Over Flanders Fields Phase 3: Between Heaven and Hell Page 6

By SimHQ on January 19, 2009 in _air12, hide

Jens: Are there any areas that we haven’t touched upon yet that you would like to mention?

Mark: Yes. The new installer very slick and smooth, we hope it will aid a lot of people to get up and running quicker. If you have a recent CFS3 (3.1 on CD / DVD already) the installer can use it even without you installing CFS3 first — great stuff from the team. Many new features really add to the experience now — if you think Phase 2 was immersing, you will drown in Phase 3.

Jens: If one of our readers hasn’t got a copy of CFS3, I’d suggest getting it from GoGamer or some other retail outlet. Do you have any additional suggestions for other ideas for getting a copy of CFS3?

Mark: Plenty of suppliers have now re-issued CFS3. In many countries (but not the UK yet) you can order a new Ubisoft distributed version of CFS3 that comes on DVD.

Jens: What are the recommended system specs?

Mark: As a general rule if you could run Phase 2 well then Phase 3 should run OK. But of course here we are 18 months on and Phase 3 can use higher resolutions scenery and skins so to get the best out of it I’d recommended something a little meatier if your old PC was struggling.

A good speed CPU is more important than multiple cores for OFF. To see OFF in all its glory recommended I’d say 3.0 GHz CPU. I run a fairly inexpensive Intel 8400 Dual Core 3GHz (clocked to 3.7 GHz) and together with a NVIDIA GTX 280 I can fly with all details on max, with textures in the new Ultra high resolution mode we have, and it runs fantastically.

Given that you can see many 100’s of aircraft all with various textures for Aces and squadrons in the air all at once, Graphic card (GPU) texture memory is very important too. So one card with 768MB or 1GB of video ram is preferred to 2 X 512MB cards in SLI or Crossfire.

Although it runs on less, you’d need at least an NVIDIA 8800 GT or higher (don’t go for the cheaper 8600’s). Or one of the latest range of ATI cards with a good size of video memory which will help a lot.

OS shouldn’t matter too much now. Testing has been done on XP and Vista 32- and 64-bit. Also we recently developed a fix for NaturalPoint’s TrackIR to finally work in Vista with OFF and made it available to NaturalPoint to release for free for OFF and CFS3 users — rather than keep that exclusively for OFF.

Jens: Finally, thank you very much for taking the time out to talk with us about your work, I can’t wait to see the fruits of your hard work, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Mark: No problem Jens! Now it is the early hours of the morning again time for bed already.