My experience with FalconAF online campaign squad flying, is that its stable and with no
"falcon config dance" required.

Sure the Falcon4 based community-ware versions have some nice addons that show what FalconAF could
have done, had they had the resources to do such; but I prefer FalconAF and its rock solid stability.


S!

Abuse: Here's one major one

1) Multiple players connecting and disconnecting from a server for days at a time

This is just one example, but there are quite a few more subtle things that have been known in the older MP code of OF.

OF suffers from many of the issues that AF has corrected in it's MP. It's quite different in fact and is the reason for being able to handle more pilots with greater ease than OF. Also, the smoothness in close positional updates in AF exceed that of OF.

In OF with large MP missions it is far more common to have anomolies such as disappearing AB textures, AGG/DeAGG issues, losing AWACS communications, RWR, and other packets that are routinely dropped. This is something that you almost never see as a problem with AF. You also see individual CTDs on larger MP flights in OF than you do with AF. Most OF supporters would suggest that it is most likely the individuals fault for not being configged properly, but doesn't that only lend more credence to my point even if that would be the case?

OFers have openly admitted that the installation is far from optimized both in MP and in relative stability by comparison to AF (due to it's ability to being tweaked, configed, modded amongst other things).

If you're flying with less than 8 people in OF you've got greater chances of success without problems, but they're still likely to occur, whereas in AF it is quite easy to have 15+ pilots flying without issue (warping, dropped packets, other anomolies).

You'd have to partake in large MP flights that push the code to its potential before making a sweeping judgement on which would be considered more stable. I've actively flown in both variations with large numbers of pilots and know for certain that OF is not on par with AF in terms of MP stability. Can OF host large numbers of pilots in the campaign? Sure, but not without painstaking care, or the usual handful of problems with pilots having to disconnect, or the host reset the server because of one reason or the other. The time it takes and care it takes to get a large MP flight stable and operational is far more anal retentive by comparison to AF, which goes off a greater percentage of the time without a hitch.

with Falcon 4.0 you can the install OF which is 100 times better than AF

Of course KV, I agree that AF is much easier to run and more stable, since the entire MP code is rewritten. Maybe I didn't express it correctly but what I was mostly trying to say is that OF can be as good as AF many times, of course it has it's problems, but it's usually not as bad as some ppl may think, esp for small flights. Or as bad as RV is in MP from what I hear.

And yes, it depends greatly on every user's install for the MP to be smooth and stable, and yes it takes a little time at first to set up for a MP flight, while in AF you don't have to worry about anything usually. But still, OF is worth the trouble for me, esp with some of it's exclusive MP features like the Datalink and radios.

This has been the experience I've had at FreeBirds with OF. I took part in only about 10 flights, mostly training flights with few objects, and <8 pilots. I'm too busy for flying at all, lately, so I haven't "quit" OF or AF, by any means. It's arguable that these problems were caused by someone "doing it wrong", nevertheless:

Intermittent datalink information
IVC Host crash
Pilots unable to enter without graphical anomalies
Loss of ATC

Also, one of the IPs could not get OF to work until he switched from an ATI card to one from nVidia. Myself, IVC is incredibly quiet. GlobalFalcon users and other FreeBirds report this, and it seems to be tied to using onboard sound. So for me, one of the coolest things about OF is no-go until I upgrade my sound card.

Can it work? Yes. But you'd better be patient and expect 1 out of 10 OF flights to be completely scrubbed, you'd better require everyone to have strong internet connections, and assume that SOMETHING is not going to work as advertised. A training flight that might take 30 minutes in AF will take you an hour in OF. If everything works for you and you have a group of ~10 guys who all have good connections and a solid IVC/Sim host, great. If you don't have the time to risk briefing for an hour only to have radio comms disappear and perhaps have to restart the mission due to someone's CTD, forget it.

Unfortunately, there's no version of Falcon that "has it all" yet. LP needs to add what OF has or the guys that originally created the OF exe need to come out of retirement and implement some of what LP has done.

And they all need to quit wasting time with DX7 graphics.

Well your mileage will vary with OF, that's for sure. Personally as I've said I haven't had any problems with small flights (2-6 ppl), except for a few issues the first times I tried to connect when I didn't know how it worked exactly.

However OF has well known issues with the following three things: certain sound cards (don't remember which ones, I *think* onboards), ATI graphic cards and Vista.