TrollBreath

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

I thought I might take the liberty of posting the poem, "In Flanders Fields", seeing as how this sim shares a similar name. Written by LT. Col John McCrae of the Canadian army, who was a doctor: In Flanders Fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Those are fantastic. I'm hoping to remodel a workshop/garage in the next year or two into a real man-cave, and I'm going with an aviation theme, combo WWI and WWII, and some posters like that would definitely fit right in once I get around to decorating the place. Nice find.

There once was a man from Berlin, Who flew with a devious grin. He took on a spad, was shot in the a$$, and was never seen smiling again.

Some deep, philosophical thoughts, gentlemen. It's great that we have such a group of intelligent, thoughtful, articulate pilots. Now excuse me while I go toss down a few ales and then try and turn a few Spads into twisted, burning wreckage. I promise to be much more contemplative in my Posts from the Front.

Oh sure, point out the obvious Olham. Yes, we are killing ourselves and destroying valuable military aircraft at the same time. Happy now? Definitely going to check out the maps. Thanks for sharing the resource.

Daylight, I'm telling you, that damn Eindecker is a killer. Of its pilots mostly! :-) Interestingly, having spent the week playing RB3D prior to getting my disk, the flight model is almost exactly the same in both games. Turn too tight, you lose all lift, and pretty soon your doing a pretty nice impression of "falling leaf", which given the usually low altitudes involved with that plane results in Bad Things happening to your pilots. I've already lost one German pilot that way (I didn't realize that Quick Combat could result in your pilot's death if you weren't in campaign mode... doh!... that's what happens when you get stuck in the mentality of one game and have to switch up to another). I agree the map is rough, but I managed it alright on mission one. It's not pretty, not even as nice as good ole RB3D, but it's enough I can get where I need to be and back again. Which is all I expect at this point, since I so far mostly find myself staring at the cloud effects around me with my mouth hanging open, wondering why the heck I'm not getting soaking wet. And don't even talk to me about flying in snow... that's incredibly disorienting (as it should be). Like your pilot names, by the way. You've got the who's who of authors going on over there.

Labels and TAC turned off. Makes it tougher then it probably would be even in real life since a monitor can never totally replicate human vision (at least not yet), but I find all that stuff just gets in the way. What I ended up doing was honing in on where the guns protecting it were located, and working down in a spiral in that general until I finally spotted a bit of yellow moving contrary to the way the rest of the terrain was rotating. Leveled out, made a single pass.... it went up like a torch. Took some machine gun fire on the way out that damaged the left wing, but made it back across the front with no further spottings or incidents. May invest in a bigger monitor to improve overall visibility. I do remember at one point as the formation was heading towards the target scanning around and seeing a flight of 8 or 9 planes cruising at right angles to us at a very high altitude. Impressive... in RB3D there was never more then 8 planes total on the screen at a time, and here we had my flight of three and eight more in the same space, making for a very immersive, "stuff is going on all around you" feeling. I did crash the plane on landing, though, I turned a little too hard after I touched down and heeled it over onto its left side, but was sufficiently slowed (tail was dragging by then) that I walked away unharmed. So it wasn't as easy as all that. Oh, and I DID use warp, I just can't play for two hours straight at a time, have a real life to maintain. But it still ended up being more then a half hour of real time, even with that concession. You're right... this is not game, this is a real hell of a simulator, and I'm already impressed. Can't wait to fly more missions soon.

And mine landed yesterday. After fighting with it to keep it from crashing, I've now completed my first campaign flight, a balloon busting machine where, I'm happy to say, I did manage to find a shoot down one of those infernal British observation platforms (very hard to spot it turns out, I had no idea what altitude to be looking at and was way too high at first). I've filed my claim for my first kill, hopefully it'll be approved. Initial thoughts are HUGELY positive about the game. I think the interface menus could use some tweaking, they sometimes seem a bit "busy" if that makes sense, but overall it's just one hell of a great flight sim. Flight models feel good, graphics are really amazing, and I'm going to have a hard time not getting lost in the damn thing for endless hours.

Thanks for the replies, but updating the vid drivers and so forth seems to have licked the crashes. Having fun just trying out some Quick Combat missions for the being, just to make sure she's shaking out thoroughly before I start a full campaign.

I am happy to report that after new drivers were installed, and the CFS3 config file reset, it now appears to be crash free (albeit during a short five minute flight). I have to head out to work now, but will look forward to many hours of flying and crashing later today (fingers crossed).

So much for that theory. It worked because the graphics were set for "safe mode". That's why the textures were so bolluxed (and why there was no sound in combat). As soon as I took it off safe mode, even at the lowest graphic settings, it crashed again. I guess I'll update the video drivers and see if that has any effect. I am SOOOOO going to get this game to work!!!!!! :-)

Ok, here's where I'm at: I've set the resolution and all graphics settings to their extreme low. I have now removed all crashing from the game, however, it looks like total dog spit. Trees are black boxes with white graphics, the ground is big swaths of simple colors, etc. Of course, that's to be expected. I'm going to slowly tweak things upwards and see where I end up.

Well, I got my disk last night and immediately installed it. Of course, even after downloading the patches, the game would crash once it entered flight mode. CSF3 had been working fine prior to this, but after OFF kept crashing I attempted to play just a straight CFS3 game and it crashed, too, which it never did before. So, here's what I did: 1. Uninstalled OFF and CFS3 completely, removed all files. Rebooted. 2. Reinstalled CFS3. Made sure to patch it up to the latest version (3.1a) 3. Updated DirectX (because you can never be sure what was causing the crashes). 4. Ran CFS3 and did a few quick combat missions in the P-47 without any crashes. 5. Install OFF. Patched it up to the latest versions including the mini-patch. So I can get the OFF menu program up and running, and often it won't even crash when the CFS3 engine does. The CFS3 crashes are random, at different times and stages of a mission. Sometimes immediately after start up... sometimes I fly for a while before it happens. The following is the crash information as reported by MS Vista (I freaking HATE Vista, I wish I still had an XP system): Application Version: 3.1.0.30203 Application Timestamp: 3e3ebe85 Fault Module Name: CFS3.exe Fault Module Version: 3.1.0.30203 Fault Module Timestamp: 3e3ebe85 Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 00119a27 OS Version: 6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 8653 Additional Information 2: f3f9f71fd18d9979856a8df1581f9ac5 Additional Information 3: 7d7c Additional Information 4: 74b1cec4f5ffc930b2e51d56da898efc Any thoughts from the devs on this? Anything I missed? I thought I was pretty thorough and careful with all the installation instructions given on the FAQ.

Still waiting for my copy, but I quickly ran through five pilots, all of whom crashed their eindeckers, before I finally have one that has survived a full year in RB3D. And the only reason it's been a year is because he was lucky enough to survive his crash behind enemy lines, was hospitalized for three months, and escaped after six more in the POW camp. Those damn eindeckers are hella tricky to fly, and almost as hard to land safely (two of those first pilots died on landing when the plane flipped forward). Now he's got an Alb III.... and yes, it's JUST like Christmas!!! What a difference. Just ran a patrol mission, and when the Nieuports ran off the rest of my flight into a circle battle, I was left all alone with three recon planes (not sure the model). Three planes, three easy kills. I love watching them burn as they spiral to the ground, and seeing the gunner and pilot jumping out. Maybe my copy of OFF will come today.... fingers and toes crossed, offering a toast to Saint Joseph....