Just started my first campaign (Jasta 1 in a DIII). In my first mission I was about 6 miles into the mission when my wingman, who had been swinging from my left side to my right side, collided with me (death all around). Started a new campaign (same thing) and this time the fine chap let me travel about 20 miles before smashing into me (again death all around). And I thought it was the enemy that was going to be tough!!!

I left “formation spacing” at the default level in WorkShop which is “tight”. Can anyone share their experiences with other planes or settings – obviously not everyone is experiencing this.

Well, flying for British Se5a squadron, my wingman scared me a few times because he made some extremely near passes by me but fortunally we never collided since my wingman always managed to avoid me.

It sounds like you have "Special" wingmen.
Just kidding!!! Merry Christmas!!!

I've read threads where setting formation
spacing further apart solved this problem.

It has happened to me. Seems setting less than tight will solve it. maybe it's the wingman pilot who is "tight"

This has also happened to me quite a bit and it tended to happen more so whenever i was flying straight and level.I also tried all the different formation settings but it made no difference.
I have now found that if i also "weave" like the wingmen but much more gentily helps a lot.
Another thing i do is,when i see the wingman starting to weave/drift,i use the "split" command(s key) but i dont know if this actually does help or not but by using this with the weaving,i have got away with no collisions in the last few days.
Hope this helps in some way.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all.


Kemal.

Formation keeping was always pretty bad in CFS3 but in OFF the formation flying makes the original look like the Red Arrows! Credit to the OFF team for giving options but the WW1 low-powered planes still seem especially bad at this no matter the setting. In sims like EAW it looks like the AI used a special formation flying "follow the leader" routine while in CFS3 they seem to use individual FM routines, which would be superior if it worked, but it doesn't.

So in OFF we get wide formations, a lot of weaving about, mid-airs, an inability to cope with anything but the very gentlest changes of altitude or direction with a tediously slow response to course changes by the leader, and VERY slow regaining of formation once lost.

I do hope this can be improved somehow or other. As it is now, it would suit passasbly well the 1914-15 period when kites were especially slow and formation flying was in its infancy, but it's very counter-immersive for 1917.

any definitive fix to this yet?

how do you set formation spacing wider?

if you can call it a formation? these guys are just weaving all over the sky within 1km of me. get halfway to waypoint 3 on my first campaign mission and wham - one flies into me. discouraging to say the least after 20 minutes in the air...

Hi Steel, in the main OFF interface there's a button labelled "Workshop", the formation spacing settings are in there. I'm using medium at present, combined with large flight setting so I get missions with 4-5 of us not 2-3.

For some reason the formation flying seems not as bad now, maybe I'm just getting used to it. Very impresssive to look out to the left and see your fellow SE5s stepped up in a ragged line abreast. They still take a long time to get there, or regain posn if I have to orbit, so still not good, but maybe I'm now instinctively compensating with gentle course or height changes and throttling back or weaving to help them catch up. Not unrealistic, of course, and it does seem to help. I'd be content if ONLY they didn't get so badly out of formation when I orbit.

I think it would help a lot if there was some way of getting the AI to follow any leader course changes more quickly, right now there seems to be a built-in lag of 1-3 seconds, which is just enough to b***s up the formation pretty thoroughly. Conversely, a quicker response might be just enough to preserve it.

BTW, on the SimOuthouse forum, RalphB suggested in the pilotconstants.xml file, hand-editing with Notepad to change the values for AI wingman skill and accuracy to 3 (don't know if this is the max or if higher is better) and I've done this for OFF and stock CFS3, hard to say what difference it makes. Haven't had a collission since.

Thx Ivor... will give that a try as soon as i can.