Wings of Prey

[Art Blade]

Ah, one note about voice acting. The young Englishman (you) has the deepest voice I've heard in a long time and sounds like America Incarnate, the broadest yank accent I've heard in a long time, too  ^+-+ Silly, when that chap muses "..my fellow countrymen" (Brits)  ^+-+

[Art Blade]

Joystick configuration:

Dead Zone
Make sure whatever axis you configure not to mess with that "dead zone" if you've got a precise stick. It's a range you can move the stick without the game registering it -- good if the stick is wobbly, make a small dead zone so the plane doesn't fly in circles just because the stick isn't 100% centred.

Non-linearity
If you want to make subtle movements (especially when training your sights on the enemy) it is a helpful feature: The more non-linearity, the lesser the responsiveness and therefore simpler to handle when making small or smooth movements. It creates a range the stick will increasingly pick up the direction you move it towards. In practical terms: 50% non-linearity allows you to move the stick half the way it physically can, causing a soft movement, before that movement really kicks in hard. Within the first half of the way it will only register a movement as if you moved the stick a lot less. So you can actually move it quite a bit but the result will be a fine-tuned move. When you press on towards the physical limit, the stick will pick up more and more until the actual limit is reached. By comparison: zero non-linearity will cause the plane to "jump" with the slightest joystick movement, whereas with some non-linearity it will only "jump" when you really hit the limit.

[Art Blade]

This is what it looks like when flying near Stalingrad, using a "virtual cockpit" (none at all). This is during replay, during gaming you'd see a few HUD elements (kind of a mini map top right, that's about all you can see then).

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[Art Blade]

This is a Russian cockpit :)

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[Art Blade]

Phew. This game is exhausting (a lot of concentration needed to survive at least and to achieve all goals at last) so I can't play through as I would with other games.

Let me tell you about a manoeuvre that I haven't read about anywhere before but I developed it long ago already, I has saved my life many times and cost that of enemies even more often.

Art's stalling manoeuvre

I'd call it a steep loop, the shape of an egg. You can do it both vertically and horizontally. By comparison, most pilots would go full speed to start something like an Immelmann or things like that which involve a loop or half a loop. What I do is: voluntarily stall and recover at the top of a loop or at the centre of a turn. That manoeuvre can be achieved either by suddenly going lowest speed possible or even shutting off the engine.

For a loop: at the time you're highest possible (or anywhere on your way up) you pull the stick as hard as possible towards you and stall the engine so you'd fall over backwards. On your way down restart the engine or go full throttle again.

For a turn: accordingly, once you've reached a point when you want to make a drastic change, switch off the engine or in this case better go lowest speed possible and turn as hard as possible until you're about to drop, then go full throttle or restart the engine.

Those manoeuvres are useful when you are facing an enemy with a faster and/or more agile plane. Your manoeuvre will create a surprising short cut and bring you in a line that allows to fire ahead of the enemy thus taking him by surprise and down.

Try it :)

[Art Blade]

This is a virtual cockpit and its nearly invisible HUD elements. The "circle" down in the middle is where the bombs will hit, the dots in it mark where each bomb will hit. The other orange lines mark HUD elements so you can try to find them.

[smg id=2529 type=link align=center width=400 caption="WoP virtual bomber cockpit"]

[JRD]

Just installed this game am finished the first two tutorial steps and a first mission!

This game is very cool  8) :-X

Graphics are pretty good, good balance between fun and difficulty - I'm playing arcade/easy at the moment - nice sound, models are very well made as well as damage models with enemy planes shattering in mid air leaving a trail of fire and smoke  >:D

Nice to be able to finish the mission and skip or land  the plane... I landed perfectly after the first mission (however smoking due to enemy lead  ::)

I'll have a great weekend with WoP plus Batman AA and AC:B  >:D

[JRD]

Just finished  the third mission where I had to sunk some enemy ships offshore UK! Cool... feels very  much real as airborne warfare should feel back in the day... no advanced technology calls for skilled pilots, which is something that really get my attention in this game. Not only WWII themed-games are nice but also puts the player in a challenging environment even for arcade players like me  ::)

The ammount of side missions other than the campaign plus all allied and german aircrafts makes WoP a massive game for flying fanatics... I'll have loads of fun for a loooong time with this game!  :-X

[Art Blade]

 :)

Any screenshots, JRD? Please?  :-()

[JRD]

Ok, here's a few snapshots of my experience with WoP...

Me and my wingman, Chuck...  ;D

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I was chasing this enemy plane over the cliffs of Dover under havy dogfights... excelent play!

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I got him after all...

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Taking lead from enemy bombers as I approached a convoy, still over Dover.

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Payback  >:D

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Damage model... this one is a mission over Leningrad with heavy fighting... cool  :-X  The last one is not so good but take a look at the right wing.. swiss cheese  ::) ... I was shot from underneath by an ascending enemy coming from a completely blind spot at me... 8)

I had some great moments during those missions... even if a bit of the same over and over but that's what I expect from a WWII aerial warfare game  :-X

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[JRD]

Ok... a few more...

Approaching combat zone... blue guys are friendlies, everybody else are enemy bombers, bright spots are tracer bullets.

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A heavy combat scene with my squadron thinning out a nazi bomber squad en route to Leningrad

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One less...  >:D ... man, this game is fun... really enjoying it!!!  :-X

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[JRD]

Hmmm ... having problems... being shot too much during the second mission in Stalingrad... had to try some tutorials but still a bit tough...  :-X ... challenging even for arcade mode  :)

Music is annoying... Hero Theme  >:(( ... boring...

Details as you get close to the ground (and if not flying too fast) are a bit poor but that's the price you pay for smooth play during missions over hundreds of km of terrain.

Missions won't change nothing, maybe the scenario with and without snow, mostly inland, lakes or nearshore etc...everythung resume to shoot down target before it's too late or bomb something... but I'm fine with that... I read you can find the Gate of Brandenbourg and bomb a target near to it for a trophy or achievement... nice... there weren't many big cities as stage for aerial warfare during WWII so you can't expect to fight over Paris around the Eiffel Tower  :-X

The plains in UK are pretty much what southern England looks like with the chalk cliffs by the shore... Dover is a nice area with cool details such as the Radar transmitters / receivers giving England eyes over the Channel  8)

Now I feel I should've bought that Logitech twin axis controller long ago...  :D

[Art Blade]

oh yes, screenies  :-() :-X Nice, JRD :) Have fun  :)

[fragger]

Cool screenies, JRD :-X I've actually got WoP but never got around to installing it, was waiting to get myself a decent joystick, then got sidetracked with other games and stuff and actually forgot that I even owned this game until this topic was revived. I think I'll go looking for a joystick...

[JRD]

Funny you mention it... I just bought myself a new controller... a gamepad, dual stick analogic/digital  >:D

I was going for a Logitech but couldn't find it in the stores I checked on my way back from w@&k today. I got a cheap one instead  :-[

I tryed to play a bit with it just now but couldn't configure it on the Devices screen and this one's not on the list they have... see, cheap stuff  :D ;)

The key mapping wasn't really doing what I want it to do ... I'm not sure if what you get on the screen is something created by the game or depends on the gamepad you plug in  ????

(that's how much I'm familiar with periferals other than keyboard and mouse ::) )

[Jim di Griz]

Ahhh, a BoP thread - excellent!

Nice to read all of the excitement and discovery stories in this thread. I can also identify with some of the frustrations too - Gaijin are an odd developer alright, certainly regarding some of their coding decisions; they've been keen and productive as hell though.

I played this quite a lot just after release, also some of last year as there is quite a community on the 1c forums who played this out to every degree, with lots of online matches and meet-up missions.

Like Art and JDR I started on arcade, going straight through to the end of Berlin - there were some evil missions in there, some real beauties too. I did the training excercises in all three difficulty modes too and the sim practise bombing run in the Hurricane was immensely rewarding. Before that taking down the two/three Heinkels was a nightmare, not only did I keep running out of ammo at the most inconvenient time, but I couldn't find the enemy most of the time (no mini-map in sim mode, which is how it should be  :))

One mission in particular I just couldn't do on arcade, the one protecting the Russian bombers en route for Berlin during the last campaign. The forum I mentioned had a solution for that one, do it in Sim because the AI reacts accordingly and all you had to do is maintain an umbrella presence over the bombers, thereby scaring the enemy fighters off - seriously, the easiest and oddest mission of the lot.

Then I began it all again on realistic, which was tough for different reasons but again very rewarding once completed.

Did either of you get to do the night-time interceptor mission over Russia? That one is a nightmare on sim and is as far as I have gone in that mode.

Visually the game is beautiful, especially the early morning and evening missions over Russia and the Ardennes - there is something about all that snow and the light it gives off. I lost a few missions in both places, too busy taking in the scenery. I did find that Dover was the best represented with regard to the ground detail. Stalingrad Sicilly and Berlin were noticeably poorer by comparison and I though that was a shame.

I agree with you Art, the training section where you can set which planes to fight, plus their number and difficulty level are really great fun. These give a true idea of how big some of those maps are letting you explore to the extent you have set the time limit to - the Ardennes in particular is huge and I think it took me half-an-hour to fly from one side of it to the other in a Mustang. The time of day and weather conditions can also be selected for these and for online - but don't try stormy weather at night though, or you'll be doing very little more than ploughing into unexpected bits of ground. Stormy in daylight is fun though, especially if you gain enough altitude to break out of the clouds.

Additionally, if you enjoyed this game there is also Birds of Steel out now - set in the Pacific theatre, though there are training missions around Malta, Crimea, the Rhur and various pacific islands too. The FLAK is incredibly intense in BoS. I couldn't see a thread about it, so maybe I should start one and give more details there (just let me check the forums again first.)

[Art Blade]

Apparently I lost interest at some point. As far as I remember it, it was because of "too much." At that time I had several games going, one of which was ALPHA Protocol, that consumed a lot of time but were far more entertaining. WoP is intensive and has a learning curve. Loads of missions and whatnot. I think I am done with flight games  :-D

[Jim di Griz]

That is always the danger with flight sims - the far end of it you get people doing realtime flights around the world on Flight Sim and thinking nothing of it. The 1c forum guys played nothing other than BoP for more than two years, with a slight detour to GT5 where all they did was make cars jump and fly lots  - I suspect they are still playing BoP now, even after BoS came out.

[PZ]

  some people become stuck in their ways

[fragger]

This game has been sitting forgotten a nondescript box full of other stuff for about five years, but I finally got around to playing it :-()

As mentioned elsewhere I picked up a new joystick especially for getting into flight sims, and WoP was first on the list. I haven't done much with it so far, just wanted to see what it had to offer and to see how the new stick went.

Game impressions: There's quite a learning curve if one wants to get into full-on sim mode. Full sim mode covers such minutiae as fuel mixture and prop pitch settings, if you want to go into it that far. There are three modes of play: Arcade, Realistic and Simulator. Arcade mode has simplified flight modelling, good if you don't want to get into the full sim experience but just want to mix it up without pesky annoyances like stalls and G-force induced blackouts. Realistic is as it suggests, with wind and turbulence effects and the possibility of stalls and blackouts, but still with some HUD aids which will show you where the enemies are and tags them for you, and so forth. Simulator is much the same as Realistic but without the HUD, i.e. you have to rely on your own eyeballs and skill to find the baddies and grasp the situation, as real pilots did. The aircraft behave very realistically and the flight modelling appears to be quite accurate.

The graphics are terrific. Ground textures and detail can look near-photographic, and the smoke and particle effects are excellent. The bullet tracer effects are the best I've ever seen, you not only see the tracers but the smoke trails they leave behind. The cockpit detail looks very authentic and all instruments w@&k as they should. I'm not running with everything maxed, but I possibly can. I only have AA off and am running on 1600x900 res, everything else is enabled and it's silky-smooth, so I can possibly up the settings (mind you, this was with only a few planes in the air. Big battles with lots of planes and flak will probably be a different story, but I can probably trade off stuff like water reflections and aircraft self-shadowing). Sound is rich - well, as much as you can hear in a fighter cockpit :-()

Weather effects are impressive. The clouds look fantastic, and flying through them will cause condensation to appear on your canopy. You can find yourself flying in all kinds of conditions - clear, cloudy to various extents, overcast, stormy, night, day, windy, or various combos of these. It's a very dynamic system.

Damage modelling is impressive. I took a hit in the engine and oil started spraying all over my cockpit canopy. Instant blackout :-() I couldn't see jack so I bailed out. It was just a training mission, which you can restart immediately if you stuff things up.

There are loads of missions. There are lots of single missions of varying types from different theatres/periods of WW2, and a campaign mode. You can also put together quick-combat type "training" missions. These are customizable instant dogfights, where you can specify a location, time of day, weather, altitude, your aircraft, their aircraft (number of and types), a time limit, limited or unlimited ammo, and a bunch of other stuff. If you want to play a full-on campaign or just jump straight into a furball, you can. The game caters to a wide range of mission type preferences. I gave myself a relatively easy challenge for checking-out purposes: to shoot down a couple of Stukas in my MK.II Spitfire (see screenies below).

One thing that's sorely missing is a free-flight option. All other combat flight sims I've played have had this, where you can jump into an aircraft and fly around with no enemies to worry about, so you can get a feel for the plane, practice take-offs and landings, etc. Big omission IMO. There are tutorial missions, but these are pre-set affairs, no substitute for free-flight.

Stick impressions: Very happy with it, although I can't seem to get WoP to recognise my hat as a POV control, which is exasperating - it's the whole reason I bought a stick with a hat :D There may be an option somewhere to enable it, I haven't had a complete poke around in the game's settings menu yet, just a quick look. At present I can only look around using the numpad keys, which is awkward. As I thought, I don't like the throttle slider on the stick, so I remapped a couple of keys for throttle control, which works just fine. The stick-twist rudder control works really well, which is very handy in the absence of actual rudder pedals, and avoids having to map yet more keyboard keys to w@&k the rudder.

Anyway, here's a few screenies - and for once, there is a screencap key: PrtScrn takes a screenshot and saves it in <user>/My Documents/My Games/Wings Of Prey/Screenshots, so they're nice and easy to find. You can snap a shot during a mish, or during the "Replay" clip which is automatically made of each mission (you can save or discard these at the end of the mish, if space on your hard drive is an issue):

Love the landscape, near Dover here.

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The tracer effects are awesome (note the spent bullet casings falling out of the wings).

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I say, time for a Stuka party, what?

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That was close...

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Let that be a lesson to you, Jerry - stay away from old Blighty!

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[fragger]

Well, I got the hat sorted. Turns out it has to be set up in the keyboard mapping section. Who knew?

You can sort of do free flight, I found, in the training missions. Just a matter of staying away from the enemy planes for the time limit (which you can set), though sometimes they'll come after you. Best to just choose one enemy and try to give him the slip.

Tried a single Battle of Britain mission to defend Manston airfield from a pack of Bf-109s. That was fun, pics below.

So far I'm finding Arcade mode to be the most fun. In Realistic and Simulator mode, my plane seems to stall and spin out if I do so much as cock my head... It's probably the way I'm flying, but it really ain't easy. Probably just more practice required.

So here's a few more pics:

Ready for take-off. This mish gave me the option of taking off but not landing, which is a bummer. I like the challenge of landings.

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On my way to the rally point. Check out the clouds, they look terrific in-game.

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RAF Manston, which me and the lads have to protect. You can see there's one bogey down already.

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TALLY-HO!

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The cat among the pigeons.

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Great action in WoP, the dogfights can be quite exciting and spectacular.

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[Binnatics]

Fragger, this looks awesome!

From the pics you show us it seems you're flying in 3rd person mode? Or is it just a cinematic shot 'after-action'?

The landscape and clouds look great indeed. I could imagine having a lot of fun with such a game. So; Joystick required? :-\\

[fragger]

Cheers Binn :)

I was playing in first-person (cockpit) mode, but it's easier to grab screenies from the replay that you can watch after a mission. I'm usually too excited during an actual mission to remember to hit the screenie button :-()

Each mission is automatically recorded, and when the mish is over you get the choice of watching the replay, saving it, or ignoring it (by just exiting to the last menu). The replay is always in 3rd person, or external, view, and you have no control over the view angles while it's running, but you can grab screenies from it, which is how I got these.

The game can be played without a joystick, but I think it might be a handful with mouse and keyboard. Maybe, maybe not - I guess it depends on what you're used to. But I think a joystick will give you way finer control than m&k. I've always preferred a stick for a flight sim as it's a more authentic form of flight control and it gives me a greater sense of immersion.

[Art Blade]

nice posts fragger +1 :-X :)

[PZ]

Very nice report fragger, +1 from me as well

The last WWII game I played (that is memorable) was Band of Brothers, Hells Highway - anyone know of anything else like that?

I really like that theme, and although I understand that the youth of today have no interest in WWII, a few old guys like playing in that arena.