Over Flanders Fields Phase 3: Between Heaven and Hell Page 4

By SimHQ on March 4, 2009 in _air12, hide

To the Front!

If you’re new to OFF, you must enlist your pilot, selecting name, rank and Squadron, and then make this pilot active before you can fly in any of the modes. If you crash and die, this pilot will be unavailable to you for further flying, so dead is really dead.

Itching to do my bit in the mighty aerial struggle in one of the 39 flyable aircraft, I surveyed the different game options:

Mission: This sees you flying a number of different single missions in various airplanes. Fly in campaign, for best results and immersion. The missions from the Missions tab are mainly test /sample scenarios so this is an opportunity for mission makers to come up with some interesting add on missions.

Campaign: Where you fly in a squadron for the duration of that campaign, assuming you live long enough!

Quick Combat: A quick mission-editor that lets you fly different airplanes in various modes; free-flight, dog-fight, and Turkey Shoot — I wonder by the way, who is the Turkey, as suddenly I feel feathers growing out all over me?

Don’t worry about the message you get at the end of a flown mission in QC regarding a problem with Time Advance. It is just a notification letting you know that the time advance from the campaign module is not in effect when flying Quick Combat.

Multiplayer: Well, this is self-explanatory. The multiplayer aspect from CFS3 has been left unchanged.

But I don’t like CFS3!

Conducting some very unscientific research as to why CFS3 upon its release received so little love from the community, the main reasons given to me were that it would hardly run at all on people’s computers, and if it ran, it ran buggily and choppily. For all this stuttering and falling over, one would have expected that it featured at least some breathtaking graphics — but it didn’t.

Chances are that many of us have upgraded our hardware one or more times since the initial release of CFS3 so that with a decent mid-range PC — as long as the CPU clocks at 3MHz or above, you’ll be able to enjoy OFF and forget about CFS3 shortcomings.

Very little of CFS3 is left, in fact the only times you see anything in the GUI you’ll recognize as CFS remnants is when you hit ESC to end the flight, — or when you’re presented with the multiplayer options to join or host. Everything else is completely and seamlessly controlled by OFF.

If you disable the HUD and simulation warnings through the configuration application, you’ll remove the circular “radar” from the screen as well as the tiresome warnings about the enemy airman who is using you for his target practice.