Contents:

 
Flawed Beginning
  History Begins
  Early
UOP's

  "The Dr.1 is Porked!"

  SWWISA

  The Last Classic UOP

  To the East!
  Revolution of CdT
  A New Breed of UOP
  Pat Wilson and WFP

  Stachel's Hell's Angels

  The Promised Land

  The End of the Road

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The Second Coming of The Promised Land

           Yet one patch remains in the community’s history. The ultimate UnOfficial Patch ever created for Red Baron. The one patch that the entire community waited with baited breath for months to be released. The only patch ever to garner publication in gaming magazines and actually be nominated for Flight Sim of the Year in 2003, six years after Red Baron’s release. That patch is Full Canvas Jacket, and it represents the culmination of years of work by the talented modder who goes by the handle, Kessler. The patch, now over a year old, stands as a giant over the rest, and leaves Red Baron unchallenged as the ultimate flight simulation of the First World War.

            To list what Full Canvas Jacket accomplishes compares to listing the feats of a great athlete. Aircraft skins, squadrons, aces, events, sound effects, menu music (composed and performed by Kessler himself), flight model, damage model, terrain, sky, clouds, cockpits, artificial intelligence, ground objects, infantry, buildings, trees, machine gun nests, anti-aircraft fire; the list goes on and on. Everything that could be altered and improved within the structure of Red Baron was and Kessler left no stone unturned. Full Canvas Jacket did more than modify Red Baron; it changed the game as it had always been known. Red Baron transformed into an accurate and moving representation of the period and those who risked their lives everyday in the skies over the Western Front. Full Canvas Jacket can be regarded as the “shot heard round the world” and the community’s world changed forever upon its release.

            Kessler had worked since the beginning tweaking Red Baron, usually creating new terrains, photo-realistic buildings and better sound effects. His site, The Promised Land, was always a source for new and better audio and visual effects. In 2001 he released a “Promised Land” update for Red Baron, giving the game all of the above in one patch. Yet Kessler knew he had to finish the job right to be satisfied and began work on creating a single install, non-date based UOP for Red Baron. When the screenshots of his aircraft were released, the community was stunned. No one had ever seen aircraft that looked so incredibly realistic. No one really knew how he had done it, but with each passing day more pictures of more planes were released to an amazed and excited community. Not only did the planes look “real”, so did everything else. The terrain had transformed from a blurry mass of green and blue to something beyond photo-realistic. One could actually see shadows being cast by trees along open fields below the planes. The rivers looked like they slowly flowed along the French countryside. The sky and clouds filling it looked exactly as Red Baron pilots had always imagined it. The trenches looked chillingly realistic. The one phrase uttered most often in the months leading up to July of 2003 was “it looks so real!”

When Full Canvas Jacket was finally released in July of 2003, the culmination of work by Kessler, and in all actuality, an entire community of enthusiasts drew to a dramatic conclusion. Years of work researching, modifying, studying, and patience had finally paid off. Flying Full Canvas Jacket resembles that of being in a movie, or even better, actually flying in World War I itself. To sit in the photo-realistic cockpit, take off over the stunning terrain, and engage in a ferocious dogfight with aircraft that look like they are going to jump off the screen was simply breathtaking. Kessler’s Full Canvas Jacket represents the ideal imagined by Beery, WingStrut, Stachel, Pat Wilson, every member of SWWISA, Baron von Benz, Karel, Baron von Helton, and every enthusiast who felt called to tweak a flew plane skins since the late 1990’s.

(How Far we’ve come: An SE5 from the original Red Baron 3D 
 compared to the Full Canvas Jacket version)

(The Wow Factor: A Roland CII from the original Red Baron 3D
 compared with its big brother from Full Canvas Jacket)