HumanDrone

redpiano: What parent would do that to their child? That's worse than "Moon Unit" or some of the other celebrity names you hear! & how would they be listed in the phone book? All in good fun, Tom

Another German: Messer Schmidt! (Reminds me of the old joke about the British WWII pilot telling a classroom of his wartime exploits... "There were Fokkers to the left, and Fokkers to the right... those Fokkers were everywhere!" The class was tittering and chuckling, and the teacher prompted "Perhaps you need to explain that 'Fokker" is a German aircraft manufacturer." To which the British pilot replied, in his best British accent, "Oh, of course! But these Fokkers were Messerschmidts!" Tom

Mein apologies, Herr Olham, sir! But the boards are in English... (loved your accented typing! - Dsherrmnan!!! - great!) Getting a great chuckle out of these! Borrowing from the "Car Talk" folks in the US, how about the three stooges of the air, Dewey, Shootem, & Howe?

Well, now you've got me thinking...! In light of my "Human Drone" status, maybe I should christen one "Heywood Jahshootmee!" And I appreciate the BOC invite, I will see about filing my papers here, perhaps at lunchtime. But while "Barmy" probably describes me pretty well, everyone IRL would agree that "funny" does not. My kids would tell their friends, "That was a joke. Like the funny kind but... different..." and my brother-in-law says, "Yeah, someone else can tell a joke and everybody's laughing their heads off, but if Tom told the same one, you could hear a pin drop, and everyone's just looking at each other with this disgusted look on their face..." Olham, I like "Hans Wurst!" You get the first Foreign langauge bonus, and I think I'll have to petition Lou for an oak leaf cluster for your BOC badge! (if I get admitted, that is..)... And Wayfarer, is the "white feather" a sign of cowardice? Best, Tom

My dear fellow aviators: I'm learning more about setting up my Saitek X-52 with all it's buttosn and slides and wheels and such ('way to many for WWI planes!), and it has occurred to me that the thumb slide on the throttle would be a great place to put the mixture (I know, just fly auto mixture!). But in the Saitek profile editor I have to split the range into bands, or something, in order to do this... Hmm wait, maybe this won't work... It'd have to be CTRL+ going rich and CTRL- going lean... dang. There should be a way to do this, but maybe I'm limited by the keyboard interface the original programmers were limited by. I was going to ask how many CTRL+ or CTRL- does it take to go from full lean to full rich, and split the slide into that many bands, but I don't think thta will work. I guess I'll go ahead and post this and see if anyone has any better ideas. Same idea was going to be applied to prop pitch in sims tha have planes with varaible pitch props... Anyway, thanks all, for your time. Mods may move if I've put this in the wrong place. Tom

You know, Burning Beard, after I considered your first reply, I went looking, and found it. Fantastic, and I thank you! Then I checked back this AM and you had posted exactly what I found. What's interesting besides the mixture is that there appears to be settings for both prop pitch and prop rpm (for, obviously, more sophisticated aircraft than these). Now pitch I can understand, but I've never heard of setting prop rpm. Unless you had a transmission or fluid drive like the hydrostatic drive on my tractor, how would the prop rpm not be the same as the engine rpm? Confused, Tom (hope you get your beard put out, that could be painful!)

Well, thank you all, as usual, a great bunch, but Burning Beard has me curious! & RAF_Louvert, that is a sweet watch and a nice setup! I'd sure like to see the particulars of how you did this. It sounds exactly like what I want to do! Did you make an entry in the CFS3.XCA file, or how did you do this? Thanks, Tom

Olham, I know the feeling. Maybe I’m just old and soft, and maybe I’m getting cynical about gov’ts and war. When I first bought Flight Simulator, it was the civilian version. But my son wanted to try combat, so he bought me CFS2. Shortly after that, my brother-in-law (who has an odd fascination with the Nazis) bought me CFS3. I still remember the feeling as I struggled against Zeros for the first time in my F4U Corsair. No TrackIR or anything like that - and all of a sudden a Zero pulls in front of me, very close- a short burst caught his wing and fuselage in the cockpit area and he was burning, out of control. He didn’t get out before the plane exploded. And of course it’s not real, and thank God. But it actually jarred me. Just like that, it’s over. Just like that, one wrong move or an aircraft failure or a lucky shot, and your machine has become a falling death trap, and it’s not like you can just pull over, get out, and duck into the woods. When does terror turn into the realization, even the resignation, that you are going to die momentarily? The poor bugger probably just wanted to survive and get home to live in peace just like I would have. Problem was, he HAD to fight to get that opportunity, just like our side. He probably even volunteered, just as many of our “greatest generation” felt compelled to do. And then it “got real”, as they say. And we saw heroism and nobility - and some of the worst inhumanity to man that the world has ever seen. Are we any better for it? Sometimes I wonder. I don’t think many of this generation appreciate what these great men went through. So I appreciate your viewpoint, and with you I appreciate the fact that the developers and our fellow members here have assembled this vast array or resources that can allow us to develop at least a shadow of the feelings these men must have experienced, and not become completely desensitized to what killing someone actually means. One of those resources was the books uploaded by RAF_Louvert. I was reading a little on Oswald Boelcke, how he was chivalrous to those enemies who survived being downed by him. I’m sure you are familiar with it - he downs a man, then takes him out for coffee and a tour of his air base! And how, when he was killed, the Allied prisoners sent flowers and condolences, and the English RFS dropped a wreath onto the airfield with a kind inscription. In the raw inhumanity of war, that must have been a blessed relief. Best, Tom

This sure seems worth a try, but what are ENB series drivers? And they must be removed? Any tips here? Thanks, Tom ETA: My, you sure did punch some holes in those airplanes! I gotta get some serious stick time, here!

It's not. I believe they are Mk II aircraft, and are reportedly very carefully preserved. The plan is to hopefully get a flying squadron out of the lot of them, plus some museum pieces! Very cool!

Thank you, Dej. Tom

Quite an interesting picture! I find them moving, as well, for much the same reasons. The ground details are interesting, too. It looks like some sort of racetrack top center, and are all those white spots signs of shelling (YOW!) or what? Thanks, nice pic! It must have been a very difficult one to take back in the day! Tom

Er, minor thing perhaps, but I saw the pilot's hands in that video! I don't think that happens for me. Is there an add-on? Thanks, nice videos! Tom

Just to throw another reply onto the heap, I installed OFF BH&H, then my HiTR download, patched'em up and flew off into the susnset without an ounce of trouble. I'm at 5 on all my sliders, too. W7 64 Bit pro, and just a general user, i.e not a developer, etc. I'm busting a gut waiting for P4; I'm actually thinking about getting my Force feedback joystick back from my son so I can feel the stalls, etc, better. So welcome to OFF! It's so nice that you can "free flight" this one just for the "flight-seeing"! Best, Tom

That is most mighty pretty! I don't know how you guys do it!

The reason I commented on the skies in particular is the 2nd, 3rd and 4th screenshot. Particularly in the 2nd and 3rd, I've seen that effect when flying - at 10,000 ft or thereabouts, the air gets a lot clearer and you have that layer of foggier stuff below. Glory! The air must be getting mighty thin for some of these guys! Sooo looking forward to P4!

My, oh my! The sky! How in the world... That is the most realistic sky I've ever seen! + what everyone else said, the damage & all that... I'm with Bullethead - ready to order! Best, Tom

To wait for the next release is to waste valuable flying time! OFF HiTR is beautiful and challenging right now. If you bought CFS3 just to get OFF, then by all means jump in with both feet and get OFF! I've been free-flying trying to get used to these idiosyncratic birds, managing my mixture, etc, and the "Flightseeing" is remarkable. Wish I was at home, I could post some screenies, but there are plenty of those around here. Best, Tom

So we have HPW's fine damage mod, and I see there is an AI aircraft weight mod, and then various FM mods around. And that's where I run int trouble, modding up and keeping track of what I've installed - maybe a little notebook would help! But anyway, as we wait with baited breath for the release of P4, will any of these improvements be included in P4? I mean life is complicated enough! I don't know how you guys do it, making all these wonderful things, I can't even keep track of installing them! Thanks, Tom

I really didn't know where to put this, so feel free to move it if necessary. On another forum, someone noted that they were going to build a new computer and wanted to run CFS3 "maxed out" but stay with Windows XP, SP3. Supposedly this and an NVIDIA graphics card allows one to use specular reflection; though NVIDIA still supports this feature in their drivers, Windows 7 does not. So I took to the skies on a reasonably clear day, plenty of sunshine, in a nice, shiny P-38. Sure enough, no bright flashes from the polished aluminum fuselage. And I'm thinking, "Blast it!" My old computer could hardly run CFS3 at all, so I had everything dialed back; now my new one runs CFS3 ETO and OFF HiTR flat-out no problems at 60 FPS, and apparently there is a consensus that it would look even better if I was running Windows XP! Now for OFF aircraft, I can imagine that specular reflection isn't such a big deal, with fabric not being real shiny. But they say it makes the scenery look better, too! And I was already enthralled with how nice the OFF scenery was! So what the heck? Did I jump right over the best graphics combo that I could have had? Should I think about dual boot? I sure don''t want to use a 32 bit operating system that will soon be unsupported on a 64 bit machine like this! So if the answer is "Go dual boot", then what about XP 64 bit versions? any problems there? And further, is this real? Did you guys find a way around this? I googled and found entries for implementing specular reflection in DX10 on MSDN, so what happened? I've written quite a bit of code, but I don't know much about what's under the hood on CFS3, but it has something to do with files of the *_s.dds type. Best to all, & thanks, Tom

Glad to hear it, Jim! & yessir, that opening music/video is quite magnificent. Like you, I have this love/hate thing with Micro$oft Windoze, but for me it's the only game in town, so I try not to fiddle with it much. So you're saying that it appears that had you installed Bill's media player in the first place, you may have avoided all this? Tough lesson! Happy flying & Happy Easter! Tom

One reason I pretend to fly combat is to try to get a better perspective on my world, on the suffering and sacrifice of real people who cried in real agony as their craft dissolved in flames around them, as they were perhaps wounded and unable to do anything but writhe and wait for death. If we taught this more, perhaps we'd have war less. I'm no starry-eyed idealist; it is a crazy world run by crazy people and sometimes you have to fight or be killed; but as you said, and the beautiful pictures illustrate, you might hear voices here. If you do, pray and listen. Thanks, those are beautiful pictures.

Well, that's just it. I know how to fly in the basic sense, but detailed knowledge of the planes and tactics still escape me! But I sure do love my new setup, and as I said, TrackIR is worth it just for the "flight-seeing", I consider it indispensable for combat! The SPAD sights being eccentric like that, how best to align the sights without something like TrackIR? Best, Tom

Fantastic find. I must admit (perhaps I'm too selfish) that I might give a copy to be displayed, but I think I'd keep the original in the family treasury! Good on you! But reversing my scenario, you could make a good copy for the family before passing it on... Best, Tom eta: And note the penmanship! Some US schools aren't even teaching cursive handwriting anymore!

Another vote here for TrackIR or something similar! It's unquestionably the best improvement to my flight simming ever. Example: Try flying the SPAD XIII. The gun sight consists of a ball on a rod (nearer you) and a crosshairs out on your cowl. But they are offset to the right! No joystick hat switch will ever make that easy, though I suppose there is some "defined view" way around it... but it makes no difference to me, as I just move my head to the right as I would IRL, and while I'm lining up my shot I get shot down! err.. I mean, I make a clean kill! (Actually, it's the first scenario... there is a reason for my screen neame...) But yes, yes, yes, go get yourself some head tracking. Happy "flying", and welcome to OFF, Tom