corsaire31

Vista ? OMG !

OK solved...

Glad to see you back Olham, didn't have any reply to my FEOW messages last week...

Western Digital Caviar Black for me ... 2 x 1To divided each in two 500 gigs partitions (General - Flight Sims - FSX - Backup). My system is on a 128 Go SSD. One of them comes from my previous XP machine, so it's been working safely for 5 years already.

And also that you don't see the real world around you, which might not be a minor thing... except if you live alone in a closed basement !

200th anniversary ? We're not that old yet...

The first important thing you need is being a regular member of one of the squads participating in the campaign(s) or being invited by a member if organizers allow it. Track IR is not needed (but I can't imagine doing without since I'm so used to it since years) and voice comms is a must - even in the "no-comms" missions and campaigns, we still need to meet on some TS channel for pre-flight briefing, password for the server, and answers to any questions. It is also nice to have a post-mission debriefing. The comms question in itself is a long going debate inside the community. I prefer to fly without as this is more historical, but fact is we are a minority which leads to small missions. For larger events, it's up to the organization. For practical reasons we usually restrict the use of comms to one channel per flight, so you cannot communicate with another flight which is flying miles away. I participate then in small (10-15 players + possible AI planes) very realistic events (which are for me "the real thing") and in semi-realistic larger events (50 to 80 players) which I consider more like a game (which is still even as everybody has the same rules) For Rise of Flight servers, 80 players seem to be the upper limit for good conditions (no lag) as you need fairly large maps - ( I remember landing a DFW with a few liters of fuel left when I had taken off with full tank, something like a two and a half hours flight...)

I fly myself a Jasta 5 campaign over the war with PWCG (think I started it with version 14.0) and I agree with you it has been constantly getting better, probably due to the fact we have a dialog between Pat and users all the time. This is the only thing that keeps me flying single player in Rise of Flight (which I fly a lot online multiplayer).

Not to stir up the debate again, but you don't have to buy 55 planes... Although I don't think WOFF is overpriced (and I plan to buy it in 2014 as soon as my bank account is back to a normal situation after the madness of year's end), I'm pretty sure I will never have the time (or the will) to fly 55 planes. I usually play campaigns following one Escadrille or Squadron or Jasta or Schlasta throughout the war, so each campaign takes me several months (even if I'm lucky to be old enough to have plenty of time to fly - but I fly several sims...)

More precisions : I am side commander for Central in a 1916 campaign, we have 3 groups on each side so between 20 and 25 players. We advance 2 weeks every mission and also 2 hours in the daytime, with night missions and "special missions" like bridge busting or pick up a spy at twilight on a remote airfield, or attack the other side's commander train, etc... We play every Monday and it will be 24 missions overall, 6 months in real time. We are at mission 11 at this point. It is based on a cumulative points system with plus points for objectives, air victories, ground targets, photos of enemy HQ and minus points for pilots and planes lost. The other campaign I fly at the moment (with Olham) is called Flaming Eagles of War (FEOW) and spans over the war from 1916 to 1918. The different planes are introduced at historical dates and it will also last 6 months, we fly one mission every 2 weeks. There are two fronts, one flying 4 hour missions on Friday for europeans and one flying 4 hour missions on Saturday for americans. Max 40 players on each side for every mission, 2 lives per mission. Based on ground conquest with recons of artillery positions actioning ground troops. Fuel dumps and ammo dumps at airfields can be bombed, thus reducing fuel and ammo for next mission at this airfield. Factories producing airplanes can be bombed after successful recons by two seaters giving information on their activity ( there are also fake ones on the map) which influences the number and type of planes available for next mission. I also participate almost weekly inside the french community to many small missions / mini campaigns historically accurate and flown "no-comms" with 10 to 15 players. Just to say online multiplayer is not limited to "team deathmatch"...

Rise of Flight...

Joyeux Noël à tous ! Olham looking forward to flying with you again soon in our FEOW III campaign ! By the way it is also overcast and rainy in the South West of France.

This is probably because you never participated in organised multiplayer campaigns that can span over several months. You should try, it is really interesting as there is a logistics part behind where bombing factories/fuel dumps/ammo dumps have a direct impact on how many aircraft/fuel/ammo will be available for future missions. Also recon aircraft play a big part as you need to recon targets (and bring screenshots back to your airfield) before you can attack them in next mission, so two-seater pilots are also very important - I have flown 4 hours recon aircraft where the game was to stay stealthy using clouds and avoid combat. The general weekly strategic and tactical planning of each mission (I am side commander for Central forces in one of these campaigns) is also very interesting IMHO.

Agreed with you Olham, this is why I never understood why people are presenting it as a choice. From the beginning, RoF has been developped as a multi-player game. The single player campaign has been added afterwards and nothing significant has been done by 777 studios to make the AI better. PWCG (latest 15.2) is the only thing that makes me fly some single player missions as Pat Wilson has made great steps forward with the last releases, specially with the AI behaviour when coupled with AI mod. I consider them as "training". When I want to make serious single player flying, I start OFF (with HPW FM/EW 4.0 and Ultimate DM 1.25) which I will replace with WOFF at some point in 2014. On the other hand, OFF/WOFF lacks the multiplayer environment. Why spend a lot of time trying to develop an AI which will try to behave like human pilots when it is simple to fly directly against human pilots ? I know that many people are complaining that players use Teamspeak in multiplayer environment. This is true on public servers, but I participate every week in missions and campaigns on private servers where we fly no comms and only communicate with flares and wing waggles. If I look at the almost ended year 2013, I think I spent an equal flying time in both sims and I enjoyed all of it.

I suppose it is with WOFF like with OFF greatly depending of the settings you use in the workshop. I fly OFF with the last HPW FM/EW and Damage mods which greatly improve how the AI planes fly, and using RSS - SIA settings for my campaigns I am happy when I score 1 victory in a mission, and I am flying sims since the early 90s. In my Jasta 5 campaign, my last pilot who flew the second half of 1916 had only 8 victories for 58 missions... ( given that there were many missions without any enemy contact)

This is one of the reasons why I never buy games on release ... besides the fact they are most of the time not finished !

Not a good comparison... You don't buy RoF, it's free. Then you can buy only the planes you are interested in flying ( all the other ones will be there to shoot at...) and at the moment there is a 50% discount on everything. And there are hundreds of user made quality skins available. I don't think there is a competition, WOFF is single player only and RoF is very much multiplayer oriented, so they rather complement each other.

That is of course if you own the Ubisoft DVD version of CFS3 (patched to 3.1)... If you have the Microsoft CD version, you need to install and patch.

The fact that there is no market probably explains why no business oriented dev team works on such a sim...

Not a good comparison : game is free and you don't have to buy all the planes if you don't want to (and if you're clever you wait for sales to buy them)... I personnally fly german planes 90% of the time, so why should I buy planes I don't fly ? We are talking about 60$ for the base game + 25$ for the skin pack + delivery for the DVD + taxes for us poor europeans.... so it's probably close to 100$ which at this time of the year is already some money ! Anyway I never buy games on release and I'm happy flying my OFF campaign for the time being. Will be 2014 for me !

I would never leave access to my PC room to my cat when I'm not here to watch out after him, he likes too much playing with cables ! Anyway he spends most of the day outside in the street's gardens with his pals so he is tired in the evening and sleeps deeply on the couch behind me while I'm flying... I have to wake him up usually around 1 o'clock morning and get him out of the room for a late dinner (or an early breakfast, depends how you look at it...) and he spends the rest of the night on our bed most of the time...

With the DVD you don't need to install CFS3. You launch the install of OFF, then it will ask you to insert the DVD, read a few files and finish install OFF. You can then store your DVD away. I would think it will be the same for WOFF.

You should not have to walk too long, there are still many of them. I only switched to Windows 7 / 64bits a month ago...

Smartphone cameras can certainly take clear pictures, but for the moment you can't stick a 600mm f4 or an 18mm wide angle on them. They're ok to make "family pics" (although I'm aware some people made films with them, I didn't see any...) Reversing the second part, all internet related things that tablets and smartphones do, I can already do them on my home PC or my laptop, so why should I buy new stuff that does the same thing than stuff I already have ! And then they will convince you that your smartphone you bought 6 months ago is now outdated and you absolutely neeeed a new one. And then it gets so complicated that very serious people in the Silicon Valley start thinking that in a few years the human brain will not be able to follow the technology leaps and the information flow, and that we will need some kind of electronic implants (saw an interesting document a few weeks ago) The other problem is that all these things (mails, social networks, forums) use a lot of your daily time and until now days are still only 24 hours ! In fact you spend a lot more time these days gathering and sorting informations among 90% of which you don't give a damn ! Reminds me of the saying about couples : " Being married or living with someone else is about the ability of solving together all kinds of problems you wouldn't have if you were single."

I don't care about what the rest of the world is doing with tablets or smartphones ... I just invested in a good new desktop PC for the 5 next years at least and got my HP laptop repaired (had to change the thermic paste under the GPU...) I use the laptop mainly to display maps when I fly multiplayer missions in RoF, or when I fly FSX or Condor Soaring. My telephone is not smart at all and I make photos with my Nikon Reflex camera system. May be we will be the last ones, but I don't see me flying on anything else than a good PC with Track IR, joystick, rudder pedals for military sims and yoke / multi throttle and trim wheel for civilian aviation.