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Red Baron 3D vs. Flying Corps Gold
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Introduction
Sound effects are very detailed, functional and atmospheric in both games. Both also feature appropriate music which in most cases can be turned off. Flying Corps Gold’s sounds are said to feature recordings of the actual guns and engines represented in the game. Sound effects not found in Red Baron 3D include the sounds of air buffeting the airplane and the airframe creaking in certain maneuvers, the whine of the engine over-revving in a dive, and the plane plowing up dirt in a rough landing. An interesting use of in-game music features themes for different kinds of action that creep in as events occur during play. I found that the volume levels in this game were a bit lower than my other programs - one may want to adjust the system or speaker volume up to compensate. Sounds unique to Red Baron 3D include the air raid sirens, church bells, and of course rockets and the “bailing out yell,” since these are events unique to Red Baron 3D. On a Large installation, midi music plays during the many stages of loading the multi-player program. Ways to stop this include clicking on the desktop outside the loading windows (which must be done every time a loading window comes up), or finding and deleting the midi file. Flying Corps Gold You would hear an explosion at this point.
The focus of these games is of course dogfighting. Pilots compete using tactics, flying skills, and the different strengths of their airplanes. Therefore the flight models (the calculations and data used to simulate the flight of the planes) are one of these games’ most important elements. In World War One more pilots, all professionally-trained hand-picked men, died from flying the dangerously difficult planes in training and regular operations than died in combat. A true simulation of such difficult planes would be an extremely difficult game and probably an unpleasant experience for most players. The designers realized this and so both games offer a wide range of options for making the planes easier and simpler to fly, while still trying to preserve the historical quirks and differences between the planes. This is a difficult and very complicated task, and any solution will of course be a compromise between realism and playability. Problems to be avoided include presenting planes that turn out to be too good or too bad for interesting play balance, and presenting gross errors in terms of the historical relative abilities of the planes. Red Baron 3D now offers three different sets of flight models with different measures of easiness versus realism. Players also independently select whether torque and G-force effects will occur, as well as seven other non-flight game options such as player invulnerability, unlimited ammunition, and glare from the sun. Red Baron 3D’s various aircraft are quite detailed and distinct, with interesting and very significant differences in their abilities based on their historical qualities. The game does a nice job of modeling damage to the planes as well, which appears visually and affects the way the planes fly. Several parts of a plane can be damaged or even lost and the plane may still be able to struggle along. Oil leaks lead to engine overheating and eventually engine fires, which can be countered by turning off the engine and even diving to cool the engine and extinguish flames. Red Baron 3D An Albatros D.III struggles with a Sopwith Triplane. Red Baron II’s flight models have always had some important inaccuracies and imbalances. Patches have corrected many of these and the Red Baron 3D upgrade includes some more improvements. Unfortunately problems remain such as the Albatros D.Va: Accurately described as “not a major improvement on the Albatros D.III” by Red Baron’s manual, in the game it’s in fact much worse than the game’s D.III, so bad as to be hopeless against any of the fighters it must meet. In Red Baron 3D, some planes are quirky, limited and difficult to maneuver, while others are quite capable and easy to fly, even in contradiction to what the manual says about them. However, many of the particular combinations of planes are more historical, balanced and interesting, such as the Nieuport 11 & 17, and Spad VII versus the Halberstadt D.II and Albatros D.II and D.III, or the Fokker Dr.I versus the Spad XIII. On occasion I have doubted the authenticity of Red Baron 3D’s physics, as well. In particular, bullets seem to often cause a target plane to immediately lose most or all of its airspeed, causing them to tumble helplessly to the ground. Even a very large bomber can frequently be sent into a fatal yawing spin by just a few bullet hits, which I would think impossible unless perhaps this represents the snapping of control lines, but I doubt that. In some cases it also seems strangely difficult to recover airspeed. Moreover, even with all the flight model details turned on, the flight feels more like a basic flight simulator program than a real airplane, especially in one of the easier planes - keep enough speed and you can easily and smoothly point it with the joystick without much thought or skill required. Flying Corps Gold’s planes feel more like real planes flying through real air. They’re less stable and react more severely to controls and blunders. Skill permits some quick maneuvers but mistakes quickly result in stalls and spins of various kinds. Flying Corps’s flight models are more complicated and accurate, and therefore more interesting and more challenging to fly. The manual details each plane’s strengths and weaknesses along with tips on flying and tactics for each plane, and the game faithfully models these details. Flying Corps Gold A Spad closes in for the kill on a Fokker triplane. Flying Corps Gold’s flight model complexity and difficulty can be adjusted (even during flight) by selecting up to twelve optional factors on or off: torque effects, wind, gyroscopic effects, slipstream effects, auto-coordinated rudder, spinning, power boost, spinning compass, blackouts, tail heaviness, bomb weight and drag, and stick stiffness. Thirteen other options relate to combat but not the flight model, such as how accurately you need to aim to hit, sun glare, whether your machine guns will jam or run out of ammo, and whether your plane can be damaged by bullets or even by hitting the ground. Another handy cheat option is the U key, which will immediately move you up 500 feet. The manual has some good tips on how to set these various options depending on the style of play you want. Damage to aircraft is detailed and well done, and can include missing parts that may or may not be survivable. Red Baron 3D has somewhat more detailed and varied plane damage, but Flying Corps Gold doesn’t have the suspicious spins and stalls from bullet hits. Flying Corps Gold An Albatros suffering serious wing damage! Each game has some elements not found in the other. For example, Red Baron 3D includes airplane-mounted rockets and crewmen jumping out (without parachutes). Flying Corps Gold includes fights between moving ground units, although these aren’t nearly as realistic as the air combat - the rate of fire of artillery is extremely high. Anti-aircraft cannon harass airplanes in both games with different effects. In Red Baron 3D there are fewer guns that send up individual shots that you can see arcing upwards - these cause all computer-guided planes to dodge and sway back and forth on their course, and once in a blue moon a plane will be hit for disastrous effect. In Flying Corps Gold, whole batteries of anti-aircraft cannon fire all together in barrages that tend to explode fairly close to their targets, although I’ve never seen one actually hit. What they do do is bump all nearby planes around with air turbulence. This is an interesting effect and realistic except perhaps for being more accurate and heavy than was historically the case, yet at the same time ineffectual at actually causing damage. In addition to machine guns, Flying Corps Gold also has a third type of anti-aircraft gun that fires only at close range with a visible, fairly accurate but somewhat slow projectile that isn’t particularly destructive when it hits. Red Baron 3D Spads dive on German trenches - ground machine guns shoot back.
Other combat differences between the two games include: Table of included airplanes: Flyable planes appear in bold. Computer-flown planes appear in italics.
Perhaps the most unrealistic aspect of first-person perspective 3D computer games is the need to see the world through a fixed 2D screen. It’s a bit like wearing a helmet with a narrow viewslit, and having to use hand controls to move one’s head. There’s no binocular depth perception, and most human eyes have much better resolution than the best computer monitors. Real pilots can also feel their plane change direction, and gravity helps them feel which way the ground lies. World War One pilots could even feel their airspeed on their faces! Meanwhile, perhaps the most important attribute of a successful combat pilot is his/her situational awareness - the ability to know what’s going on in all directions at all times. Therefore, another critical element of combat flight simulators is their solution to this problem. Red Baron 3D offers several aids to keeping track of what’s going on. Fixed views in all directions are available with a key-press or shift-key-press, and in recent upgrades these cover almost all fields of view. Four fixed views are also available without the keyboard if your joystick has a working “coolie hat.” One can also switch to an outside view of all nearby planes and landmarks. The keyboard “padlock” target selection system is very helpful but both limited and unrealistically capable. The limit is in that only the nearest object in a certain category can be selected with a single key-press, meaning that to lock onto a particular plane, one has to repeatedly press the key for that category of object, waiting while the view turns to center on each item in turn. That’s bad news in a dogfight with several enemies! Fortunately the categories include enemy planes, the AI’s opinion of the most threatening enemy plane, and the AI’s opinion of your best dogfight target. Once selected, the view (from inside or outside your own plane) will point so as to center the “padlocked” object in your view. This makes it possible to keep track of a particular plane even when your relative positions change rapidly. By padlocking your enemy in a dogfight and switching to an external view of your own plane, both planes can be kept in view, which (after a little practice) can make it much easier to engage in a swirling turning battle. You can’t expect to hit anything from an external view of your own plane however, so you must switch back to a cockpit view when you achieve a firing position. Unfortunately the program always forgets which plane you had padlocked at that point, requiring another key-press, and if another plane is for some reason now the AI’s best idea of a dogfight target, you may lose your target in the confusion. However the worst danger is that while using the padlock view you may lose track your own plane’s flight angle and crash! This is probably my leading cause of death in Red Baron 3D. Updates added an optional attitude indicator (two small dials) that remains in the upper-right corner of the screen, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to get used to using it effectively. The padlock system is somewhat unrealistic in that it allows determination of friendly versus enemy planes at fairly long range, but perhaps this is fair compensation for the low screen resolution compared to a human eye. It also allows you to track objects that your pilot couldn’t actually see through his own airplane, but again this compensates for the player’s other sensory handicaps such as the inability to move in the seat. Red Baron 3D The external view feature shows us that distant speck is a German recon plane. Flying Corps Gold’s padlock system is very similar. Instead of offering “dogfight” and “threat” targets, it gives the closest enemy and then enemies by range, with badly-damaged enemies excluded. The system works quite well, although the cockpit perspective sometimes suddenly shifts upwards more than it needs to, perhaps trying to look over the upper wing at the padlocked plane. Flying Corps Gold’s system does have two advantages over Red Baron 3D’s: when looking up from the cockpit, a large wire-frame outline clearly indicates your own plane’s orientation, greatly reducing the risk of crashing due to disorientation. Also, the view can automatically switch from exterior view to cockpit perspective and remain locked on the same target when the target comes into the forward arc, usually eliminating the need to bother with the keyboard for view adjustments. These two features are lifesavers, and make the game much more enjoyable. Other features that help awareness are little markers indicating the direction of planes that are off the edge of the screen, and three optional status lines on the top of the screen clearly showing flight statistics and left and right side stall indicators. However there is one aspect it doesn’t do as well as Red Baron 3D - in external padlock view, the point of view is closely lined up with both the player’s plane and the target plane, which often means you can’t actually see the targeted plane - you can only tell its direction. Pressing Backspace will often help either by shifting perspective slightly or giving you an internal view. Flying Corps Gold With no other visible frame of reference, the wire-frame
An advantage of Red Baron 3D is the ability to view from just outside other nearby planes, and to padlock enemies that are crashing - this makes it easier to sadistically enjoy your opponents’ falls to Earth. To do this in Flying Corps Gold one has to not padlock anything else once the foe is heavily damaged, and then one has to actually fly after the crashing plane for a good view. Flying Corps Gold’s arrangement does make for easier padlocking of dangerous foes, and is more realistic, also because it doesn’t allow the trick of getting a close-up of distant enemies before they come to close range. Having alternated between games, I greatly prefer Flying Corps Gold’s padlock system for practical use. Red Baron 3D External view on a spinning Morane Bullet Both games also freeze the action with a tap on the P key. Views can then be adjusted at leisure to get an idea of what’s going on. Particularly in many-plane dogfights, I personally find this an almost necessary resort in both games to keep track of what’s happening and who might be about to shoot me down unexpectedly.
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© 1998