Vidken

OFF is awesome because it's WW1, and you can participate in it with airplanes. That might sound dumb and obvious, but... I remember a quote, I think it was in the Falcon: Allied Force manual: "There's a war on. Someone put you in charge of an F-16." I think that applies here, although with less avionics and more wood. Other sims feel like avionics and flight model studies, with token targets and missions as an afterthought. OFF and Falcon derivatives are the only sims I've played in the past decade which feel like they put the player into a situation much bigger than themselves. I just barely survived an OFF mission a couple of hours ago where my only chance of survival with no ammo and a damaged engine was to circle above a friendly base while hoping the flak and mg file would take down my pursuers. While dodging trees, I was flying past friendly soldiers who were physically aiming their rifles at the enemy aircraft, and I could hear the reports of their rifles above the sound of wind (HITR) and my sputtering engine. In the distance, I could see friendly (white) flak shooting at something else. I could see smoke rising from the tree line below the flak. It must have been a ground attack mission of some sort by an enemy flight. The war is happening regardless if I'm there or not, and I love it. By contrast, I've been flying missions in another sim, where in the entire world at any given point there may exist two, maybe four enemy aircraft, four mg emplacements, and 3-4 balloons. I can land and taxi around the enemy trenches with no fear. The graphics and flight model are great but... there's no real war atmosphere of any sort. I always come back here for that. And most missions wind up being worthy of epic "and there I was..." stories.

Even a developer can be in sight of the finish, and still get their project knocked back a few weeks or even months (depending on the scope of the project) due to unforseen bugs. When fixed, the bugs may cause other bugs, and so forth. It's been my experience working with small software projects that if we never mention a due date, things go well. However, if we even so much as breathe a hint, everything goes to hell and the project simmers in delays well beyond our intended release. It's a curse that seems quite common around the industry. If a studio announces a date and actually meets it, one of three things happened: 1. They've already finished and polished the project to death, and are waiting for an arbitrary release date instead of releasing it now. 2. They've basically won the lottery in terms of odds that the work didn't hitch on any problems. 3. They've decided to release despite a lack of polish and bug testing. The best thing a studio can do is simply take their time and be as thorough as possible, because a little extra wait time is infinitely preferable to getting flooded with support emails and tickets from angry (ex-)customers because the software is broken. Unfortunately, that usually isn't an option with a team of impatient investors for the larger projects whom have no clue what the development process is like. Fortunately, it seems OBDSoftware doesn't suffer from this. :)

I know it might seem like minor details, but the buffeting and wind noise are something I'm really looking forward to for the non-warp DiD thing.

I did a lot of searching around and experimenting, but I can't seem to get windowed mode to work for OFF. I've found that CFS3 itself supports windowed mode by adding -window to a shortcut to cfs3.exe, although that doesn't work out to well for OFF since it leaves out the manager, which is critical. Adding -window to a shortcut to the manager doesn't work either. The only program I've found which forces games to run in windowed mode is DXwnd, but I couldn't get it to work despite following the instructions to the letter. I can't find any windowing options in the manager, configuration for resolution, graphics settings, override settings, or in the XML files themselves in the OFF directory. I realize windowed mode isn't really an intended function of OFF, and OFF runs perfectly for me otherwise (in fact, it's a blast). However, it would be useful in the context of broadcasting my flights via uStream, such as I've done for Black Shark and OpenFalcon. The reason why windowed mode is important is that the output for most games flicker on the stream if they run in full-screen mode, but render properly in windowed mode (even if the window is stretched to fill the entire screen). In any case, I just got OFF recently, and I wanted to state in this (as my first post) that it's been downright addicting. The open cockpits of these aircraft feel like a better environment for TrackIR than any other. I've managed to (barely) survive a couple campaign missions so far, and it's been good fun. :D

Tried out the SPAD XIII and N17. Flak enjoys stealing my kills in QC.

I wound up having a surplus of budgeted game purchase money and free time due to announcements of the games I was looking forward to containing severely disappointing news. I won't name names there, it isn't the point. However, these were "top shelf" titles. Lots of names scratched off my purchase list. There was a topic about RoF in a general gaming forum that I read regularly. As the conversation drew on about payware aircraft and phone home DRM, someone wrote a couple positive paragraphs about OFF and provided a link. There isn't much else to say. I slept on the decision to buy it, but the feature list and Youtube videos were pretty overwhelming. CFS3 and OFF shipped quickly and it's been a joyride since.

I love the cloudscapes.

This was an ace, except the screenshots I got of him with labels on didn't catch his name. I'm running OFF stock currently as I only got it a few days ago. That was the second time I saw an engine blown out of an aircraft in OFF. The first time, I almost caught the engine with my face. I was distracted by snapping a screenshot of one of my first kills, and then noticed the aircraft wasn't on fire anymore... I didn't take the opportunity to take a clean screen though. Edit: Closeup of the engine from the other screenshot.

He won't be needing that anymore.

Certainly. Find CFS3.EXE in the directory where CFS3 is installed, right-click on it, and select "Create Shortcut". Right-click on the shortcut and click on "Properties". At the end of the Target field add -window, so it looks like this: "C:\OBDSoftware\CFSWW1 Over Flanders Fields\CFS3.EXE" -window The above is just an example. I've never installed CFS3 by itself, so I don't know what the default directory is, but the point is to put -window at the very end after the quotation marks. Hit OK and use the shortcut to launch CFS3. It's probably best to set up the intended resolution in the game before running it in windowed mode. I did explain why in the original post.