BurningDaylight

Lou, there’s way too much Orwell in the world today. I try to remind people that those were cautionary tales he was writing, not instruction manuals. New at Amazon, “George Orwell’s Guide To Executive Success: or How to Walk Upright, Even Though You’re a Repugnant Swine!” As for poetry, I can appreciate guys like Bukowski and Allen Ginsberg (“I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, blah de blah,”) but I’ve always enjoyed the rhymers more. Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling are two of my favorites. Paul Laurence Dunbar is another good one. I think I learned to love Kipling through my grandfather. His rhymes were a bit clunky, but he still managed to get off some good ones. One of my favorites begins, Here come I to my own again, Fed Forgiven and known again, Claimed by the bone of my bone again And cheered by the flesh of my flesh. I stole that rhyme scheme once to write a poem that began: Here we come from the sea again all my mates and me again we’ve caught our fish and we’re free again so we’re off to the Idle Hour. Where there’s always women waiting for us Dinner and drinking and dating for us A chance for meeting and mating for us In the smoke of the Idle Hour. I remember my grandpa getting drunk (it happened so rarely, and only at our Christmas Eve party) and reciting Kipling. "Twas Din, Din, Din, you Lazarushian Leather, Gunga Din!" The birthday before he died I bought him a copy of "Barrack Room Ballads", first edition. Printed in Germany in 1892. (An interesting note: It has a swastika on the title page--long before it became a symbol of such hatred and horror.) It's mine now. In fact, it's sitting on a shelf within easy reach of this desk. In my early twenties, I struck up a conversation with some strangers in a bar (unfortunately, I spent a lot of time in bars in my early to mid twenties) which is something I've been known to do when I'm a few sheets to the wind. While discussing books with this very tall, very beautiful German woman, she plopped her head into her hands and said, "Charles Bukowski is jumping on my brain!" Naturally, I fell in love immediately. Unfortunately, she was already married. To a man with a pony-tail no less. But the man with the ponytail inserted himself into our conversation (naturally) and it turned out he was a huge fan of Robert Service too. So we took turns standing on our table, raising our beers, reciting poems, really belting 'em out: "Gold! We leapt from our benches! Gold! We leapt from our stools! Gold! We wheeled in the furrows, fired with the faith of fools!" and "This is the Law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain, send not your foolish and feeble, send me your strong and your sane!" and that old favorite, "I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did. I grieved for his fate and early and late, I watched over him like a kid." Naturally, that very tall, very long legged, very gorgeous, red-headed German woman got the biggest applause, with her sexy German accent. The owner of the bar was an Irish woman named Maggie O’Toole. One time I traded her a poem for a pitcher of beer (Mirror Pond Pale Ale, of course, the best brew ever beer'd.) It began like this: "In this Irish Pub we drink While Irish thoughts we think We're the drunken fools of Maggie O'Toole's, Of the Guinness Stout we stink. We toil all day in an Irish way and it's the Irish songs we sing And while we labor long to that Irish song, it's to an Irish hope we cling That we'll drink again in our Irish den and raise an Irish toast, To Maggie O'toole, who sits on her stool, our bright-eyed benevolent host." Maggie was neither bright-eyed nor benevolent, but shoot, it was for a pitcher of Mirror Pond Pale Ale! BD

Lou, Thanks for that excellent map and the idea of the extra computer. I flew the A2A Sim. Piper Cub from the Washington Coast to Maine with Google Earth open on my laptop. It worked pretty well. TrollBreath, Quick Mission was how I lost Bukowski. I flew a balloon busting mission in campaign mode, decided I needed a little practice in the Eindecker before I actually had to engage the enemy. I didn't notice the little box that said, "Pilot Never Dies." So Bukowski's gone. I didn't like the Eindecker so much anyway. Herman Hesse has replaced him in an Albatross DII. Olham, you gotta keep an eye on Hemingway, though. Planes weren't always good to him. I was going to enlist Hunter Thompson, but I figured instead of Fokkers, he'd just see huge bats swooping and screeching and diving around his plane. I didn't know if that would actually be an advantage or not. Sartre has been replaced by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (the guy's got some talent, so you just have to ignore the fact that he's a real douche.) Robert Service's and Rudyard Kipling's draft cards came up, so it looks like it's time for them to gather up their gear. BD

Trollbreath, sounds like my experiences have been identical to yours. I had some early crashing issues and assorted errors. (I had installed Hat in the Ring directly over Heaven and Hell, assuming the latter would be automatically updated, so I had to reinstall everything. That fixed the error messages, but the crashing issues persisted, so I went in and set everything to “Run as Administrator.” Except I soon discovered that if you run the OFFManager.exe as administrator, TrackIR doesn’t work. So now just the CFS.exe is being run as administrator and all is well.) As for how I feel about OFF at this point, all I can say is that it sets a very high standard by which all other flight combat sims will be measured. I can't help but kick myself for not getting it sooner. Since I spent a lot of time in Rise of Flight, I couldn’t help but compare the two. In terms of terrain complexity and just sheer beauty, RoF can’t even come close. Sure it renders water better, but it’s basically like Il-2 but with better trees—neatly arranged forests, and not much diversity. Another winning aspect of OFF is that the world seems much more active. RoF by comparison was very sterile and empty. During a campaign, the enemy dutifully show up at the appropriate time and place, but aside from that, there really isn’t that much else going on. Of all the missions I flew in RoF, I wasn’t once bounced, out of the blue, by a flight of enemy fighters. Yesterday, I landed my Camel after a mission. It was a beautiful spring day, and the birds were chirping, cars were driving around, guns were going off. It really added to experience. I got to tell you, though, there is one aspect that RoF has OFF beat—the in-game map. The OFF map is just awful. There is absolutely NO WAY you can navigate with it without that damn flying plane icon, which I hate. I’d like to be able to disable the icon, and navigate by roads and rivers and landmarks. I’ve checked the downloads section, and there just isn’t a good map to work from. Maybe we need to all pitch in and hire a good cartographer for this game? What do you say? I got ten on it and it’d WELLLLL worth it not to have to look at that awful in game map! Some other observations: The Eindecker and I do not get along. My first flight, I tried to out-turn DH2, both when I’d run out of energy…and altitude. I plummeted into the trees and my pilot, Charles Bukowski, was killed instantly. His family has yet to be notified. My French pilot, Jean Paul Sartre, was killed while chasing an Albatross. The Alby went up, Sartre went up after him, fired right into the cockpit. The pilot screamed and the plane stalled…and tumbled back right into my N-17. Just before that, though, I was following another Albatross, just lining up to squeeze off a shot…when it just suddenly exploded. It had taken a direct flak burst. Awesome. Luckily my American pilot, Ernest Hemingway, and his British counterpart, George Orwell, are still alive and well. (The Camel and I are still good friends. The SE-5? We'll see. We'll see.) BD

...landed this afternoon, which puts me in one helluva pickle, seeing as how I have a LOT of work to do. Yet the Albies and the Camels and the Fockers and the Spads and the Nieuports keep calling to me. I am distracted by images of wings being ripped off of planes, fabric being riddled with bullets, wood splintering, pilots screaming, fuel tanks rupturing and catching fire, both friend and enemy alike spiraling into the earth. BD

I certainly hope so, Olham. In a career in Rise of Flight, I shot down 16 planes, took out 9 artillery emplacements, and 7 trucks...in, get this (seriously), only 5 missions. Those numbers are just ridiculous. That career is ongoing, too, by the way. I just haven't been able to fly it since then with all the stuttering. But at that rate, Mannock, Fonck and von Richtofen won't have nothing on me. I know that developers have to balance (sacrifice?) historical accuracy for mass entertainment, but jeeze. (Incidentally, one of the things I will install as soon as OFF arrives is Creaghorn's realistic tracer mod--great stuff, that.) Cheers, BD

Thanks for the welcomes and the advice. I'll certainly buy the drinks...but I hope authentic WW1 era prices have been applied for total emersion. But with all the warnings about the difficulty of this thing you guys are making a tall order for it to fill. I have been flying combat sims since Janes WW2 Fighters. I've flown the entire CFS Series, Il-2 in all of it's incarnations (except that silly arcade console version they just released...but then I don't own a console anyway), the Lock On series, European Air War, Mig Alley, Battle of Britain and Battle of Britian II, etc. Most of these games, when it was available, I flew in multiplayer. And I have never flown any way except full real (that's not a bragging point, and definitely not a condemnation of others that may fly with the radar and the targeting cones and labels and target lock and all that, it's just the way I like to do it--to me, nothing says "immersion killer" as much as a label suspended over a plane. Shrug, to each their own.) So how hard can it really be for a guy like me? I can't wait to find out. Wish there'd been a downloadable version. As for Storm of War...that's not even on my radar anymore. Every once in awhile I'll do a search online to see if there's been any progress...and the answer is almost always: not much. It seems like there's been some rumbling from Oleg lately (like a volcano about to erupt?). I've seen some nice screenshots. Some short (incredibly short) animation videos. But I've been seeing those for years. But no, the sim I'm waiting impatiently for is DCS: A-10. Love those Thunderbolts. (And it's got some U.S. scenery in it.) BD

To be clear I was in fact talking about the pilot parts (arms and legs and such) that you can see while in the virtual cockpit view. Not external shots. In external shots of COURSE I want to see someone flying the plane. I know a lot of computer pilots like to see somebody working the controls. My 10-year-old nephew always asks "Why can't I see my body?" But for me it detracts a bit from the emersion. After all, I can already see my legs if I look down, my feet on my rudder pedals, my hand on the throttle and working the stick (or the yoke if I'm in FSX and using my CH Products setup.) An additional set of arms and legs doesn't improve anything for me. Aside from that, I went ahead and bought OFF, due in large part to the community and the commitment of the developers. It seems like a group that is very dedicated to historical accuracy and absolute realism and that is the kind of experience I am looking for. (Also the videos I've been watching on YouTube are just frickin' awesome!" :-D) Cheers, BD

Hey guys, thanks for the advice. It's not the realism and learning curve I'm worried about, it's the 40 bucks. Seems like an awful lot of money for what is essentially just an upgrade to an 8-year-old platform. A few years ago I bought X-plane version 7 about 2 weeks before version 8 came out and frankly that pissed me off. Especially since X-plane 7 pretty much sucked. (Not that all subsequent versions haven't had their serious drawbacks--what are we up to, version 9? With 10 on it's way? And the planes and cockpits still look like cartoons or those characters from the Money for Nothing video. Yikes.) In fact, that 40 bucks is the reason I haven't gotten OFF before. I still enjoy CFS3 (especially since buying trackir--one of my major complaints with the game was the viewing mechanism--developing any kind of situational awareness was damn near impossible using just the hatswitch and I absolutely can't stand the target lock viewing thing and the ridiculous radar thing.) And as far as WW1 combat sims are concerned, I've been flying Rise of Flight, but after the last patch it's been stuttering so bad on my system that it's pretty much unplayable. Still, I've soldiered on with it, tinkering with this and that, wiping my computer, reinstalling windows, updating drivers and bios and all that and nothing helps. So I've given up. But...big but...I enjoy the hell out of WW1 combat. OFF looks like a pretty good alternative. One other question though...I've noticed that some of the planes in the Hat in the Ring expansion have 3D pilots in them. Is there any way to turn it off? I know there's a whole contingent of virtual pilots out there who like that sort of thing, but I can't stand it. (I mean absolutely cannot stand it.) DCS: Black Shark's 3D pilot can be toggled. Is that the case with HITR? Please tell me that's the case! BD

should I wait for "Phase 4?" I have no idea what the different phases are. Are they simply updates? If I buy Phase 3, can I just download and install Phase 4 when it's available? Or will I have to buy it all over again? Naturally I'd like the most current version... Thanks, BD

Hi guys, I just discovered this Add-on for CFS3 and I'll most likely buy this on payday. I've got a couple of questions though. Can you still fly it as a world war 2 sim, but within the OFF user interface and improvements? I haven't flown CFS 3 in ages, but I remember it had one clunky interface and some major faults. Thanks, BD