Combat Flight Simulator 3 - The Luftwaffe

By Andrew Herd (29 October 2002)

kay, having taken a quick trot through the features of CFS3 and some of the British planes, let's take a look at the problems, one of them being the Luftwaffe. The trouble with the Luftwaffe was that it was made up of young men who were no different from their Allied counterparts; pilots, navigators, bombardiers, gunners and engineers all of whom enjoyed a good time and few of whom had any particular desire to go to war. Yet once hostilities had started, they fought for their country to the best of their ability and history confirms that they were very good indeed.

The Luftwaffe's misfortune was to be thrown into action very early on, in the Battle of Britain, up against a numerically inferior enemy with very high morale and absolutely nothing to lose. RAF Fighter Command, assisted by Polish, Czech, Canadian, South African, Free French, Irish and American volunteers, broke the back of the Luftwaffe by killing its most experienced crews; even those who survived being shot down usually ended up being taken prisoner, a loss from which the service never really recovered.

By 1943, the period when CFS3 is set, the Luftwaffe was fighting on several fronts: across the English channel, where the Allied war effort was ramping up for the invasion; in North Africa; and in Russia, in a campaign that haemorrhaged the German war machine to death. I have often wondered if any other country could have sustained the effort to fight on so many fronts at once; the fact that Germany managed to keep all the balls in the air is a tribute to its logistical system.

By contrast, Microsoft's system seems to have slipped up a little with the CFS3 release, because in addition to the usual problem of retailers lacking adequate, or indeed, any stock, I have also had reports from people who called MS support early on and were told that the help line people themselves didn't have the shrinkwrap yet. If this is correct, it is something that needs addressing in the future, because as you will already have guessed from reading my previous reviews, CFS3 has its share of problems.

Microsoft quotes the minimum system spec for the game as a Windows OS, Pentium III 450 MHz, 64 Mb of ram (128 Mb for Windows XP), a 16 Mb 3D accelerated graphics card, and 1 Gb of available disk space. This is in line with the pre-release advice that CFS3 would run on much the same specs as FS2002. Now I don't know who is fooling who here, but I would not in my wildest dreams try running FS2002 on the minimum spec machine that Microsoft suggests and all my experience of CFS3 tells me that it is no different. In fact, judging from the range of effects on offer, logic says it will require a higher hardware spec than FS2002 to really shine.

Needless to say, the specification does not lie: you probably can run CFS3 on a 450 MHz PIII with a TNT2... at about one fps, with the sliders dragged all the way to the left. You can also dive off the top of a tall ladder into a bucket of boiling fat and get away with it, but that isn't to say it is an enjoyable experience. In my own opinion, it is time that developers - and Microsoft isn't the only offender here - got real and started issuing specs that bore at least some relationship to reality. Take it from me, if you have a 450 MHz machine, you are better off sticking with CFS2, rather than going through the pain of spending money on a sim that will only run if you cripple 90% of the features that you wanted it for in the first place.

My first cut minimum spec for CFS3 is not far off the one I would quote for FS2002: a 1 Ghz Pentium, with 256 Mb of RAM and a 32 Mb GeForce 3. I can run the game on that class of system without too many problems, as long as I don't think too much about what it looks like on my usual PC. To get the package running with anything like its full feature set, you will need a 1.5 Ghz PIV with 256 Mb RAM and a 64 Mb GeForce 4 Mx; and I have to run it with all the sliders on 4 on a 1.7 Ghz PIV, with 512 Mb RAM and a 128 Mb GeForce 4 Ti200. It does a real disservice to quote lower specs than these, because although you can run CFS3 on lower specced PCs, it doesn't look terribly good and it stutters badly.

Why is the game so demanding on hardware? Well, just look at the screen shots and you will realise why. There is no way you can display all that transparency, reflective textures, animation, fogging, multilayered explosions and who knows what else, without using some serious grunt to push it onto the screen and keep it all moving. And since the name of the game in combat sims is fluidity, any player who sits down in front of a view that only moves in jerks is going to be mightily displeased.

As you might expect with a Microsoft sim, there is another price to be paid for all this sophistication and that is in compatibility with video cards. I am not going to speculate on the reasons why, but Microsoft flight simulations seem to run better on nVidia graphics chipsets than anyone else's and all sorts of problems occur with other cards. Part of this may well be due to the way Gmax objects pipe straight into DirectX and I imagine that slightly incompatibilities with drivers could throw up huge problems in this area, as could running an old DirectX version and the wind direction last Saturday. The strange thing is that other manufacturers' games don't seem to have this problem, and as far as I know, Quake III runs as well on the latest Radeon as it does on anything nVidia ever did. But if you want to run Microsoft flight sims, my take on the situation is that you need an nVidia card unless you are feeling particularly lucky. Don't ask me if this has anything to do with the choice of graphics chip supplier for X-box, I simply couldn't say.

Even with an nVidia card, it isn't all plain sailing; the almost infinite combination of processors, operating systems and OEM cards making it impossible to second guess what will work and what will not. That being said, most users seem to be getting the game up and running without any problems, but the forums are full of howls of anguish from folk who can't - though anyone who gets a game like CFS3 up and running straight out the box isn't likely to post a message saying, "Hey, guys, it works fine here, I have nothing to report." But just as with FS2002 there have been many tales of grief and people have sent email reporting everything from complete system crashes to intermittent screen corruption. I got my copy running with the nVidia reference driver 6.13.10.4072, although I would warn this is a beta and may well be superceded by the time you read this. I had my share of trouble with screen corruptions until I used the excellent freeware RivaTuner utility to switch off antialiasing on the card after which everything ran fine at 1280 x 1024, although I couldn't get away with maxing all the sliders. If you are having problems, try the Microsoft CFS3 insider web site for their graphics troubleshooter.

Even so, CFS3 still generates its share of bugs and funnies. For example, on the anti-shipping missions, it isn't uncommon to come across freighters at 15,000 feet in warp mode and it is as scary as hell dodging around them. The idea of ploughing through a ship at high altitude in a plane full of live ammunition simply doesn't bear thinking about. Another problem is that not all the ships have wakes, which makes a difference on the torpedo missions.

Hold on, did you say torpedoes?

Well, yes, I did, actually. I think CFS3 does torpedoes really well. If you choose the German bomber campaign and run one of the early anti-shipping missions, you will find yourself staggering off the runway in a heavily-loaded Ju88 and heading out to sea. The Ju is one of my favorite planes in CFS3, not least because it is murder to fly when it is fully loaded, with huge trim changes that made me sweat some on takeoff. On top of that, it has dive brakes and you get to swap around the various crew positions so you can take a crack at incoming fighters - just don't expect to hit any, though it is fun trying. But the torpedoes are the best bit, because although they are spectacular when they hit, they aren't that easy to use and I had to fly about five missions before I managed to hit anything at all. Even when you miss, you get to watch the tracks, which is how I eventually worked out what tactics were needed for this highly specialised form of warfare. It pays to make a medium level pass over the convoy so you can work out which way the ships are going by watching the wakes (assuming the no-wake bug doesn't get you) and then come back at low level and drop your fish. Only experience will tell you how near you have to get to be sure of a hit, but I assure you it is closer than you would wish, as most WW2 torpedo drops were made at less than 700 yards and below a hundred feet.

The addition of torpedoes opens up some fantastic opportunities and if someone doesn't come up with a "Sink the Bismarck" add-on for CFS3, I will be sorely disappointed. The same add-on might well include the suicidal attack that Flying Officer Kenneth Campbell and his Bristol Beaufort crew made on the Gneisenau at Brest, making a run in over three flak ships at mast height, dropping their torpedo when they were staring down the barrels of a battleship, before being slaughtered by AA fire as they made the steep turn necessary to avoid the hill behind the harbor. For this Campbell was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross and his observer, Sgt. J.P. Scott, the Distinguished Flying Medal; they launched their lone attack after the remainder of their flight failed to find the target and the escort failed to turn up. That is heroism.

There is a huge issue with CFS3 which has caused a crisis of confidence among existing users. Unlike Flight Simulator, the development of which has been a continuous path of incremental building from the first wireframe Apple II/TRS-80 version to the game it is today, Combat Flight Simulator has taken a very different route. The Sopwith Camel has been present in every version of Flight Simulator I can recall, but Combat FS changes almost beyond recognition with every new release, a complete change of planes being the norm. With a new release of FS, we know more or less what to expect - more and better simulation of flight, with a couple of additional aircraft and improvements to all the existing ones. With CFS, new versions seem to be designed as if their predecessor had never existed. Many users find this extremely trying and I have lost count of the emails I have had from folk who are disappointed that their favorite feature has not made it through the upgrade path. On the other hand, newcomers can't understand what the fuss is about, and the fact that CFS3 will undoubtedly drag in huge numbers of new gamers will make it a sales success, even if it is at the cost of some of the existing user base.

Why should the CFS3 upgrade philosophy be so different to FS? Take it from me, there is no point asking Microsoft that question. From what little I know, they take the attitude that CFS is no different to Quake and that users don't have the vote. They make a product with the aim of shifting as many boxes as possible and if selling into a bigger market means making changes that upset everyone who ever contributed to a CFS forum, they will go ahead and do just that, on the basis that the loudest combined shout the users can make is a mere whisper in their scheme of things. No, I do not like it either, but short of hoping that somewhere on the Microsoft campus, a person in a position of authority is reading this and sheds a tear, there is nothing I can do about it. Those who know me will assert that I do not waste my energy on lost causes.

I have already mentioned one glaring problem with CFS3, which is the brutal simplification of the cockpits compared to Flight Simulator. Yes, it is great being able to pan around them and they look wonderful, but CFS3 has taken its cue from IL2 Sturmovik and you can look, but you can't touch. I am sure that the eminence gris who specified the game took the view that if you wanted cockpits with every knob and dial working, there was already a program that did that - FS2002. CFS3 is about planes, trains and armaments and anyone who wishes otherwise need not spend money on the shrinkwrap. Yes, it annoys me too, but neither you nor I can do anything about it.

In the final analysis, whether CFS3 is a good or a bad game boils down to your expectations of it. Looking back, very few versions of Flight Simulator have been received with unstinted praise - for a start, someone's favorite airplane or panel always failed to work, and for a long time, the new versions wouldn't run on the kind of hardware people like you and I could afford. It is forgotten now, but for a long time Microsoft designed FS to run only on leading edge PCs, FS2000 being a case in point. Look on the bright side - at least CFS3 doesn't demand a 2.5 Ghz PIV and a 128 Mb GeForce Ti600.

Forget I said that, Mr. Gates. Really, I didn't mean it.

CFS3 is not FS2002 with guns, which is what a lot of people were expecting. The change of course in the new version means it has somewhat different hardware requirements, one of them being a reasonably hot graphics card, whereas FS2002 runs happily with a 32 Mb GeForce 3. This alone differentiates it from its parent sim. As a result, CFS3 is gorgeous to look at - it is hardly possible to take a bad screen shot - and it majors on special effects, but it pays more homage to the gaming world than to its heritage as a simulator. If CFS3 was a film, the question I would ask is this: are we looking at Pearl Harbor here, or Das Boot?

Only you can decide that. There were some good bits in Pearl - mostly the flying, I recall.

PS. Call me slow, but I finally worked out how to select different types of target using the Enemy Indicator. You press T. D'oh!

Other CFS3 Review Parts

Combat Flight Simulator 3 Mosquito

Combat Flight Simulator 3 Spitfire

Combat Flight Simulator 3 Preview Part 1

Message Forum