Introducing Take On Helicopters by Bohemia Interactive

[Capt. Sand 10]

"Hello ground!" indeed. look at the detail in that shot. craaazy.

[Muahaha 10]

any info on the specs requirements to run this game yet? hope my old rigs still up for it.

[Daniel 0]

So far:

System requirements

Operating system: Windows XP/Vista

Processor: CPU: Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHz or faster

Memory: 2 GB RAM

Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT or ATI Radeon 4850 with Shader Model 3 and 512 MB VRAM or faster

Hard disk: 10 GB free HDD space

Not really massive requirements.

[Muahaha 10]

great... seems pretty easy to meet that requirement.

[nightsta1ker 10]

Interesting video Sam. For larger helicopters, particularly the medium lift rescue helo depicted in the screenshots, crewmembers calling the aircraft will be critical to mission success. However, for longlining ops in the smaller helo (MD500) the pilot will most likely be alone. The added weight of a copilot detracts from the max gross that the helicopter could be carrying. During longlining operations, strict attention to weight and aircraft performance must be applied, and the pilot needs the skills to pull it off by himself.

Notice how he drops his passenger off to rig the load, and removes the pilot door so he can hang his body out. Also, pay close attention to his use of reference points to keep himself oriented. This is called vertical reference and is the cornerstone of single pilot sling operations (it can be done without it, but it takes some talent).

[samb 15]

We would also use working mirrors to help us keep an eye on what's going below a chelicopter. Terrific video btw, thank You for sharing it!

Sam

[ArmAriffic 10]

Dear devs,

Please make the sperm whale a playable unit.

LOL would be fun, does that have fuel too?

[celery 8]

LOL would be fun, does that have fuel too?

No. You just swim in the sea or get beached for lulz. Maybe jump out of the water to wreck low flying helicopters.

[Logan9773 10]

So, why not just stick this in Arma? Seems kind of a weird game.

[Daniel 0]

It's a game where you fly helicopters doing different tasks. What's weird about it? How does BIS make more money if they "just stick it in Arma"?

[Wen 10]

Just get rid of everything else in ArmA 2 except the helicopters and it'll be reduced to a good helicopter game with "authentic fight models" and "detailed environment" XD

[nodunit 397]

Nah, just make expansions focusing on set units and broadning their uses and functionality. Although this would require a number of engine changes which likely wouldn't mesh very well.

[dale0404 5]

Just get rid of everything else in ArmA 2 except the helicopters and it'll be reduced to a good helicopter game with "authentic fight models" and "detailed environment" XD

By pressing the 'Q' key? :p

[bobocz 10]

Some interesting new facts from http://games.tiscali.cz/prvni-dojmy/take-on-helicopters-prvni-dojmy-z-nove-hry-od-tvurcu-arma-55602 preview:

sorry for mistakes it's only fast raw translation :o, for more information use http://translate.google.cz/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=cs&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.tiscali.cz%2Fprvni-dojmy%2Ftake-on-helicopters-prvni-dojmy-z-nove-hry-od-tvurcu-arma-55602 ;)

about missions:

rescue missions (pick up wounded people from hard reach areas)

police asistence (searching for criminals)

helping with building contructions

air show participation (to do acrobatics show)

about realism:

Coptict is not only texture, its detailed with buttons and animated gauges.

Full start simualtion is consists of 10 steps (battery switch on,... warm up and so on...). Casual players can start with one button. You can look out bellow, ahead of helicopter cockpit. Near ground turbulence shake with helicopter. But newbies can switch to easy model (autohower..).

about damage:

rotor blades can bend, electrical malfunction can appear, gear can brake down, when you land hard skid can be bended.

about maps:

seattle area 61x61km, 20km visibility, not detailed as in arma (half resolution as in chernarus), very detailed areas are only near airports

south east asia area 120x120km

about helicopters:

they are not licenced, but you can recognise their real counterpart, they are modeled according real helicopters

The plan is to make one military helicopter with machine-gun and rockets.

edit, added:

You can do pre-flight check by walking around helicopter. You will have to check rotor, stabilizaton wing, fuel leaking ...so on. You can open hood and check motor.

Three categories of helicopters: light, middle, heavy class. Every categories should contain 5 choppers.

Improved modules for editor (without scripting). Example: waypoints for landing, flying on time, load up, unload cargo on rope, module for calm fly (pasengers will shout during rapid maneuver)

Edited April 30, 2011 by BoboCZ

[samb 15]

O_O Awesomeeeeee

[icebreakr 3159]

Sounds like a keeper :)

[Deadfast 43]

Stand by for full translation, over ;)

[nodunit 397]

Oh it certainly sounds interesting, I wonder how the flight model will be tweaked, wether we will get gravity pulling us down in hover and in motion and more things described here http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...UkgcYHocSrPIZyw

The models look excellent and I am overjoys to see the attention to rotorheads, probably a vanity thought but I'm hoping we'll get to see some user input control. The textures on the interior shot though seem a bit underwhelming.. http://games.cz.imag3box.com/uploads/takeonhelicopters-score3-game14075-img199562.jpg Afterall this is the primary focus and the landscape won't be as detailed so textures won't be as high, therefore you have room to expand and bring out the full focus.

Also yay picture in picture. Ooh..I wonder if they will code in the ability for something to not function properly if you don't check i- Oh that gives me an idea!

Thanks for the info BoboCZ!

Edited April 30, 2011 by NodUnit

[purepassion 22]

oh mann if we could then convert RtT to Arma 2 that would be great!

Nod and Franze, keep an eye on it ;)

[nodunit 397]

Like a hawk, but this isn't about us and we certainly wouldn't be the only ones to benefit from such a thing. Trailer towing, modern MBT's and more.

[purepassion 22]

yeah of course ;) that would be an great benefit for all Arma 2 addon makers

all those possibilities in my head... ahh love this!

[Deadfast 43]

Stand by for full translation, over ;)

There, finished...

Helicopters have been a part of Bohemia Interactive’s military games since the beginning. In Operation Flashpoint or ArmA you’ll find infantry, tanks or APCs, and you can bet the last bullet in your magazine that you will lift off in a helicopter as well. Flying in a helicopter is a fascinating way to travel and I have been a fan since the aforementioned Operation Flashpoint.

I was excited by Bohemia Interactive’s announcement of Take On Helicopters, at first I was surprised but later it all started to make sense. It is a very logical step by the company – this is something they have firm experience with, yet it is a completely new direction to set on. I personally went to take a look on Take On Helicopters straight to Mníšek pod Brdy – Bohemia Interactive’s base of operations – and I’m quite sure I’m the first game reviewer who saw the game live with his own eyes. You will finally learn what this game is all about. Fasten your seatbelts, we’re about to take off.

Kicked out of the army

Take On Helicopters borrows the helicopters from BI’s games with one huge difference – the player will get to take a break from all the killing and instead it will be civilian machines and the civilian tasks involved that get to play the base. Joris-Jan van 't Land, the project lead, has explained it to me: “When we thought about what you can actually do with a civilian helicopter and what will the missions be about, we realized there is an incredible number of things to do and the actual problem will be to choose from those.â€

Joris continued to explain in detail: â€The gameplay is based around you having a heliport and hangars with a few helicopters in them, which you use to fulfill various contracts. You’ll fly rescue, picking up wounded from places with difficult access. You will help the police with locating criminals, help set large construction parts in place on building sites, and you’ll make an appearance during the Flight day performing acrobatic maneuvers. You can look forward to timed flights, you’ll fly the director around during film shoots and sometimes it’ll be up to you to carefully transport a client who is scared of flying to his destination. Don’t do any sudden maneuvers with him on board.â€

The hanger and heliport will be your home base. Karel Mořický, lead designer, has compared it to the Normandy from Mass Effect. It will be possible to walk around the hangar, look at the stationed helicopters and, of course, perform modifications on them. If you have the funds you can buy a winch, hi-end camera system, engine improvements or even a new helicopter. With each such improvement you gain access to more tasks to perform. Those in return provide the necessary funds for larger hangars, heliports, new helicopters or a team of top-notch mechanics, and in the end becoming the best pilot capable of taking on just about kind of missions.

Your own company

The game is helped along using a campaign with a simple plot where find yourself trying to establish a helicopter transport company. I’ll let Jay Crowe, creative lead, explain the details: “It is a challenge for us to get together players who are experienced virtual pilots with those who have little experience with flying. We wish to entertain both groups. If you never flew before, following the campaign will teach you the basics and turn you into an experienced pilot. However, should you be a flying ace, there are many side missions that are more difficult and require a certain level of experience. Everyone can find something for himself to do in Take On Helicopters.â€

Karel MoÅ™ický continues: “In the campaign the player will be taking care of his company and will eventually reach something that could be considered an open ending. He will be fulfilling main and side missions, along with those added by the community. He will finish some of those, earn money and buy a new helicopter making the next missions a bit easier. He will go through all this as one character, so it will be a bit similar to an RPG style of playing.â€

So far it looks like the campaign will be a small sapling that will grow into a mature tree thanks to user missions, new helicopters and upgrades that will be easily added into the game. I’m really looking forward by this.

Firmly at the controls

No matter what mission will you be taking on, the game will grasp and won’t let you go with the great flying experience. That is after all the heart of the game, the heart that will become your own. You will greatly enjoy flying closely to the ground, right above the tree tops, avoiding buildings and overall the entire handling of the helicopter, a machine capable of flying like the wind or hovering in one place the next minute.

The universum is of course inherited from ArmA 2, looking very similar to it while being very different overall. You will recognize some of the controls, the terrain’s style and the character models, but the flying experience is completely different. When Joris started the game for the first time and appeared next to a helicopter I felt like this was ArmA 2. That feeling didn’t last long. The helicopter no longer has just the few interaction options such as getting in as the gunner, there are many more now. In the current development version many weren’t functional yet but other than getting in, you can open the engine cover to make sure everything is in order, for example. Overall, you will have to interact with the machine much more.

In contrary to other helicopter simulators Take On Helicopters will have the upper hand in one thing – before taking off you can walk around the aircraft. That doesn’t mean just admiring it either; you will have to perform a pre-flight check, as the real pilots do. You will have to make sure the rotor or stabilizer bar isn’t damaged and that there is no fuel leakage at fuel tank cap. Joris has pointed out another small bit that will add to the realism: “What we definitely want to improve from ArmA 2 are the get in animations. We should be actually working on that later today in our motion capture studio.â€

Simulation or arcade

Alright, we’re in looking at the nicely modeled cockpit. No longer do we see blurry textures and flickering buttons here and there as we would in ArmA 2. Instead there are detailed, but mainly functional, indicators and buttons. We shift our focus towards the top panel and the battery on toggle. Memories of the realistic engine start-up sequence in DCS: Ka-50 Black Shark might be emerging and starting to worry you, but there is no need. To start the engine is nowhere near as simple in ArmA 2 but it still is a child’s play.

With full simulation there are ten steps you have to go through, such as turning on the battery, spinning up the rotor, starting up the engine or waiting for it to heat up. It won’t annoy you and instead it will make you feel like you were a real pilot. If you are an occasional player that accidentally ventured in the pilot’s seat, you can always switch back to the single-button start-up.

We take off and begin flying. Joris adds: “One of the other things we want to add is the possibility to not only look around but also lean ahead or to the sides, something that is essential for pilots, especially when it comes to landing where they have to see the front of the chopper.†The flight itself is definitely not as smooth as it would be in ArmA 2. Close to the ground we are swayed around by the turbulence, and you have to constantly adjust during the flight. Strong wind has visible influence and such luxury as flying straight isn’t nearly as easy to achieve as it would seem.

Of course there is the option to play the less difficult mode in which the helicopter flies as smooth as if it was attached to a rail. You can also turn on autohower or automatic trim to gain a better in-flight stability. On the other hand, the full simulation mode doesn’t seem to be that much of a pain; instead it seems like a good reason to learn how to fly without the help from a computer. Once you master that, your experience from flying will be so much better.

“A large difference between flying a helicopter in ArmA 2 and Take On is that here we have a fully modeled throttle (?). In ArmA 2 you just used it to either ascend or descend, you have to be a little bit more careful with it now,†says Joris who has a genuinely excited look on his face as he flies following a narrow road, maneuvering between the trees surrounding it on both sides.

Beginners need not to worry

Beginners won’t be helped only by the text hints appearing in the upper part of the screen but in tutorials also the instructor who will bark commands and suggestion over the headset as the situation requires. System of the tutorials seems to be really extensive from what I could see, and does not only explain the controls but also how to master the aircraft in case of an emergency, such as using autorotation in case of engine failure. This definitely isn’t something that would be easy to master and I can’t wait to try to learn it myself.

But let’s get back to the flying. In the final game we should have a radio in which we will hear communication between us and the base, as well as other aircrafts. A pleasant surprise was the aforementioned damage system. In ArmA 2 it was very basic. For example a collision of the main rotor with an obstacle would damage the entire helicopter. This time around it will be only the rotor itself that will get damaged, something that will be very noticeable in-flight, just as a damage to the stabilizer bar would be.

Joris explains: “The helicopter models have more damage zones, for example even the electrical system may fail. There is a gearbox that could be damaged by wild maneuvers that the aircraft isn’t built for. A harsh landing won’t result in an explosive fireball but the landing skids may bend.â€

What will I fly with?

We described the flying itself, but now it is time to talk about what and where we will be flying. The available helicopters are split into three categories: light, medium and heavy. Each one of these categories should contain about 5 helicopters. Given the realistic flight model it is reasonable to expect big differences between handling of the helicopters across the three categories, and obviously their suitability to perform certain types of missions. The helicopter models aren’t licensed but you will definitely be able to tell that they are based on real-life counterparts. You will meet the small MH-6 Little Bird (MD500), something along the lines of Bell 206, Agusta A109 and it is possible some of the ArmA 2 helicopters (the good old Mi-8 for example) will make an appearance as well, but that is not confirmed yet.

It will be possible to upgrade the aircrafts and purchase various gadgets for them to allow you to take part in more missions. One chopper will get night vision and a powerful spotlight to help out the cops, another one a powerful winch for cargo transport and the last one a mounted camera for TV news. There will be many possibilities.

Even though the game is primarily focused on civilian flying, the plan is to include at least one military helicopter armed with rocket launchers and machineguns, to be used in the multiplayer or in user missions for example. The base game is one thing but there is no doubt the Internet will soon be flooded with hundreds of new helicopters from addon makers. The game will open to the community.

A city and a desert

Now let’s have a look at Seattle, USA. That is what is hidden under the mysterious label of North America that was present in the initially released official information (Some may have already guessed so from the game’s website with the typical tower). Joris adds: “We liked Seattle because of its shape, all the bays, the curvy coastline and the nearby mountains.â€

When Joris first opened the map of the city center and the surroundings I got terrified. Everyone surely well remembers the way the FPS pummels when one enters a town in ArmA 2 and in this game you will spend most of the time flying over one and doing so at a high speed too. The map is 61x61 kilometers in size and Joris showed me that he has view distance set to 20 kilometers in the options! I was impressed by the large number of houses, skyscrapers and the dominant Space Needle towering high over the city wasn’t missing either. God, protect our hardware!

Alright, calm down, it is of course under control. The terrain is again modeled after satellite imagery but using a little different technology this time with a better optimization. First of all, the terrain detail isn’t equal with what you can see in ArmA 2. Should you get closer to the ground you will notice it isn’t as smoothed and you will notice many sharp edges. T terrain detail of the Seattle map is two times less detailed than Chernarus from ArmA 2, for example, which is of course something you won’t notice from the air. On top of that the new “normal map†effect is applied, thanks to which the terrain looks more plastic than it actually is.

Simply this terrain isn’t made for infantry hiding in the bushes but rather for some good flying. A higher amount of detail will be present only in the area surrounding your base where you can walk around. What adds further to the detail are the clouds, which are no longer just textures but real objects with width and height as is necessary for a real flying simulator.

Seattle will be the main setting for the campaign but there is one other map too. It is not too different from Takistan – mountainous, deserted and hilly area in Asia. This map has area of gigantic 120x120 kilometers and it is perfect for you to enjoy the freedom of flying there. Surely there will be a few missions on it as well but mainly it is to be the primary setting for the multiplayer. It is too soon to talk about that for the game is still at the beginning of its development cycle.

DIY

Mission editor and the community have a large stake in the popularity of games from Bohemia Interactive and the editing for this game will be no different. Quite the opposite actually! Take On has a mission editor very similar to that of ArmA 2 but with certain changes made to make it suitable for the game as well as for beginning mission makers. Karel MoÅ™ický showed me around: “In ArmA 2 we introduced modules which are basically function packages. Now we have something even easier – special waypoints for the individual helicopters.â€

For example the Land waypoint, waypoint for timed flight, attach or detach cargo waypoint or fly calmly, a waypoint where your passengers will start panicking when you start doing hard and sudden maneuvers. Those simple commans can be inserted by the player using a single click without having to resort to using scripts or complicated settings. Experienced scripters on the other hand, can create their own waypoints.

Another interesting feature is picture in picture. Thanks to that you can place various screens and displays monitoring a certain position on the ground with night vision, for example. User-friendly editor and the overall openness of the game to modifications will surely bring in hundreds of community-made content few months after the release. And so, even if the amount of original content isn’t breathtaking, the community will take care of adding in more helicopters, missions and campaigns.

Karel MoÅ™ický finishes with a well-aimed remark: “Community-made content invites more people to our games and pretty much works as marketing. For example the popular Battle Bus video that appeared on PC Gamer surely raised ArmA 2’s popularity.â€

My very positive feeling of the game springs from two basic things. The first one is the balance between realism and fun and the ability to entertain everyone, no matter their skill. The other bit is the openness to community-made content and the easiness of adding new content straight into the game, even the campaign you are currently playing. With your purchase you gain something that, thanks to the community, will grow into monumental size and will surely in time offer focus on military side of things too. The conclusion is simple – helicopters in ArmA were always entertaining and thanks to Take On Helicopters they have the chance to be successful in a stand-alone product too.

[Macadam Cow 1]

E3OpgwpgqXA

Now I'm getting really excited :)
Thanks for the info Bobo !

Edit : and thanks a lot for the full translation Deadfast ;)
Edit 2 : so in the end it really sounds like a mix of SAR and Simcopter, woohoo ! Edited May 1, 2011 by Macadam Cow

[Capt. Sand 10]

never thought I'd see the day that I'd be so hyped for a helicopter game.

leave it to Bohemia, man.

thanks for the info/translation, guys.

[nightsta1ker 10]

Well... OK. I think I'm going to stop posting suggestions, because they obviously have the situation well in hand.