Lewie

I'd like to differ a bit on this. Maybe it's because of their genetics but our two male kitties, both at 9 years of age have actually been pretty sweet little companions. They're littermates, both found at a road wayside in a damp cardboard box. They were half starved and about 4 to 5 weeks in age when we found them, if no-one had found them I shudder to think what their fate would have been. I'm guessing they're some sort of Havana Brown-Oriental Shorthair mix. Very thin and pretty vocal. Our more bold one accompanies me to our mailbox, about a 1/2 mile round trip, nearly daily. He's in my lap now giving me the "Lets go get the mail" look. They used to try to follow me on my bike trips, once discovered that Pums had ran along about 2 miles following me at a trot, meowing his head off. Crazy cats, but gems, the pair of them.

I have to say despite the aging graphics, the game is a hoot. Plus it's got the most incongruous collection of aircraft, A Dornier 335? It is one of my Axis favorites, despite that it didn't see any action in the ET. Of course I crashed it bigtime trying to land somewhere near Cambridge, I got lost and decided to make a landing on a road. I was fine until I decided to make a turn before I hurt some trees.

Well this is nice, I've started a British B25 shipping attack campaign and on my second mission the weather broke out wet and thundery and all the effects, including rain and lightning are running on my machine without a lot of slowdown. I'm pretty happy about this. I realize that OFF will be more resource hungry but this is a good sign that if CFS3 runs on my old machine with a baseline setting of 4, that I'd expect that OFF would run on my newer machine. This is so atmospheric it's phenomenal.

Hey what can I say Olham, you like Albatrosses, I like Dorniers. Yeah the in-game map is a little hard to find, I'm used to the "M" key for SDOE- Fighter Squadron or the F4 key in TargetWare 0.64, to bring up a map. Couldn't for the life of me find where i was supposed to land. Pulling a "Hess"? I'm sorry to be obtuse, but is this more Enigma speak? I'm ordering OFF. I just wanted to see what CFS3 was about, and work out how well it will work on my better machine. I am pretty impressed my old Athlon 800 mHZ game machine runs this at better than slide show frame rates. I'm getting about 17 to 24 FPS and this with flocks of attacking Spitties weaving around me.

Yes, I've read their threads, Seems that changing from editable poly to editable mesh does some wonky things to the polys in the vicinity of the boolean.

No problem, we're all here to share stuff. What a sweety, I'm sorry your dog is sick, it sounds like he's having good life. My sister had two Border collies that lived into their teens, one of the friendliest dogs and pretty smart. I'm rather more of a cat person myself, having a pet get ill is tough, I've been there too. Cheers

Aren't Cappy and Perrone two of the allied fields that changed hands a couple of times during the 1918 offensive?

Yes it's a bit of a dream of mine, to do a small motorbike tour of the front, from the channel to the Swiss border.

In RedBaron3D I really liked the 'optional' two-seater careers that were added with the Western Front Patches. I had a particular fondness for my Farman chicken coop crates careers and the Aviatik CII careers, ( OFF needs some Farmans and older German two seaters, like the Aviatik, and the Ago.. ;) ) Once I get my OFF DVD I'm planning a bunch of early war two seater careers. That OFF has Fee's is just the icing of the cake. How about careers with Happe's Bomber Group 25 with Salmson engined MF11's, Breguet Michelins, and Farman Horaces.. There's a reason that the German air service had a 25,000 Duetschmark price on Happe's head.

Ah thanks you for that tip, I usually just drag the view port to the corner as I'm used to doing the 3D view from an ortho view. It would be nice to turn off the perspective in the ortho view, and keep the faces present in the other 3 views. Yeah, I'm going to have to learn how to do Boolean cuts, there's number of exhaust holes and the two semi triangular engine access plates below them, plus the Vickers inset. I've got a good start of the interior woodworks, made some longerons and stringer for the main cockpits. How far back do I need to run these, Is the current game requiring fully modeled interiors?

If you can track down Herbert Malloy Mason's book about the Escadrille Layfayette,..Amazon Books listing, he talks about visiting the Verdun area, especially around Duamont and the other heavily shelled fortified areas. This book was written in the mid 60's and even then nature was trying to reclaim the old churned up ground. He did some extensive helicopter over flights and remarked about the damage to some of the areas, that would take scores of years to reclaim. In contrast the Western Somme area had it bit easier, as the Discovery channel's show on the last flight of Baron Von Richthofen illustrated. The 1918 late spring German Somme offensive, did get stalled because the they could not sustain the supply lines. That the German troops stopped long enough to feed themselves from the bounty of the Somme valley is what probably what saved it from worse carnage.

I've been a fan of this show since it was first carried by Comedy Central. The link provided has Youtube vids of some of the best songs from the intermissions and experiment presentations from the run of the show, included is one of my faves, "The United Servo Academy Men's Chorus directed by Vice Brigadier Sir Thomas Bullhead Servo.". From an intermission segment of the equally well panned classic, "The Star Fighters". Best 13 songs of MST3K Topless robot Cheers

I'm rather jealous of your age, I used to be a better cyclist when I was your age, rode to work almost 12 miles round trip nearly each day.

Yes it's one of the best things to come out of Minnesota ever. I kind of figure it's the long winters that bring out this level of humor, and I really miss the show, especially the Joel Hodgson years. I'm pretty impressed that they have the entire Magic Voyage of Sinbad and the Day the Earth Froze, on Youtube. The riff they did on Scandahoovian Minnesotan dialects in the beginning of The Day the Earth Froze, always floors me. 'Oh Yah, I remember dat day, it must of gotten down to fifty below.." "Well the ding dang stuff in my nose just froze up."

And this segment of "The Magic Voyage of Sinbad" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W89GkOMEz-0&feature=related

They did miss this little gem, from their Fugitive Alien episode.

OK some progress report, my SPAD IX fuselage. I've gotten a fairly reliable import process figured out and the smoothing in my 3D app is being kept in the final import to gmax, so that's a good thing. I still haven't figured out how to keep the mapping. So far it looks OK, but I think a baseline for minimum and maximum polys should be established for the externals. I'm expecting that in the SPAD that all the front engine compartment holes need to be modelled?

The RE8 had both an additional throttle control and elevator stick for the gunner, I assume that when you jump to the gunner's position the ability to throttle back or override the pilot 's elevator inputs aren't there. I'm not sure what the Royal Air Factory's reasons for these additional controls, but for maybe if the pilot became injured or killed?

Just picked up my replacement joystick, (yay!) a Saitek ST290, which replaces my ancient old worn MicroFlop. The old one was on it's last repair for the rudder pot which had worn into complete un-calibrativity. Yeah I know, the Saitek ain't exactly a high end unit, but for my uses it seems fine. Fired up TargetWare and flew my Borel monoplane which has a considerable engine torque and 'P' factor and discovered it wasn't the complete handful on takeoff it was with the old stick. Flew a few rounds of Redbaron3D with the realistic torque and gyro on. Pretty good. My only gripe is that the twist for the rudder is a pretty narrow arc and the spring tension is a bit high, my old crates rely on the rudder a lot and I'd like to make it have a bit more resolution. Anyone have some observations and comments about the Saitek and using it in OFF?

I did some surgery on the Saitek stick last night, it's pretty straight forward in it's construction but really complex in the handle where the rudder pot resides. Oh yeah the metal plate for the palm rest's thumb screw can drop out of alignment and really make your reassembly fun. I discovered that Saitek uses a really thick treacle like compound in the throttle paddle 'bearing' support and the handle part of the rudder twist part of the handle, that supposedly makes for smooth damped control. Well except for the problem that this compound has either dried out or stiffened with age. It was really thick and glue-like, and was actually hindering both controls. I found that plain old isopropyl alcohol will clean this crap out. That's a good thing as any other solvent would probably attack the plastic which looks like Styrene. You might get away with low odor mineral spirits, but the alcohol worked fine. I gave the paddle bearing and the rudder twist bearing a generous daubing of plastic compatible teflon grease and took the spring out and gave it a slight detuning by stretching it a bit and the control is a bit more balanced. it's not perfect but the notchy center is definitely easier to work past.

In CaptSopwith's screenshot's of his desktop I'm noticing the Win7 shield over some of the game icons, I'm assuming this is Windows running the game in administration mode? Why is Redbaron3D not marked with the shield? I've installed FS-WWI on my wife's little Acer netbook and it has this same icon, it's always asks if you want to allow the game to make changes.

Ever since I started building R/C 3D models for the R/C training simulator FMS, I've wanted to get into their cockpits and fly them. I also had the PC games Flying Corps Gold, and RedBaron3D, and wanted to make my own custom models for them. I also wanted to do a pre WWI flight simulation, and at the time, like Von Baur, I was on the Prospero Full Canvas Jacket and Western Front patch forums, trying to figure out how to get my models into Redbaron 3D. I was hearing a lot about this WWI add-on to Microsoft's flight simulator and CFS2, through the members of the Prospero forums, which I suspect is what OFF evolved from. One thing lead to another, I discovered the Targetware Team and got on the Richthofen's Skies development team just as 0.64 was having development stopped. It was a shame because I was getting the hang of importing my models just as the ax fell on any further development for TW's 0.64 rendering and FM engine. I'm glad they are developing it further, but it would have been nice to keep the legacy features and formats. A lot of folks who had much time in the sim felt the same way. Water under the bridge.. I'm now working with SDOE's mod Fighter Squadron WWI and am getting the hang of it. That you can have a dynamic combat situation in FS-WWI is a bit better than RS's offline play, which is you, by yourself, flying a solo mission with a bit of flak to worry about. I'm also here because I'm looking into adding some of my models to OFF. I 'm still getting to know gmax as a 3D program, it has a lot of niggling problems and there's not a lot of beginner help, especially with the user interface which I'm finding a bit hard to grasp.

My interest was always there. Watched "The Great War" with my Dad as a kid, and my Aunt and Grandmother were always buying me books on aviation, because I had a big interest in it. I also think my Grandmother was chuffed that we had another young bookworm in the family, because she was on the Directors Board of our local library. The 3 in 1Monogram 1/72" scale plastic model kit with the DH2, Albatross DII, and Nieuport 17 also helped. I blame the DH2, despite it's difficulty to assemble for an 8 year old, for my life long love of all things overtly strutty and latticey. The movies Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines and the Blue Max, were a influence along with many Guillows and Comet rubber freeflight balsa kits. That I still build small WWI and pre-WWI RC scale models I guess is a sign that I am in touch my inner kid. I also started to make 3D models for a freeware RC simulation, Flying Model Simulator FMS Homepage with the help of the 3D program MetasequoiaLE. That simulation sparked an interest in WWI combat simming when I discovered an old copy of Flying Corps Gold at a thrift store a few years back, and then picked up a copy of RedBaron3D.

Well one alternative would be to perform some surgery to extract the rudder pot out of the Saitek and make my own rudder pedals, I've never flown a sim with them though. It sounds like a bit of surgery will be required at any rate, the rudder spring is just too stiff and the arc too small. It's too bad because the rest of the stick is pretty good.

Are you running Firefox or Internet Exploder? If Firefox you might see if you've got your NoScripts permissions reset. or you need to update NoScript, That is if you have Firefox, otherwise...