when the whole point of OFFice is to end the worry about versions! ARGH!!! So really, last I have to say on the subject.

Epic rant posted here at SimHQ, my last word on this subject. In short: supporting multiple versions is a nightmare on a number of levels and the very thought makes me want to never touch OFF again. People who "like to compare different versions of a mod" can muck up their systems with no help from me.

Actually, that's the last thing you want to do. If you rename the folder, OFFice will no longer recognize it. JSGME mods should absolutely NOT include version numbers in the folder name so they can be upgraded transparently. The documentation installed alongside the JSGME mod folder indicates the version.

Hope to get out the update to OFFice/OFFbase with version 4.0.0 of the FM (and a ton of other improvements) soon, wrangling a few bugs.