I thought I'd start a 1917 Campaign flying Spads for 84 Esc. While the flying is brilliant, I'm really struggling to feel like a WW1 fighter pilot... Here's some of the problems I've had in the first 10 missions

1. Your given no information about your squadron. Every mission starts with you flying with four anonymous pilots from your squadron. It's hard to feel any connection as you know nothing about them; Especially when their killed time after time but keep reappearing for the next mission.
2. Your wingmen fly identical aircraft with no individual markings.
3. We always fly in a group of five. The German single seaters fly in groups of two so its always a race to see if you can bag one before your squadron mates clean them all up.
4. The limited aircraft set really detracts. Almost all enemy single seaters are Albatros's, while all two seaters are DFW's.
5. Twice I've shot down Fokker D.VII's in a 1917 campaign... With only five aircraft, surely they can get their time periods right!
6. My squadron mates make no effort to maneuver against two seaters, instead they just charge in from directly behind through the rear gunners fire. Time after time their shot down but your faced with no other option but to charge with them or you won't have a chance to get a shot off.
7. Rain really really effects you ability to hit the enemy. It has no effect on two seater gunners making tackling them in bad weather a nightmare.
8. Your map won't stay locked where you left it. Every time you open it, you need to move and zoom to get back to where you are. This is a major frustration when trying to map read your way home.
9. Setups for you aircraft have to be redone at the start of each mission, unlike IL2 which defaults to the last setup you used.
10. During a mission to cover French tanks attacking German guns, the two forces were on the wrong sides. The French tanks attacked from the German trenches against German guns sheltering in the French lines... It was really bad...
11. You fly two or three missions a day. I was a double ace with two medals by the end of the second day making the campaign hard to take seriously. As I only have a few hours a day to 'fly', I'm getting two days worth of campaign time for every three days real time! Its going to take 9 months real time to finish a average 6 month flying tour!
12. The debrief screen is confusing and tells you little. It needs a lot of work...
13. You don't get told at the end of a mission if you were awarded a medal for it. The only way to find out is to go to the 'Awards' page and see if there's a new medal there.

I think Neoqb has some work to do...

Spoon

I have to agree. I, too, am seeing DVIIs in 1917 and credibility goes right out the window.

The campaign missions generally are fun and challenging to fly. As individual missions they're quite good.

But there really is no "historical immersion": No context, no sense of what enemy squadrons you are facing. No squadron to be a part of. No squadron mates to fly with.

For all of the many who keep comparing and contrasting ROF to Il2 (which I flew for many years), I should point out the IL2 non-dynamic, totally linear campaigns were pretty lame.

If you want a bench mark, look to Falcon 4.0, the best and most dynamic campaigns anywhere.

Overall, I'm very pleased with ROF (the physics and FMs are awesome!) and I understand it is a work in progress.

But it is flunking History so far.

This is an area that will require some serious work.

Especially since on line play appears a long way off. And when it arrives, I suspect it will become, like IL2, centered on dogfight arenas.

The history buffs among us would appreciate some real historical campaigns.

ttt

Hello,
I would definitley prefer a historical correct flight sim with a good immersive career, all for single play. But RoF was made for online fighting, and it has been said numerous times that single play and the career mode are lame in RoF - yet.

I certainly hope this will get a thorough overhaul .. i know it is not easy to implement even the major battles and all kinds of incidents in a sim, especially if you want to make money lol - because you would need not only technical know-alls plane-wise, but historians, and this will blow any time frame and budget.
If you are in for historical accuracy, WW1 immersion and single play, i would still recommend "Over Flanders Fields" phase3 - but let's see how RoF moves on.

Greetings,
Catfish

If they get a mission builder manual going, there should be campaigns and content coming from the community, so the manual is really of the highest importance, too bad they haven't looked into that so far. Neoqb should have been far more on the ball when it comes to documentation.

The campaign missions generally are fun and challenging to fly. As individual missions they're quite good.

But there really is no "historical immersion": No context, no sense of what enemy squadrons you are facing. No squadron to be a part of. No squadron mates to fly with.


Nailed it. This sim does the basics right... the FM, DM, physics, graphics... it is an absolute blast to fly. But it does need a bit more work on its historical immersion. The sim is still growing and evolving so I have high hopes this will be addressed.

WvB

I know you'll be surprised to hear this, but i agree 110% with you on this one. The work in progress model would be fine if there was a way to start delegating work to the hobbyists and the community from the get go.

Getting the bare essential ground work laid out is all fine and dandy, but it requires an infrastructure that allows some decentralized development to occur, otherwise it can't really pick up the pace fast enough. Point by point development where you have to ask the developer what to do every step of the way doesn't ease the strain on him. If on the other hand people could start adding and improving things on their own and submit it for review and possible inclusion in the next patch, it would really untie their hands. For this to happen though, there must be a way for the 3rd party designer to test the new content as he makes it.
Than in turn requires the ability to run the game in an incarnation that differs from the official "latest mandatory version", which is not possible due to the way the online auto-updater works, leading back to the usual can of worms. Of course the tester team probably runs different versions as they are tuned before release, but that "version choosing" ability doesn't extend to the rest of the community so there's no way for someone to simply start doing 3rd party work, it's still a centralized process.

I'm not talking about far fetched stuff like giving out the source code, but some built-in support and documentation for a user to add content would help them a lot at this point. They could follow Oleg's system, a lot of the add-on aircraft, maps and ground objects were made by the community and submitted to his team for testing and evaluation. The developers still get the final say on whether the add-on content is good enough to be included in the sim, they still get to decide if it's freeware or payware, plus they get some free time to focus on bug fixing instead of coding everything from scratch themselves, it's a win-win situation really.

From previous information coming from the developer team it looks like they had something like this in mind. There's only one conflict here...what do you do if the community starts making add-on content that you intent to sell?
I get the feeling the reason we don't see any provision for third party content integration at this point is probably them getting cornered by their publisher in Russia in regards to the marketing model, as most of the controversial issues started appearing when the product and company names changed. Up to that point it was looking more like we would be getting something that would follow the path successfully trodden by IL2, albeit with a new engine and a different setting to play around in. It's after the companies merged that all the new ideas were aired and the whole controversy started.

The gennadich guys were members of the 3rd party community for IL2. I'm sure they are familiar with the entire process and how much extra sales for the base product the lure of a mix of free and payware 3rd party add-ons generates. This has also happened with the mods after the initial controversy, people who had stopped bothering with IL2 a few years ago bought the all-inclusive IL2 1946 DVD just because of all the extra content. I'm also sure they have taken note of how Oleg's team plans to support modding from the get go in their next sim.

The only reason i would go with the current model if i was in the shoes of the original gennadich team, would be if i desperately needed some cash flow to finish the project and an investor came in and required of me to adopt it in exchange for funding.
Of course that last point is pure speculation on my part, but that's the first reason that jumps to mind as to why an emerging flight sim developer, comprised mostly of enthusiasts and gamers themselves with experience in the 3rd party scene, wouldn't want to delegate some work and help kickstart their project into motion.

Don't take this in a negative way. Cast away preconceived notions (if any exist) about what kind of agenda i might or might not have, even better, pretend it's someone else that's posting this and you'll see it's simply meant as food for thought
Maybe it would pay off in the long run if someone with a bit of reach to Neoqb could persuade them to share their opinions on this, namely the intended scope of involvement for 3rd party development into the title.

Well, at the risk of drawing some flames and brickbats, Over Flanders Fields (and, yes, I fly both) has historical accuracy that is truly amazing. ROF, with its far better engine and physics really is missing the boat if it doesn't move in that direction.

At the moment, OFF has it all over ROF in terms of historical accuracy (squadrons on the right airfields and changing fields when they actually did, the front moving when it did in real life, historically accurate weather for each day, accurate skins for every squadron and every ace, historically correct rosters that change as they did historically: Pretty great stuff!).

OFF, however, is stuck with the ancient CFS3 engine, which never was much good to start with. And you can't buy both OFF and CFS3 as a package (you need both) and the developers refuse to bundle the two.

OFF ain't the "Total CFS3 Makeover" it claims to be, sales have been disappointing and that's probably why they have a fire sale going on right now.

But they certainly got the history part dead solid perfect. And ROF doesn't. At least not yet.

What I'm seeing on these ROF boards are lot of familiar IL2 call signs (I burned out on IL2 three or four years ago and moved on to Steel Beasts Pro, a really accurate tank sim).

My recollection of the IL2 community (and I admit this is painting with a very broad brush and may be very unfair to some) was a great interest in the accuracy of the aircraft and little or no interest in the historical accuracy of the missions and campaigns.

The bright spots were a few IL2 modders who wrote great coop missions with great attention to historical battles.

Hangar, in particular, comes to mind. He wrote very entertaining and very accurate third party campaigns. There were a few others whose names I can't recall (senior moment). Sadly for the community, he (like I) burned out after several years and moved on to other pursuits.

The good part about IL2 was that there was, pretty much, something for everybody: Dog fights, Coops, on line, campaigns (the stock ones were awful and very inaccurate historically) and community-written single missions off line.

A very full menu no matter what your taste.

I'm hoping that ROF moves towards that diversity and I agree that opening it to modders (perhaps requiring approval of what they produce by the developers) would speed that along.

It is a great beginning. Let's see where it goes!

Again, I'm a history buff. I resent seeing DVIIs in 1917 and Noop 17s in 1918. It's a major immersion killer.

If ROF provides that history to the degree OFF does, I'll stick around and keep buying their add-ons. If not...Hasta La Vista, Baby!

At the moment, I'm very hopeful for ROF's future and very glad I bought it!

ttt

Well, that does it for me. I've read enough about RoF now to know it is not the game for me. Maybe in a year when/if it is a decent game I will re-consider, that's if it is still available for sale then. Looks like ordering a copy of OFF is in my future.

No reason for flaming TTTiger, you're just noting ROF's design approach.

OFF was never a WWI sim, it's limited to being built onto CFS3, an old and less than popular flight sim engine, with its content coming from years of hard work by modders.

Apparently OFF sales have been less than stellar, it certainly needs a real advertising budget, and it's bargain-pricing now is an good indication of its true market value. I don't think the OFF model would have been a serious one for any commercial developer to consider these days, other than to consider supporting 3rd-party content, which in regards to ROF has already been expressed. Problem is, I don't see too many 3D modelers able to sustain the level of work required for inclusion into a retail product like ROF, maybe that will change through their cooperative profit offering though.

I disagree, FR. Or maybe we're saying the same thing with a different emphasis

OFF is a WWI aviation history sim project with amazing fidelity. And a lame engine.

ROF (so far) is a WWI airplane sim with very little historical fidelity. And a great engine.

If "commercial" means "dumb it down so it sells to the Great Unwashed who flunked high school history and only want to dogfight," I guess ROF qualifies. At least at the moment.

My point was (is) that I hope the ROF developers use the OFF historical aspects as a model and not only emulate OFF but go beyond it in historical accuracy..

Add OFF's history to ROF's engine and it could be spectacular.

I'm waiting hopefully.

S!

ttt