Hello,

    First off, this should make a few of you feel much better:  I've just dropped a lot of hard-earned dosh and upgraded my old PC to an Alienware Area-51 (I'm sending my old one back to my parents... they always need more computers).  It's really lovely, though I don't know what to make of the case yet.  It's kind of funny looking.  It's the most top-notch gaming system you can buy (all I play are flight sims and chess), so I was fairly drooling with anticipation as to how CFS3 would do.  I figure that immediately I'm going to set everything to 5 on the detail settings, right?  Wrong.  It took almost two days of incessant tweaking of the Radeon 9800 Pro before I reached something approaching tolerable.  It's working pretty good now.  I get a decent 25-35fps over water and in good weather, and 20-25 over land and bad weather (this is with everything set to 5 except clouds, which are at 2).  But, as soon as I get over London, Paris, Calais, the Caen peninsula, Amsterdam, or Berlin, I drop down to about 10-15, with some stuttering.  Those places have lots of polygons.  What a fecked-out game this is!  It's too bad I love it so much.

    Which brings me to my only real remaining problem: the Anti-Aircraft Artillery.  I seem to recall in CFS2 that the damage from AAA was quite realistic, and cumulative, that is to say, the more AAA fire you took, the worse the damage progressively got.
     Why is this not the case in CFS3?  There is only one specific kind of damage you can ever obtain from AAA fire, and it's something I think you all know quite well: You are hit, the damage text mumbles something about elevator, aileron, wing, cable, and horz stolb(?) damage, you immediately develop a fuel and/or oil leak, oil pressure begins to rapidly drop, and after about 90-180 seconds your engine dies because oil pressure dropped down to nothing or you ran out of fuel.  That's it.  I've been playing this game off and on since last November, and I do not recall even one single variation on this damage theme.  Not once!  I know this problem can be resolved through the DP in the aircrafts' XDP files, because the GroundCrew Bf110s and the 1% aircraft all have remarkable damage profiles.  Does it also require profile modifications for all relevent munitions (88mm Flak, 40mm Bofors, 37mm Flak, and 90mm Flak rounds)?  I was attacking an allied airfield in the GroundCrew Bf110 R4 (a brilliant aircraft) and was hit by flak.  Naturally, I asssumed I would soon receive the standard fuel-leak/oil-leak result and have to bail.  Not so!  The right engine, and the right engine only, sputtered and coughed, smoked and spit, and after a few minutes, died.  But the left kept plugging away and I nursed the poor plane back to base.  I nearly wept with joy over this display of much-needed realism.
    I can't seem to make heads or tails of the damage profiles in CFS3... I know the basics, but it's the specifics that throw me (boolean strings, die rolls, etc.).  I know there is an Microsoft Word document that comes with the A&V SDK that supposedly explains XDP files, but it is, (as is usual for Microsoft) woefully inadequate.  It could barely be considered a lousy glossary.  In fact, it's an insult to all other lousy glossaries the world over.
    I'm flying my custom-painted Spit MkIXc (see photo) in a campaign right now, and this is the plane I'm tinkering with.  To see if it would help with the obnoxious "engine-death" flak damage, I went into my Spit's XDP file and slightly lowered the Probability percentage on engine_one, oil_reservoir, coolant_reservoir, and nose_structure.  Then when I flew, I received no damage from flak whatsoever!  Bollocks!  I circled over the 2-destoyer/1-cruiser ship formation at 2000 feet for over five minutes, flak bursting all around me, and I was never hit once, in any part of the plane.  I know the Kriegsmarine was better than that.  Back to the drawing board.  There's no tutorials of any kind available yet for damage profiles in CFS3?  I've scoured the internet, and have found nothing.

    One final gripe, and then I'm off.  I'm sure you've all noticed that enemy AA can be fired through hillsides, buildings, and even underground.  "As Real As It Gets", my arse.  I've tried for ages to create a more realistic field of fire for all the AAA in the game, but no luck.  This is what I've tried so far:

• I adjusted the "DownLimit" angle in the XDP files for all AA Artillery pieces and guns on ships to something approaching reality... I tried 15°.  No luck.  This had no effect whatsoever.  It's as if flak isn't really fired from the guns at all, but simply spawns randomly in mid air wherever your plane is located.  I even set the DownLimit to 45°, but still got hammered 50 feet off the ground!
• I checked in the SPAWNS folder to see if there was an XML or SPAWN file that directly references AA Fire, but there's nothing!
• Then I got really serious and dug deep inside the CFS3.exe file, and all the other executable files in the main CFS3 folder, but still found nothing.

     If anyone has any hints, suggestions, insults, or anything else regarding a solution, I've love to hear them.
    I really believe in this game.  I think that for all of it's flaws, it has big potential, and may become a great platform for many future projects.  Now, if I only knew enough XML and C++ to bring the sow up to speed!  However, sometimes I feel like a idiot spouse that keeps running back to their abusive husband or wife over and over and over and.....
    Anyway, if you've actually read this far... Thanks!  You're bluddy great.



My first view of England on the new PC.  Now, I've flown over Essex a few times, in real life, and I do not recall ever seeing this.


My lovely Spit (with Irish flag).  Spits make great torpedo bombers.

     Maverick.

     That's reasonable advice.  Thanks.  I have severe doubts though that I'll even be able to join a game... I've nearly hacked my installed version of CFS3 to death!  I cannot believe it still works.  I think I may have to do a new, "stock" installation in a completely seperate directory just to use for multiplayer purposes only! 
 
     Happy flying.

Try the website www.combatplanes.ca. ; They sell payware but also have some free downlaods that  restricts the angle of fire for the AA guns or so they say.  I have not had as much of a problem with the AA after installing their fix.  They also "beef up" the control cables, etc. on several aircraft to resist complete loss of control.

What's the speed of your new Alienware computer?

     Hallo Mathias!

     I thought you might reply!  Again, I love GC's Bf110s.  If only Willy Messerschmitt had had any idea you would be recreating his aircraft so well 70 years later!  What would he have thought?
     I certainly agree that the damage boxes for all of the stock planes are far too few, and far too small!  I swear that a bullet through the rudder of one of the fighters causes the engine to catch on fire!
     It appears to me as though damage boxes are tied directly to the m3d model?  That is, you can't really add more damage boxes within the XDP file?  Or can you?
     Anyway, I've been studying 1%'s damage profiles and I think I am beginning to sense a pattern, so hopefully I will be able to make some positive adjustments to my own stock aircraft.

     Bis spät.

Wow! Goose! That's the system I'm thinking about buying!  I'm surprised you still get stutters.  I have a Athlon 1.6GHz  and a GeForce Ti 4600 video card.  I set my aircraft and effects to "5," clouds to "3," and rest to "4" and do not get stutters at all.  I have my anisotropic filtering set to "2," antialiasing "off" and vertical sync "on by default."  One of the first improvements I ever saw was setting the filtering to "2" eliminated all those weird colors that are in the screen shot you posted.  I also am using Detonators 44.90 video card drivers (beta) that I got from Guru.

Quote:



Thanks for that. You've just explained why in my Mosquito both my engines cut out at the same time 5 minutes after bombing something.

     Holy cow Bob!  Mind the lightning!

     Thanks for the tips!  However, I had the same idea about my memory, and one of the first things I did when I noticed trouble was to turn my Swap File down to 2Mb (the minimum windows allows), to see if it would force the game to use my video memory and RAM... but it resulted in terrible performance.  Really peculiar.  Microsoft suggests setting your Swap File to 150% of your RAM... so in your case, that would be 768MB (It took me about 45 seconds to add that up in my head).  Every computer is different though, I suppose.  And I did check the RAM modules themselves too... it's four 512 cards, and they appeared to be all right.
     I shouldn't really complain at all... I've got it set to consistently good performance levels, with most of the graphics setting maxed out (all 5, clouds 3).  I just sort of expected perfection with such a top-notch system.  It's completely playable and enjoyable now... but it took a good amount of work to get it to this point.  I really think that the only reason we gripe so much, and obsess so much about CFS3 is because we like it so much.
     I'm sure if I played Doom III, Half-Life II, or Trinity, I would notice some pretty unbelievable performance!  I'll tell you what though, my version of Microsoft Chess for Windows 3.1 has never been faster!
     I don't think anything is going to be quite the performance hog that a good Flight-Sim is, as CFS3 has more than adequately proved.

      cheerio.