Lothar of the Hill People

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.

Hey folks. Finally got an update out for the OFFice suite, including the OFFramp mod manager, OFFset settings manager, and OFFbase role-playing game. The changelog tells the story: mostly updated support for recent releases by OFF modders and inclusion of new mods implementing the deep institutional wisdom of the OFF community, as well as fixes for reported bugs. Links to the supported mods are included on the OFFbase download page. Here are a few OFFramp screenshots showing off some of the new mods: Version 0.8.4 is available now at Combat Ace. Hopefully this will breathe a little life into OFF while we wait for WOFF. And I suppose I should wait for the bug reports...

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.

Yep! Exactly why I posted the tables in the post above... see the 16:10 aspect ratio. But this still doesn't account for your viewing distance and monitor size, which is why you want to move through and test the different widths to find the one that works best for your setup. Think I can make that easier as well; just replied to your PM.

I looked around a bit and not much of the stuff Google returned about field of view and gaming is correct or useful, so it's no wonder OFFers ended up on a slightly wrong track. But let's see if I can make sense of things a little better. First we need to understand the difference between aspect ratio and field of view. Olham's calculations are perfectly fine for a 2D world. If we were trying to play Pac-Man on our modern high-resolution wide-screen monitors, linear scaling is exactly the approach to make sure the title character is rendered as a perfect circle and not stretched into another ellipse. In this flat universe, aspect ratio and field of view are the same thing, just in different units. Talking about the square footage of your house versus measuring it in square meters doesn't change the shape of your kitchen, and rendering scale models such as floor plans is pretty intuitive. This 2D math, with two parallel planes, is a rough enough estimate for making sure a round cockpit gage that's flat and directly in front of you looks round. But all the other gages in your peripheral vision may look like coins run over by trains and seem ten feet away. What's missing? For 3D flight sims like OFF, a more realistic presentation of the game world is critical for immersion. The CFS3 engine is basically maps a three-dimensional model onto a 2D plane. Imagine sitting front and centered before your monitor. Notice that the pixels in the middle are closer to your eyes than the pixels far in the corners. As we move out from the center of our vision, the number of pixels required to cover each degree of vision decreases. I modified the field of view example from the Wikipedia article to illustrate this: With the camera at the center and looking right, the right side of the circle is divided into four 45° angles, so the 90° field of view (in green) is divided into upper and lower halves. You can see that the first 45° from the center of the view covers about 64 pixels, but the next 45° to the top of the circle is only covers 26 vertical vertical pixels (but more horizontal pixels). Angle degrees don't trade for pixels one for one--the relationship changes nonlinearly. This is why aspect ratio (pixels or inches) and field of view (angles) are not the same thing in 3D, and while Olham's linear scaling doesn't work. But what does this mean? Objects in the game world don't just have width and height, but also depth. I've said this before: despite what a lot of stuff on the web says, Field of View has nothing to do with zoom. Zooming in and out, such as you can do in game, changes the size of things but not the depth--physically it's no different from zooming in and out of a screenshot from the game, doesn't change the perspective of how things are viewed. Instead, Field of View has everything to do with perspective. A simple example might help, but instead of screens and lenses think mirrors--specifically the passenger side mirrors of automobiles. In the US and Canada at least they all have warning stickers saying "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear", emphasis added on closer. It's not a zoom effect--it's not that objects are larger than they appear. The convex shape of these mirrors changes the field of view, distorting perspective rather than scale. Zooming in on the mirror, or getting closer to it, does not "fix" the shape of the reflected image. With our two eyes we mostly think about perspective in terms of binocular vision, but that's only useful for stuff really close. Much of how we judge distance is due to angles, processing that happens in our visual system of which our conscious minds aren't even aware. When the FOV is so wrong that your plane in OFF appears taller than it is wide, that's enough to consciously know something's amiss. But most FOV problems are far more subtle, and far more insidious in how they break immersion--distorting our sense of distance and depth. No wonder forced perspective is one of oldest and most effective special effects tricks in film and photography. The true test of FOV settings is your perception of distance. Is the spot that looks halfway down your wing, actually halfway down your wing? Do your wings get too narrow farther away from you at the tip, or not narrow with distance enough? Does the wingspan of your E.III actually feel like nine and a half meters? Does that enemy craft you're firing at from thirty feet actually appear to be thirty feet away, and not 25 or 40? With the wrong FOV settings, even if stuff in a flat plane doesn't appear distorted (cockpit gages are round), the sense of perspective can be so off as to make you feel out of scale. OFF's aircraft may feel more like toys than some of the most advanced killing machines of the day. It's a shame so many flyers have had the wrong settings for so long. I just remembered a scene in this bad comedy Ski Patrol, where a character is pranked to wake up in a miniature version of his house. In the movie it's suppose to make a short character feel like a giant, but in reality his vision system would recognize that walls and doors are closer and not just relatively smaller, and that the ground is the same distance from head as always. But project that 3D world onto a flat screen, and we're much easier to confuse. This is why FOV is so important, and why it's so tragic that pretty much every gamer is looking at all these virtual worlds from the wrong angle. Anyway, my calculator's only a starting point--just gets all the really bad settings out of the way. Which of the recommendations yields the proper sense of perspective depends on more than just your monitor's aspect ratio. 24:15 is a good place for you to start, Olham, but depending on how big your monitor is and how close you are too it you may want to go wider or narrower on the chart.