Javito1986

AI is a bastard to program, you'd have to really delve deep into CFS3's code to get at it. Then again I suppose OBD obviously has access to that. Once you did though I suppose you'd have to implement a way for the AI objects to attack their enemies only up until a certain point or variable, then break away. It'd be hard to decide what those variables would be. Ammo? Superiority of the enemy craft? Morale hit (friendly casualties)? From my understanding the rookie AI right now is set to retreat quite more often than the aggressive AI. I suppose you just have to narrow it down and enhance it a bit more. It's not really so much a matter of "retreating" anyway, rather "Okay chaps, that's enough for now, let's head home". Things have gotten better though. Back in RB3D an engagement was do or die. You had to kill each and every single one of the enemy planes, and if you ran they would pursue you all the way back to your aerodrome. Rowan's BoB came out not too long after, it had really great AI I always thought. The Germans will always disengage you after a while, though I suppose the programmers can always base that on a very consistent variable (their fuel).

No Parachute is damn hard to find. I found that in my High School library some... oh, it must've been five years ago now. Used to read it during my lunch breaks, it was definitely a great work. I believe I might pick up Sagittarius Rising in the near future, that sounds right up my alley.

The issue with warp is a good one but honestly it doesn't REALLY bother me personally. I try not to warp too much anyway. Buuuut I admit there are times I do, when I don't have an hour and want to advance my campaign. I can't imagine it would be too hard to edit it from 4 miles to 2 miles. The only real trouble with that is that it might hamper you unrealistically since 4 miles gives you much more time to get into a good position than 2 miles does, which I suspect is why it was set to 4 miles in the first place. Maybe an option in the workshop so you can choose which you want? I do understand it's annoying when you get pulled out of warp with enemies waaaaaaay above you and you have to fly around for 10 minutes waiting for them to get far enough away. That happens. But sometimes those enemies are Fokker DVIIs who drop down and play with you, and that always livens up ones evening I find

That's harsh but not implausible. You probably know it, but I seem to remember there was a flight of... oh what was that plane... some new plane the Brits brought in around the spring of '17. One of their first missions they were set on by some Jasta and mauled to death, most of the squadron killed off in one engagement. Robinson's Hornet's Sting depicts a battle based off it. I'm sure someone will chime in and remind me of what aircraft it was in a post or two. Not sure how events like that could be realistically simulated in OFF. In RB3D if by some horrible occurrence you lost 8 pilots KIA in one day, the next day there'd be 8 replacements knocking at the door, but that is just as silly as ignoring their deaths entirely. I suppose the ideal would be to model a squadron getting pulled off the line when it takes such an extreme hit like that, though now we're talking features for Phase 5 and beyond :-p. Rowan's Battle of Britain pulls squadrons off the line if they get mauled horrifically like that. That sim runs on a whole different style of campaign engine than OFF does however. Events like that could be modeled and implemented into a ruleset like 3P without too much fuss I think. Drop your campaign points by 100 or some ridiculously high number like that if your whole squadron gets wiped out on a mission or something, then back to the homefront you go

Would it really be all that hard? I would think all it would require would be implementing an array that keeps track of your squadron's casualties during an engagement, takes into account your squadron's morale (i.e. good/average/elite) and the strength of the enemy. I admit I'm new to programming but I don't think that would be overly difficult. Not sure how CFS3's engine is written though. Also, if I may, I'm not so sure that squadrons would be wiped out that quickly. When I mentioned a more consistent monitoring of casualties I of course meant only for your own squadron. For example, in I'd say 60% of the missions I flew in my most recent 50 mission campaign I went out with most if not all the squadron divided into two flights working together. The others were myself leading a flight of 4 - 6 or so. Most of the time everyone would come home safely. In my idea if someone in your squadron does get shot down though then that person could indeed die (depending on a certain probability)... under the current system it's a bit funky when you see John Doe Wingman take a direct hit from flak and not be listed as KIA or Missing on the duty roster after the mission. But see, I'm not really sure how the current system operates because, like I said, there were cases where wingmen shot down on mission, whom I saw get hit and crash and knew exactly who they were by their label, were listed as KIA when we returned to the drome. But it wasn't consistent. But really, it didn't happen so often that the squadron was ever in danger of running out of pilots, I think the most we ever lost in one day was 3 and replacements were always arriving to fill the gaps.

I would love to see a greater emphasis on the role playing aspect of the campaign. A little less randomness in your wingman deaths. I don't really like how they so often just "fail to come back". That makes sense sometimes but it happens entirely too often. Also, if one of your wingman goes down during a mission it's touch and go on whether he's listed as KIA or not in the aftermath. In my most recent campaign there WERE instances when I had a wingman take a hit, go up in flames, and he was indeed killed in action. But there was also instances where I'd see them get blown sky high by a direct hit from flak yet survive unscathed as far as the duty roster was concerned. Course I'd always just manually set that guy to KIA in the dossier but still. Red Baron 3D did all that really, really well I thought and OFF -is- the spiritual successor so...

Louvert cooked this beauty of a Camel up for me. I'm in love with it! The DG are the initials of my name, 1986 being the year I was born, but the best part is the tulips on the side. They represent my wife and when I showed them to her she just thought it was the neatest thing in the world. In fact I can now devote more time to OFF than before because she knows I'll be flying this kite around. The Camel's already a pretty plane, but this one's gorgeous. Cheers to Louvert, many thanks to him and the rest of this community

I'm flying around in the distance with these RFC-5 types. This is the second mission in a row now where these louts refuse to take off! I don't know what's with them. Cowardice in the face of the enemy perhaps? I wouldn't mind, except I can't do much with half a flight. My wingman takes off ok but these fellows just sit there! What's with them???

Yikes. Seeing your wingman's body tumbling in flames certainly dampers one taste for prancing about with the Huns.

No worries, it's easy enough to roll a die and update the pilot's dossier manually in the meantime

I've been trying to find the BBC's Wings but the U.S. version of Amazon.com doesn't have it! And if I were to order from the UK the region restrictions wouldn't let me see it unless I had a region free DVD player. Lame.

I've been looking for more World War 1 related media and thought I'd turn to the ol' grogs at the forum for some advice. I've recently finished reading Goshawk Squadron. Great book! It's about the second or third time I've read it over the years, and I'd like to find something new to read about the air war. As far as movies go, I just this morning watched All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1979 version. It's been years and years since I saw it, the last time was some ten years ago in grammar school. I stopped watching it after a while out of a sense of youthful elitism, since I discovered the classic original 1930 version and decided the 1979 one "sucked horribly" in comparison. Now that I'm an old man I can say that while the original is better, no doubt about it, the '79 is extremely well done also. They kinda go well together I think. The 1930 one focuses more on the book's characters, we see a lot more of them together, whereas the '79 one lays them by the wayside (except Kat) and focuses exclusively on Baumer and his narration. They're both faithful adaptations me thinks. Did you know they're making a new one in 2012 starring Daniel Radcliff? I think he's a good pick. Certainly no stranger than Lew Ayres or Richard Thomas. There aren't really very many war movies I enjoy to be honest with you, but it makes me sad how badly World War 1 is forgotten these days and it's hardly ever depicted in film. The WW1 bookshelves are lacking as well. Few days ago I read through The Somme at Borders (yay speedreading) and WW1 books accounted for two rows at the top of the shelf, the rest of which was filled with WW2 books. And then the next four shelves were for WW2 books! This is in the United States, mind you. Maybe in European countries WW1 has left a great footprint on the public conscious? Over here people straight up forget, probably because the U.S. was only in it such a brief time comparatively. On 11/11 one news anchor mentioned that Veteran's Day commemorates the end of World War 1 and his fellow anchorwoman said "Really? I didn't know that" and I wanted to be like *Judo-chop!*

That explains it! I was very confused as to why I couldn't switch to the rear gunner. Didn't even bother to look at the model to notice there wasn't one . Think I'll switch to a Strutter squadron!

I've always been under the impression that if I fly bombers I can switch to the gunner seat and shoot Germans from there. But when I go to the gunner seat in a BE2 I'm still pretty much in the cockpit and can't aim the gun without, y'know, trying to dogfight with the BE2. Which is impossible! Help? I don't want to die because I can't shoot back!

Not to beat a dead horse, but my pilot just got "killed" but didn't die also under the same circumstances! Manually updating his dossier to make him dead though since there's no way he could have survived what just happened!

I'm impressed by how stellar a job the Dev's team done with it! We all know you can navigate across France's OFF terrain using real life maps. But recently in my pilot career I was moved to an aerodrome a little ways from the frontline and couldn't help but notice all the ground around the aerodrome itself was pockmarked with craters, it was all muddy the nearby town was in ruins, etc. It didn't look like the French countryside, it looked like the front except the front is a few miles east! Then today I was reading a book on the Somme offensive in 1916 and recognized the name of one of the Brit's principal objectives, Bapaume, as being precisely where my aerodrome is located in 1918! It makes perfect sense that the area is still heavily scarred two years later. That's pretty amazing geographic continuity, it would be so easy to just ignore details like that and most people wouldn't notice. But for me it's little details like this that seal the deal on why I play OFF!

Adverse conditions like that I'll fly it only about 1/3 of the time, so basically if I roll a 5-6 on a 6 sided online die I'll fly, otherwise the mission's cancelled. Might even be more accurate to go with a 6 only though... really, Sopwith Camels are hard enough to take off and land on -dry- grass, nevermind rainy grass. Nevermind trying to have a dogfight in those conditions, the wind is more likely to kill you than the enemy. You get turned around inside a cloud, stall, next thing you know you're in a negative G spin and you can't see anything because your monitor is red. I consider it quite bad luck to be forced to fly on a stormy day... better to take the day off and visit the movies. I hear Stella Maris is playing at the theater these days, and Mary Pickford is a great deal more attractive than the gun barrel of a DVII's spandau. Bloody war's hard enough to survive with all those balloon busting missions they give you... and if you follow RSS you have to crank ground gunnery up to hard for those! If they told me to go bust a balloon during a rainstorm I'd rather grab my pistol, give myself a 'blighty' in the foot, and be done with it

Lulz @ Uncleal. Chicken, I had the same questions as you when I started out on RSS. That part is a bit confusing isn't it? Truth be told I haven't figured out what it means either. I just left the default settings and if it's raining or something I'll roll a die to see whether flights are cancelled that day or night but a definitive answer would be nice since the PDF reads as though those are actual settings you can change but I can't find them anywhere in OFF.

One thing I'd like to see would be a bit of an update of the 'replay mission' feature. It works but for my purposes it's a bit... erm, useless . I don't mean that in the negative! In RB3D's version it told you what planes were from what squadrons, and it mentioned pilots in your squadron or known aces by their names, so you really had a good idea of just what exactly was going on and what happened to everyone who didn't make it home. As it stands it just tells me "A Sopwith Camel was hit by a Fokker. A Sopwith Camel crashed" but I can't tell if that Camel is even in my squadron or not! And I'd love to know stuff like "Eddie Rickenbacker's plane catches fire. Eddie Rickenbacker jumps out" and such. Think it would be possible to code something like that in there?

I love those manuals for the different planes. I've flown the Sopwith Camel for some 45 missions now and can attest to how accurate its manual is! Request: A future manual for the Dr.I would be amazing ;-)

I forget how long it took for my copy to get here... I don't remember it being THAT long. Actually I was surprised by how quickly it got here. I want to say it was a week.

I do admit that I've always found it curious that Germany accepted Versailles while still holding enemy territory. It just seems like they could have held on to negotiate more reasonable terms. Yes I know things were going horribly on the domestic front and military reversals were numerous... but Versailles was a bit of a crock and I've never understood why they agreed to it.

No, but man did I want to. I remember when FCJ came out, I read the SimHQ review and drooled for days. That was all a transitional period for me computer wise though, and I only had a laptop with no video card and hence could hardly run anything decent around then. Plus I was like 15 or 16, and didn't have the... what was it? $35? $40 for FCJ? Yea, not a happy time for my flight simming. Funny thing, the way I discovered Over Flanders Fields years later was specifically because I bought an actual gaming computer and was like "Ok, time for Full Canvas Jacket". Went to search, couldn't find it, browsed SimHQ's RB3D forums, discovered OFF, rest is history...

Yea I played all those. My first flight sim was CFS1 when I was in 7th grade, then moved on to RB3D. I was also really into CFS2 and enjoyed all those awesome comic book style cinematics it used. You really missed out on RB3D though, the dynamic campaign in RB3D was like nothing else out there. I had some amazing pilot characters with their self-made stories. The German pilot in Jasta 11 who after the death of his best friend Manfred von Richtofen in late 1916 painted his Fokker Triplane red in his honor and became a new Red Baron who survived on the front unti January 1918. The American from 94th Aero who swore vengeance after his wingman was killed by Herman Goering (who flew a distinctively painted fighter... black if I remember right) and was finally killed by a shot to the head in an EPIC Werner Voss style dogfight between him alone against Goering's squadron of Fokkers in October 1918. Years later I still remember those campaigns After a while RB3D didn't really work anymore. At that point I was really into Rowan's Battle of Britain, which also had a really great campaign (but of a much, much different style than RB3D and OFF). Still am into it actually, the sequel's an amazing sim. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I always had a soft spot for RB3D and lamented the dearth of WW1 flight sims that gave me that old RB3D feeling. 'Til I upgraded my computer and got Over Flanders Fields that is. RB3D's spirit is alive and well again and I'm a happy camper!

Did you ever play Red Baron 3D? I was a huuuuuuuuuuuge RB3D guy back in the day. I was a little miniature WW1 historian at age 13 all thanks to that game. Best thing about it was the dynamic campaign. You just felt like a pilot in the Jastas or in the RFC trying your damnedest to survive the war in one piece. That was some ten years ago. OFF is the spiritual successor to RB3D, it's the next step up. Lately I've even taking to role playing certain elements with dice just to increase my immersion (see the 'Survival In The Air' thread for details). I love it and can't recommend it enough!