Wing Mounted Rockets...yes!

[PropNut]

I have been out of RoF for too long. Haven't even attended the Monday night flights (9PM EST), Mechwarrior Online has me completely addicted (although I am still supporting the DD effort to destroy GIAP in the Sunday night, 9PM EST, SEOW missions.).

[T_O_A_D]

Ah you Bloody recorded it to you cheeky Buggar

Since you have your views we should share and make a vid, it was a epic Battle.

[DD_Arthur]

Yep, I record most of my flights to review and see if there is anything screen shot worthy. I've got the track but I'll need a tutorial on how to upload it to the vault or link it in a post.

I've been wanting to get into movie making for a while now. I used to do a great deal of stop-go animation using plasticine and Lego with the kids. . RoF and CLoD look pretty good to me for movie making.

Check this out; http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=30284&p=423783#p423783. Wondering whether the kids might like to buy their Dad this for Christmas

[T_O_A_D]

Interesting, there are more than one prog listed in that thread for video recording.

I'll fool with Fraps first since I have it and see how well it works for me and ROF with this new system setup I have now.

As for uploading, all you have to do is navigate to your tracks folder in ROF/data/tracks then right click the appropiate .trk and zip it so the forum will accept it for uploading.

Note if your sending a track to someone that hasn't played the mission I think you have to include the folder too, but I'm not sure.

[DD_Arthur]

Soon!

[fruitbat]

Good news Arthur,

Myself and TOAD have spent a good few hours on his server setting up all the planes and their response curves plus head position in regard to gun sights, of which I've bought a few.

Net result, now in full control of the planes, and can now shoot (boy is shooting easier, indeed easy)......

[DD_Arthur]

Great stuff! All ready for some RoF online action? What's a good night for Toad? Mondays? Hmmm.....perhaps not this Monday but soon, very soon. I'd seriously think about pre-ordering the Channel map now whilst you still can. Release is imminent. Then you can all gun for me in the Felixstowe

@Toad; 'Fraid I'm gonna need something a bit more indepth to help me load a track up here. I'm a computer dunce! Is there a tutorial anywhere?

Edit; We could do a DangerDogz signature mission with a couple of these;

[T_O_A_D]

Ok so here is how you get a ROF track and then upload it to the Forum, or anywhere else for that matter.

To install just reverse all that, and here is my views.

Toad vs Arthur dogfight.zip

Oh and next week if weather holds out I'll be away and not able to game.

I'll be able to get on Coms when the wife is at work, but that's all I could offer.

The following week, I'll be available Mon, Tue Wed. And if work lets me have my floater holiday since its on my normal day off its possible I'll get it on Sunday, but most likely on Thursday.

[fruitbat]

I have a new favourite plane, the Sopwith Camel.

Been shooting AI Albatrosses without a second thought, and D-VII's with not much effort, its a real little killer.

Online will be different I'm sure, but offline, i feel like a bit of a bastard using it!

[T_O_A_D]

Don't worry online you're considered a bastard when you use it too. It's got the reputation of being a noob plane. What I keep over hearing its the La7 of ROF

[fruitbat]

kinda figures after flying it for a bit.

[DD_Arthur]

This is one of the two or three areas of the RoF flight model where people tend to get their knickers in a twist....with some justification.....possibly. Part of the problem is the rather surprising lack of solid contemporary, technical information available. These designs are very nearly a hundred years old, when aviation was still in it's infancy and the testing and recording regimes we have available nowadays just did not exist.

This is especially true of the Central powers. In the aftermath of the Armistice much was lost, confiscated or destroyed and a great deal of the surviving data is uncertain or purely anecdotal.

Over at the RoF forum the general view is the Camel is too fast. The theory is that RoF's Camel is modelled on the prototype for which there is excellent documentary evidence of performance figures using it's French made engine. Production versions from introduction in 1917 through to mid-late 1918 were equipped with a British made engine which was considered poorer in terms of both performance and reliability.

The engine in the RoF Camel revs to 1400rpm. The Sopworth Pup and Triplane are considered "honest" in this respect as they share the same engine as the Camel and yet they only rev to (a historically correct) 1200rpm

Certainly there are plenty of accounts from allied pilots who flew the Camel along the lines of "what a great, manouverable little plane, out turning all the Huns which was just aswell as you couldn't outrun them."

The speed advantage of the Camel in game is such that it can out-run all the Hun fighters with the exception of the FokkerD.VIIf and the Pfalz D.XII. This seems to be accepted as historically incorrect and brings us nicely to problem #2; the Mercedes DIII engine which equips most of the German planes after the Eindecker. This engine was under continuous development in the latter stages of the war and got progressively faster as it became more refined. The most important German scout of the great war was the Albi DVa which was produced right up to the Armistice even though it was superceded by the Fokker DVII in early 1918. Quite simply this important aircraft is too slow due to being equipped with the wrong kind of Mercedes DIII engine.

Confused? The bog-standard Fokker DVII that comes with the ICE edition of RoF, the plane which marked an important step-change in aero design in the closing stages of WWI is also too slow. Again, it has been modelled with an early engine for which reliable performance figures are available, not the more highly tuned production version which most aircraft used.

The 'clown wagon' of the whole game is, apparently, the Sopworth Pup and it's rate of turn and rate of climb though quite how these conclusions are justified is something of a mystery to me as the data just does not seem to exist in a reliable, useable form.

Certainly, in the QMB you can slaughter the oppostition in a Camel. Online, on a full-switch server it's not nearly so one sided, if at all as all those elements of genuine air combat come into play; height, speed, spotting your enemy early enough and then creeping up behind him to blow his brains through the instrument panel.

[fruitbat]

Reading your post Arthur i couldn't help chuckling at how a certain Hungarian is going to react if 777 model BoS planes like that......

[DD_Arthur]

Patch 1.029b is out. Basically a large hotfix.

http://riseofflight....pic.php?t=35251

and an interesting post from Loft, the series producer, on RoF's immediate future;

http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/default.aspx

[DD_Arthur]

Right, here we go. At long last version 1.030 has been released! You can read about how pleased they are with it here;

http://riseofflight.com/Blogs/default.aspx

and whats actually in it here;

http://riseofflight.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?t=36353

Now normally I'd be posting this almost immediately upon it's release but I must confess my attention has been diverted from gorgeous, pouting, jewel-like Rise of Flight by the new sparkling tart on the block that is CoD with the Team Fusion patch.

In case you're wondering, as far as I'm concerned the raddled old bag-lady of flight sims is DCS world and Flaming Friggin' Cliffs 3 which after being ignored for a month now refuses to fire up on my pc and as I have neither the time nor inclination to sort it out would seem to represent twenty-five quid down the tubes at this time .

Meanwhile, Team Dildoless, having released the read me for their next patch seem to be busy turning dear old IL2 1946 into the Stevie Nicks of combat flight sims with a discreet touch of Botox here, a new set of high heels and a rebuild of the nasal passages there. Good on 'em! . I note that at long last we will soon be awarded shared kills and the last guy to put a few rounds into the flaming wreckage will no longer be awarded the whole shebang. Going to be interesting for some of us, eh!?

Anyway, this brings us nicely round to stats and one of the big things the RoF team have been doing is a complete re-working of their global stats system. This strikes me as a bizarre waste of resources. Partly because I personally don't give two hoots about stats but also because I'm sure we're all aware the great majority of purchasers of these sims will never go online anyway. Indeed, until the release of this new version which has wiped out all the stats, for a couple of years the leader on the RoF stats board has been a guy called 242sqdn Wolf who flew on his own password protected server filled with 'bots which he proceeded to shoot down in droves thus farming his kills and making a mockery of the whole thing! Why bother?

With this release we also have two very interesting and important new 'planes from the mid-war period for the central powers.

The Halberstadt DII was the last fighter produced before the Jeermans went for twin Spanduas as standard armament with the all-conquering Albatross series and RoF's model is another beauty!

For the last year RoF's 3D modelling has been contracted to another outfit whilst the 777 team retain responsibilty for the flight models. These guys are really starting to get into their stride now after learning the ropes with the Felixstowe flying boat.

The level of detailing is fantastic!

The other new release is the Roland CIIa - the Walfisch. Another historically important mid-war two seater and a pretty funky looking design in it's own right. A kind of touring caravan with wings.

Rather compact and bijou, though I doubt many caravans have been equipped with a drum-fed machine gun!

Once again some fantastic detail work has gone into this thing.

Also, as a bonus a British version of the Nieuport N17 has been released. If you already own the standard version of the N17 then this is a welcome freebie, otherwise it's available from the store for rather less than the cost of a new model 'plane.

It's armed with an over-wing Lewis gun - I can't imagine what it must have been like to change the ammo pan on one of these things during combat, let alone level flight and a set of easy to read British instruments

as opposed to the French cockpit which seems to be stuffed full of Barometers, Astrolabes and sun dials!

So there we have it. This latest version has been a long time coming as the expanded team is also going flat out to produce BoS within the next eighteen months and they've also had to integrate the new Channel map into RoF's career mode. Evidently not an easy thing to do even for the Devs. RoF is an extremely complicated piece of software, representing well over one and a half million lines of code now!

Ever so slightly surprising given some of it's fundamental limitations. Enjoy!

Oh yeah, they've got a sale on over Easter and their next 'plane, the British FE2b is now available for pre-order.