Wings Over Flanders Fields (WOFF) (Dec 2013)

[Nefaro]

Also..

I just downed my first Ace.  Flying a Pup in October '17.   

Those Albatros DIII/DVs can be tough.  I had to put quite a few rounds into this guy even after his engine was obviously damaged.  One thing I've noticed about WOFF is that your guns aren't terribly accurate.  Despite having some aiming device in most planes, the bullets tend to cone spray a fair bit.  Enough to make targeting the enemy pilot a very unsure thing, even up close.

It's a fine inclination to look up the bio of the historic aces you shoot down:

Oskar Freiherr von Boenigk (25 August 1893 – 30 January 1946) was a German Generalmajor, he began his military career during World War I as a fighter ace credited with 26 victories. He survived the war, served in the post-war revolution, and eventually rose to the rank of Generalmajor in the Luftwaffe during World War II.

:D

[Grim.Reaper]

Did you see that the 1.4 patch is out?  There's some fixes for various TV issues in there... dunno if yours was one.

Yep, that was an attempt to fix my issue but did not work for me.   Hats off to them for trying.

[Grim.Reaper]

^So are you currently immersed in fun? We seem to be on the same page as far as skill and what we want, so if you're getting it and having fun I will feel more secure in dropping 125.00 on this.

No pressure though :)

That's a lot of pressure:)   I like the atmosphere but haven't played much in the last 2 days due to other pressing items.  I do like what I see, but not sure I would have spent $125 for it:)

[Nefaro]

$125 for what?!   :o

This isn't Steel Beasts Pro!  Hahah!

I picked up a CD-ROM set for CFS3 at Amazon for six bucks.  ???

[Grim.Reaper]

$125 for what?!   :o

This isn't Steel Beasts Pro!  Hahah!

I picked up a CD-ROM set for CFS3 at Amazon for six bucks.  ???

I think he is adding on buying a flight stick too.

[Gusington]

60.00 for game (physical copy) which adds 13.00, new DVD copy (for no disk in the drive) of CFS 3 which adds 10.00, new joystick, for 30.00. OK so 113.00.

[Cougar_DK]

It sure looks great - but I'm on the fence until they change the game to run on non-english regional settings (, and . problem in numbers) :(

[Nefaro]

Gotta point out one negative thing.. it's flight model isn't all that great, especially compared to ROF. 

For instance, you can't really perform a hammer turn.  Doing a decent loop is a rarity - even with some excess speed from a dive, you often just stall out into a spin.  I suppose the fastest aircraft (such as a SPADXIII) may be able to barely pull them off from their max level speed but they're all pretty much at or near stall speed halfway through.  At least in ROF, when you get near stall speed in a climb, your rudder is effective in doing the hammer turn and other such stuff.  If you get nose-high and near stalling in WOFF, you just kinda float around with almost no control even though you're still doing 50mph.

I'm also not sure about how well the airframes' strength is modelled.  I've not tested to see at what speed some aircrafts' wings get ripped off but the game sounds of your screeching aircraft tends to make me think it's lower than it was historically reported to be.  For instance Rickenbacker mentioned reaching about 200mph in dives, flying a Nieuport, before the risk of shredding the canvas off the wings.  In this one, it sounds as if they're gonna completely rip off at about 160mph in many of them.  It doesn't sound like much, but it's a sizable difference in these old planes.

I also had a SPADVII's wing break in a level turn at under 100mph.  The SPADs were some pretty sturdy planes for their time.  So it feels like the aircraft are structurally weaker than those in ROF, and perhaps their historical counterparts.

So yeah.. the flight model doesn't have the fidelity of other sims IMO.  As to which modelling is closer to the real thing.. who knows?  The game is still quite immersive, I just have to remind myself to be extra careful of the speed and G-forces I'm putting on the planes in WOFF.   It was scary enough, diving at high speed in ROF, but this one makes me feel like I could kill myself at any time I'm maneuvering.  If nothing else, it makes for some tense flying.

[MengJiao]

Gotta point out one negative thing.. it's flight model isn't all that great, especially compared to ROF. 

For instance, you can't really perform a hammer turn.  Doing a decent loop is a rarity - even with some excess speed from a dive, you often just stall out into a spin.  I suppose the fastest aircraft (such as a SPADXIII) may be able to barely pull them off from their max level speed but they're all pretty much at or near stall speed halfway through.  At least in ROF, when you get near stall speed in a climb, your rudder is effective in doing the hammer turn and other such stuff.  If you get nose-high and near stalling in WOFF, you just kinda float around with almost no control even though you're still doing 50mph.

I'm also not sure about how well the airframes' strength is modelled.  I've not tested to see at what speed some aircrafts' wings get ripped off but the game sounds of your screeching aircraft tends to make me think it's lower than it was historically reported to be.  For instance Rickenbacker mentioned reaching about 200mph in dives, flying a Nieuport, before the risk of shredding the canvas off the wings.  In this one, it sounds as if they're gonna completely rip off at about 160mph in many of them.  It doesn't sound like much, but it's a sizable difference in these old planes.

I also had a SPADVII's wing break in a level turn at under 100mph.  The SPADs were some pretty sturdy planes for their time.  So it feels like the aircraft are structurally weaker than those in ROF, and perhaps their historical counterparts.

So yeah.. the flight model doesn't have the fidelity of other sims IMO.  As to which modelling is closer to the real thing.. who knows?  The game is still quite immersive, I just have to remind myself to be extra careful of the speed and G-forces I'm putting on the planes in WOFF.   It was scary enough, diving at high speed in ROF, but this one makes me feel like I could kill myself at any time I'm maneuvering.  If nothing else, it makes for some tense flying.

All this talk of WOFF (which sounds like a great game all-in-all) made me re-install RoF.  And fly the FE-2b pusher (which in RoF you can only get in what seems to be the 160 HP Beardmore version).  For a while the FE-2b seemed absurdly robust and agile (I was used to flying the DCS Su-25T, which is slighly sluggish and tricky and full of fun moments with flame-outs and spins and being shot up by helicopters when taxing and never hitting anything with bombs), but eventually I was back to over-revving the engine, stalling and having damaged wings rip off.  Once I'd re-established that the FE-2b was not indestructable,
I noticed you could tell a lot by just listening to the windflow around the aircraft (not really an option in a jet).
My impression in RoF is that in most planes, you'll over-revv the engine long before you rip off your wings UNLESS there is some damage.

[Nefaro]

I've found it fairly easy to rip my wings off in WOFF just in flat turns at moderate speeds.  I thought it would be more difficult to do if you were in a slow turn.  Gotta be even more careful in this game than ROF.  :o

[MengJiao]

I've found it fairly easy to rip my wings off in WOFF just in flat turns at moderate speeds.  I thought it would be more difficult to do if you were in a slow turn.  Gotta be even more careful in this game than ROF.  :o

  That is interesting.  I have no idea how these games put in parameters like Wing-root integrity.  WWI airplanes do look comically fragile to me, though at the time maybe all those struts and crosswires were more reassuing.  Somehow.

   Also, I really know next to nothing about real airplanes or flight simulation FMs or AFMs, so let me add some completely irrelevent remarks just to round out the discussion (mostly thanks to the Wiki on the FE-2):

   1) the FE-2 flew in combat from 1915 to 1918.  Clear to the end of the war...I guess partly because you could stick any kind of weapons or lights or night landing aids you wanted in the forward tub and get good visibility forward.  Plus it could carry a fair amount of bombs.  Though it ended up in a rather special operational category "tactical light night bomber"....hmmm. 
   2) Biggles started his flying career in an FE-2
   3) I almost got OFF in April 2011.  It was my assumed first choice since I didn't think RoF would run on my underpowered gear.  I got MSflying things3 and tested it out.  It worked so -- just for the hell of it -- I got RoF installed and to my surprise it worked and it looked okay (MSFlying thing3 looked fine as well except for the water -- RoF already had nice water) so I went with RoF.

[Nefaro]

ROF's aircraft and 'pits look amazing still.  Some of the aircraft textures are astonishing.  I left a  pic in the screenshot thread of a Fokker DVII and it's hex-painted canvas texture looks superb with a slight sunlight reflection.  And it runs surprisingly smoothly.  I think part of that is due to the ground textures and overall "environment" is more like a bubble around the player so there's not a bunch of stuff being computed happening out of sight. 

This same thing is probably the reason for the higher spec requirements of WOFF.  The war is being run and it seems to be fairly processor and memory intensive.  I just now lowered my Cloud Gfx setting back down to 3 from the 5 (max) I had it.  Made a big difference in some of the jittering I'd see when over the lines and seeing all the artillery striking the ground (and various banks of clouds).  But all that extra 'stuff' going on is really what makes this game so wonderful.  I could continue niggling about the flight model and aircraft structural load points but those are minor in comparison to the general feel of flying during a campaign.


I just had to resort to turning off pilot deaths for my campaign.  The Huns kept shooting me down.  Sure, maybe I'll score one or two before taking a dirt nap, but it's inevitable.  The worst was taking on flights of 2-seaters.  Those rear gunners will murderize you if you get greedy on your climb up to attack from underneath and don't dive back down soon enough.  I also can't seem to get away from those Albatroses in 1917.  Once they get nearby, they always manage to slowly catch up to me and there is usually more than one.  Damn good shots too.  Brutal fiery deaths!  I love it.. but I gotta go with the resurrections in order to get some steady practice in without having to regularly create a new pilot.  ;)

[jomni]

Nefaro, why not fly as a German pilot instead?

[Nefaro]

Nefaro, why not fly as a German pilot instead?

Despite my love of flying the Albatros models and the DVII, I'm really enjoying these British planes right now.  I was flying a slow-ass Strutter in 70 squadron and most recently got upgraded to a Sopwith Camel in August 1917.  It's a big leap and my mission results have jumped.  Love that little aircraft in a dogfight, and the sounds of using the blip switch to slow down.  :D  I think this squadron gets the Sopwith Snipe, eventually.  Never flown one of those in a sim. 

There are a lot of different aircraft to fly.  I also enjoyed flying the F2a/b "Brisfit" 2-seaters although I tend to wanna get out of 2-seaters after awhile.  Fortunately there's a squadron transfer request form you can fill out, but I've not tried it yet - you probably need some victories under your belt for that to be successful and I had only bagged maybe 1 kill in my 2-seater campaigns.  Of course, my single-seater tallies have only reached two claims up until this latest campaign in a Camel which has given my five claims in my last 3 missions.  Quite a leap in performance having 2 guns in a strong & agile little plane.

I'm in no hurry to try out the German side yet, nor the French or American.  I can tell there will lots of campaign playtime put into this sim.  I'll probably fire up a German campaign sometime soon after some straight time spent campaigning on the west side (yo).

Also - I'm not so German-o-centric as some wargamers, who tend to always want to play ze German side most of the time.

[Gusington]

I do admit to enjoying play as the Germans when they are available. Are there any Italian, Austrian or Russian planes modeled in WOFF?