Over Flanders Fields Phase 3: Between Heaven and Hell Page 3

By SimHQ on March 4, 2009 in _air12, hide

Delivery and Installation

I received the OFF 3 DVD only 11 days after placing my order. It was shipped in a white cardboard box stating the content to be CD-ROM discs at a value of $5.00 USD — sufficiently low I suspect to avoid import tax — or perhaps it just slipped through in Customs. The box fit easily in the mail-box as it was not much larger than the DVD casing.

I was quite pleased with the speedy delivery from the US to Europe, and found the shopping agency to be efficient and reliable.

In anticipation I’d already made sure I had a vanilla CFS3 install — that was before I learned that I didn’t really need to install CFS3. If you own a legitimate disc you just show it to the installation software and some core files are copied from the disc, and then that’s that.

When the DVD arrived I installed it right away which took about 20 minutes as a lot of files need to be transferred. 15 Gigabyte of files to be exact.

The installer is to the point and it is very easy to understand what happens, what is required of the user, and where the install goes.

Then my own impatience got the better of me. Upon trying to start my first mission in OFF 3 I got error messages popping up on my screen. What had happened was that I’d recently updated my video drivers and this required CFS3 going through its configuration routine. Having sorted that, I then made doubly sure that all necessary configuration routines had run and concluded properly, including the OFF specific configuration that initializes OFF on your system, and then I was finally ready to go flying.

Make sure to download and apply the latest patch from the web site Over Flanders Fields. The current version used for this review is v1.25, but further patches are in the pipeline.

Documentation

There are no printed manuals but when you go in-sim, you can call up several manuals on the screen, or you can view and print them out from the manuals folder. They’re Adobe pdf documents and laid out in lavish style, true to the period of the subject matter;

A 92 pages comprehensive “Flight School” document detailing the keyboard commands as well as aircraft recognition cards, the principles of flight as applied to the maneuvering of the control surfaces of your aircraft and fighting tactics
A 15 page “Machines of War” document presenting the aircraft including their specifications
A 4 page introduction to “Understanding ‘World War I Aerial Combat”