Hello,
the pictures from "Rise of Flight" (RoF) sure look good, and i am glad they went on with the project - the Gennadich team was first working on the "Knights of the Sky" WWI sim, but were not allowed by Oleg to use an improved IL2 engine or so it seemed, so they cancelled the project, had to go for another engine and rebuild from the rubble.
There are even better photos from "RoF" with crash-landed planes, showing some damage modelling, and films showing the DR.I starting, and in flight.
On the photos the Fokker D.VII looks a bit too shiny with its Zebra camo as well as the SPAD (no weathering?), and "RoF" altogether seems to be planned for online play (which is good), but you only have three (?) flyable planes, no campaign, only german vs. american, and from 1917 to 18. Though I am sure the RoF team will improve this .. I believe the OFF team will also be happy to fly another sim now and then, they already said so lol. B.t.w. there is a recent interview at SimHQ
http://www.simhq.com/_air12/air_395a
Seems they have some 15 Gb of textures, skins etc.. For what i heard (not in this interview) they did indeed change the hard coded files from CFS3, but with official approval from Microsoft. It is common in the IT business to buy a developer's kit (SDK or what's it called) e.g. for MS Access, build a special application based on it, and then resell it with official approval. But then probably not in the game modding scene.
There are also other interested members from the aerodrome forum or wherever who regularly help all teams that intend to go for WWI
flight sims without charging, for historical accuracy etc., like Rabu, but also a lot of others. I do not know why Stealth Hunter has an axe to grind with the OFF team, but i am not in the mood to interfere for either side.
I would certainly prefer to get phase 3 for free, like 1 and 2, but i still think it's worth it (but then it seems it's just me). And I would probably have even paid something for GWX, or the NYGM mod, because i think they also deserved it, if not more. I am certainly happy i got all this for free.
On the other hand i would not have bought anything from this X1 company or what it was called, who stole mods from subsim modders, and tried to sell it as an SH3 add-on. Doing so was approved by Ubisoft, and i will never understand this.
Greetings,
Catfish