FS-WWI Plane Pack 5 Released!

Posted by David on January 15, 2009 06:45 PM

FS-WWI: Open Plane WWI Woo! Lots of news lately. Yesterday marked the release of FS-WWI Plane Pack 5, which is a mod for Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe (1999), which is admittedly dated, but hey, that doesn't mean we can't have some fun, right? FS-WWI is available for download on its website.

Here's ArgonV's press release:

"Never before in the flight simulator modding community have so few worked on so much for so little at such a cost."

-ArgonV after pulling all of his hair out over the last 4 years

At last we in the FS-WWI developers group bring you FS-WWI Plane Pack 5. This free add-on to the flight simulator Fighter Squadron: Screamin’ Demons Over Europe is a total conversion mod to convert Fighter Squadron (Or SDOE as we in the community like to call it) into a World War 1 flight simulator. The area of conflict takes place mainly in the Somme region of France circa 1914-1918.

With 52 flyable aircraft, two flyable balloons, one flyable Zeppelin, 8 drivable ground vehicles, over 430 Training missions and 185 Campaign Missions to choose from FS-WWI has a lot of content to offer!

The following is a list of instructions to get this mod installed properly. You must have the original game installed fresh before you can get started. In the near future, an All-In-One installer will be released in which you do not need the original game.

(From a fresh install of Fighter Squadron: Screamin' Demons Over Europe)
Please remove the game CD from the drive before continuing on to these next steps

1. (665kb) Install the 1.5 Patch to your Fighter Squadron folder and run the game once to be safe.

2. (29.3mb) Install the Latest FS-WWI Themed Patch for a WWI-only game.

3. (6.24mb) Install the FS-WWI Nations v3.0 Pack

Install any other terrains you might want BEFORE proceeding to the next step.

4. (119mb) Install the Somme and Snowy Somme v3.0 Pack

5. (555mb) Install the FS-WWI Plane Pack 5

Note: If the install seems to hang just give it time, it has to uncompress a very large file. At the end there is an option to install the FS-WWI Parfile Update. This should go into the Media folder of where ever you installed Fighter Squadron to.

6. For on-line play, please download the latest version of Hyperlobby

Settings and Tweaks:

I have put together a document which will help you tweak FS-WWI for your system. You can find it here: Getting the Best

Von has put together a nice FS-WWI keyboard commands file here.

We hope you enjoy flying FS-WWI using Inertia's OpenPlane game engine. In our opinion, OpenPlane is THE engine for WWI flight!

In regards to system requirements:

FS-WWI works on a pretty decent range of systems. The better the system the better you can scale up in the graphics and texture size department. I have an AMD X2 4200+ Dual Core CPU with 2GB of DDR400 memory and a 256mb GeForce 7800GS OC AGP graphics card on WinXP Pro. I run FS-WWI at 1280x1024 with 4x FSAA and 4x Anisotropic filtering with 1024x1024 texture size enabled. I rarely get FPS below 60 and most of the time it's in the 100s to 150s with vsync enabled. The whole game installed takes up about 1.30 GB of disk space, and with the texture cache that collects about twice that over time. The older and slower the system the more you will have to scale back on resolution and texture size. The amount of system memory you have makes quite a bit of difference in game performance.