Found it! Upgraded WOFF to the ultimate edition and jumped back into the cockpit with a random RFC squadron, which turned out to be the Sopwith Pups of RFC54.
Ran a couple scouting missions out to the front, but our area at Saint Omer is very quiet and we didn’t see anything, but the minutes in the Pup were useful for familiarity and working out the kinks in my TrackIR profile. And remembering how to land with an engine you have to blip.
On Christmas Day 1916 we were told to transfer south to Doullens and all seven Pups cruised south at a thousand feet into a strong headwind and driving rain.
After about 20 minutes the engine note and wind noise had put me in a semi-trance. The weather effects were good enough that I’d slumped in my office chair so that I was behind the Sopwith’s small windscreen and out of the rain.
Mid yawn I start thinking that my wing leader has gotten out of position because he’s now in front of me, instead of off my 2 o’clock and then my brain starts flashing warnings that the plane is silver, not green. I sit up in my seat just in time to watch a bright orange round arc down through my prop and hit me in the face.
First career over without firing a shot. Just like the WOFF I remember.
Man, I was gonna put off getting the Ultimate Edition because I just don’t have the time to sit with the long missions anymore, but shit, I think I’m gonna a get it anyway. That sounded just perfect.
I didn’t get time to check, what with being shot in the face, but I think we ran up the back of a pair or a lone Roland C.II and the observer in the back saw us before I worked out the silver tail I could see wasn’t our Wing Leader.
I would commend him on his accuracy but, you know.
I’m sure it does, and I’m not sure if they ever will. They have years of experience working with this codebase, it gives the a solid base to build upon. I can’t wait.
The latest 90s and early 2000s effectively froze the non-graphics components of flight sims. The flight and systems modelling was pretty much all it needed to be; everything past that was just rivet-guilding.
See: Jane’s F-15, Falcon 4, IL-2.
CFS3 is an extremely solid code base built on multiple generations of MSFS and CFS1/2. Its biggest downside is multiprocessor support, something that MS never did get around to properly even in FSX.
There was a time I might have tattooed “TURN&BURN 4 LYFE” on a body part; I’m glad I didn’t. I just don’t have the patience to set up endless B&Z runs. WWI is all about individual knife fights.
I’d so love to see a modern graphical engine with more of a focus on recreating individual aircraft performance and pilot AI (that is, a Zero pilot should use massively different strategies than a P-40 pilot) and realistic scenarios (where are our 100+ plane B-17 and B-24 formations and huge dogfights in-between them?) with enough systems realism that it feels convincing. I don’t give a flying $#(* about proper engine startup procedure; I want huge dogfights with VR support, historically accurate performance differences. Sure, if my radiator gets hit in a P-38, that engine should overheat, but that’s plenty. Don’t calculate the detailed fluid dynamics of the water leaking from the radiator with one-ounce accuracy; simulate that crap at a higher level and give me some realistic AI and historical situations.
In something made mostly of metal, not cloth. :)
Man, when you look at the late 90s, you’d think the sim I’m asking for would be a given… Sigh. I blame Larry Probst and Oleg Maddox.
Denny, I remember the good ole days when you were my editor and we had so many sims to pick from it was hard to know what to write about each month! Who could have predicted the sudden demise, and I agree with you on at least the one factor that killed it.
Imagine if flight sims had continued to advance the way, say, RPGs have since then. Sigh
Amen, Denny. I was just playing RoF last night, and I’m so sick of having the enemy plane instantly knowing I’m on his tail, even while he’s in the middle of trying to tail another plane. Within seconds of vaguely pointing my nose in his direction, away he dives. It’s the same in CloD. Most of the time I’m only clued in on a plane on my tail by the bullets zipping past my head (and more often than not, even against novice opponents, into my head)… I’m no Ace, but tunnel vision isn’t something only the human player should get.
There are some single player scenarios in WarThunder that give you decent numbers, one particular one that pits ten-ish p-40s vs ten-fifteen Japanese fighters, but it’s such an annoying game, with it’s tiers of locked missions, planes, various currency and experience modifiers, pit crews, basically a zillion things to spend money on without really scratching the right itch., and every time I boot it up it’s a 3 gig update to download.
The rivet-counter hate here makes me sad. I like switches. I like accurate procedures. I think BMS is one of the finest flight simming products available today, because it has a nice, accurate F-16 in a lovely dynamic world. Granted, flight sim developers spend a lot of time on the switches and procedures today, and there’s nothing the industry could use more than a good piece of dynamic campaign engine middleware, but it’s wrong to blame the demise of flight sims on rivet counters. Genre shifts happen. Computers got better, the cost of developing for them got higher, the flight sim audience didn’t get any bigger, and developers either ran out of money or left for greener pastures. It isn’t like there was a wave of terribly-reviewed rivet-counting flight sims in the early 2000s which killed the genre.
I should really fire up my copy and see if I can fix the Win10 crashes plaguing it. BoB2 is one of the greats.
You can sneak up on the AI in WOFF. As this guy how I know…
I felt a bit robbed of a chance to fly the Pup after that random Roland encounter, so I started a new career with the same squadron and on December 29th 1916 I got my first mission that wasn’t in a biblical rainstorm.
We took off from Doullens and flew north east to cross the front near Vimy. We ran a triangular patrol route and with the clear weather there were actually other planes in the air that you could see. Some shiny silver dots were flying north a way from us that for some reason scared off the two planes of A wing and then when I looked off my left shoulder there were some unknown planes below us about 2 miles away.
Look… they’re right there!
Unfortunately, the Sopwith Pup doesn’t come with a radio and despite waggling my wings and making some exaggerated rolls to my left, I couldn’t get the wing leader to spot them, or to show interest if he had seen them, so I sulked through the last loop of our tour and then we headed for home.
Thankfully the route home brought two planes into sight ahead and slightly above of us and when we got within about a mile the Wing Leader went into a shallow dive, which I followed. I used the speed gained there to catch the enemy and climb up beneath them and then rake them from engine to tail - a burst which apparently did very little, because as I climbed above the target, the observer engaged me and his first burst came in through the left side of the cockpit and grazed me before exiting through the right.
But then I rolled over left as the Roland pilot banked right and that put the Observer right beneath my gunsights and a long burst took him out of commission. Without any defence it was then just a case of staying behind the Roland and getting off aimed bursts until it eventually winged over and corkscrewed down into no mans land.
WOFF has a claim system, so I haven’t officially been credited with the kill yet. Hopefully one of the other Pups that was buzzing around saw it so I can clam it as revenge for what the Roland did to me in my first career.
I’m not saying there’s no room in flight sims for this sort of thing. Even back in the day we had stuff like Su-27. However, the strict adherence to this crap – and the fervor over it – is what drove people like Andy Hollis away from flight sims entirely. I’m still angry and sad about the direction the genre took.
There’s nothing wrong with switchology as an option. But I remember during the development of Il-2, watching the forums and seeing people bitch about the placement of a placard in the Bf-109 cockpit, while handily ignoring the sim’s totally brain-dead AI and lack of fully populated combat scenarios. The wrong priorities.
I flew in, and flew, an F-15D 20 years ago. I can’t tell you a damn thing about how the pilot in front started that plane up now, because that wasn’t the exciting or fun part. :)
The genre died out in part because of changing demographics of the gaming audience, but it also died out because there wasn’t enough focus on the gameplay and scenario aspects. Read ANY well-written account of air combat from any war and you’ll wish those scenarios could be repeated in any sim. And man, they’d be exciting if they could be. But that’s not what you find the focus on.
Take the shell of the new IL-2:BOS game or DCS WW2 – great engines, and they look beautiful. Then give it (1) An accessible mode designed to get new players up to speed in exciting scenarios. Drop them in the action with a smart AI wingman who coaches them through combat. Don’t dumb it down as an arcade game, but don’t throw them into a death stall when they turn too tight either. (2) Have a “fun” scripted campaign that’s more Black Sheep Squadron or Top Gun in nature. Hook the player with this. (3) Have a Longbow-style dynamic campaign once they’re hooked. That is, a fully dynamic campaign, but with some scripted elements that recreate specific history-inspired scenarios and have a mission depth you’re not going to get from AI. Offer a bundle with a decent but inexpensive flight stick, and also make it flyable with an Xbox controller’s joystick.
I’m not saying this will be the best ROI for your game development cash investment by any means. :) But it would be a way to kickstart the genre.
Wonder if George Lucas misses having a game company? #RedTails
