Arma II/OA aircraft behavior

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Aircraft borrowed from Arma II and/or OA seem to be almost completely unaffected by gravity, at least for me. Once I'm off the ground in any given helicopter, it tends to stay that way with no additional inputs needed. Auto hover on or off doesn't make a difference. Is this the way it's supposed to be, given the differences in the physics engine between ToH and A2/OA (I thought the A2/OA stuff was supposed to use the flight model from those games)? If so, it seems almost pointless to have imported them into ToH.

If not, can anyone lend insight into what might be wrong? Try the following for yourself and see if you get what I get:

1: Go into ToH's editor

2: Set yourself up as the pilot of an osprey, in flight

3: Start the mission

4: Enter auto-hover mode, tilt the nacelles all the way vertical

5: Fly level and try to lose any altitude whatsoever

In A2/OA, the osprey sinks like a rock in auto-hover mode with nacelles vertical. In ToH, I can't get it to sink at all. Judging by the engine/propeller sounds, it seems like the throttle becomes automatically controlled to maintain altitude while hovering. There is no response to throttle inputs, either. Switching auto-hover off will let the bird sink as normal (usually nose-down straight into the ground if you've been hovering), and returns throttle control to the player, but if you fly level with auto-hover on, you can't drop altitude at all. Other A2/OA helicopters exhibit more or less the same behavior independent of auto-hover mode.

Am I the only one having this problem? Surely someone else would have noticed it otherwise.

[max power 21]

The reason why the helicopters seem floaty is because a lot of the control is simplified or abstracted. The 'throttle' is really more like a command to the virtual pilot to tell the aircraft to go up or down. In Arma 2 you can reduce the amount of abstraction by binding the throttle to analogue throttle control, instead of the default. If it's different in Take On I suppose it would be owing to the fact they are different games. Perhaps mass and thrust are different.

The point of importing those assets into Take On is to make more varied scenario types, rather than say flying with 60 different kinds of fully simulated aircraft.

[Beagle 684]

To really feel the improved A2:OA past 1.60 flight model you really need analogie inpit devicedand a good custom axis setup...then gravity ad weight is back.

[AlloyRabbit 1]

I've been using an analog input device (it would be kind of dumb not to, in a game about flying). I've also tried the keyboard, out of desperation. Neither one will let me lose altitude in the osprey, although I have managed to descend rather arbitrarily (that is, -only- when negative input is used, rather than letting them settle down on their own via gravity) in some of the A2/OA helicopters.

Any tips on how I can make my virtual osprey pilot listen when I tell him to go down? =P

[max power 21]

If there is an analogue throttle input like in OA, bind your throttle to that.

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Er...Like I said, I've been using analog inputs all along. Yes, that includes the throttle. It doesn't fix the problem.

For what it's worth, I've discovered two other things in the course of fiddling with controls prior to posting:

1: The A2/OA aircraft apparently take their control setups from A2/OA profiles (I'm not sure which one exactly), at least partially. They seem to ignore the control settings for ToH aircraft (and yes, throttle and everything else are bound to analog controls in A2/OA). I'm not 100% sure on this, as I'd rather not wreck my ToH controls to test it completely, but the A2/OA aircraft are definitely responding to the controls I have setup for them in those games.

2: ToH crashes if you try to adjust the flaps of A2/OA aircraft that don't have any flaps--namely helicopters.

Edit: Something about putting the osprey in auto-hover definitely causes the throttle to become AI-controlled. I have full analog throttle control over the throttle when it's in normal flight, and the plane behaves like it should overall. But once it's in auto hover (which is sadly the only way to get the nacelles to tilt manually), it still pitches and rolls and yaws as it should, and it'll sink properly if you do so (hence me mentioning the need to fly level in order to experience the problem in my first post), but it completely ignores any throttle inputs. It neither gains nor loses any altitude when level. You can even hear the blades chopping into the wind rather loudly in the external camera view--a noise it only makes when you're at nearly-full-throttle (which is exactly how you get the Osprey to hover without losing/gaining altitude in A2/OA).

Edited November 14, 2012 by AlloyRabbit

[max power 21]

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about your devices. In the controls set up in OA, there is an actual control binding 'analogue throttle up' and 'analogue throttle down' as opposed to 'throttle up' and 'throttle down'. Are you able to locate these in ToH? There is a similar distinction for car steering, or aircraft steering in OA. There are often multiple (sometimes unclear) options for the same controls. ie. Turn left, turn right, bank left, bank right, left pedal, right pedal are all valid bindings for steering aircraft in OA but they all do different things.

Edited November 14, 2012 by Max Power

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Yes, those are what I've been using. They generally work fine, and I do get analog control over the throttle of ToH choppers and of the osprey in normal flight, but the game assumes control of the throttle when you put the osprey into auto hover mode for some reason.

A2/OA choppers will ascend/descend based on analog throttle input, but will, when there is no input, hover in place (given level flight). They don't sink like they should when the throttle is at its midpoint.

Both of these cases lead me to believe that the game is controlling the throttle (probably via some kind of PID loop) of A2/OA aircraft to create stable altitude as best it can. This would bug me a lot less if it were possible to override it with control inputs--which you sort of can in the case of helicopters, but which you can't do at all in the osprey.

Edited November 14, 2012 by AlloyRabbit

[max power 21]

hmm... when the throttle is set to analogue on OA for me, the mid point seems to be at 75%, and anything below 50% does nothing.

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Are you able to vertically land an osprey in auto-hover mode in ToH? In A2/OA, it falls out of the sky at anything less than about 95% throttle. I can hold the throttle all the way to zero with no effect. Ditto for the keyboard input. Frankly I can't ascend, either. The only way I can descend while in that mode is to tilt the aircraft and hope it doesn't float back up after bouncing the wheels off the ground. Or cut the engine, but that rarely goes well. =P

As soon as I exit auto-hover mode, though, everything works as it should. I can land it like a plane just fine, but that negates the fun of using a tiltrotor aircraft.

Sorry if I come across as harping on the osprey too much; it's both my favorite bird to fly in A2/OA and a prime example of the problems I'm having here.

[max power 21]

I think you can manually control the tilt of the osprey's rotors (in OA) with the flaps controls when autohover is off... this is not a direct answer to your question but it provided some fun for me.

I can check ToH tomorrow.

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Aye, that's the only way to get them to tilt completely vertical in OA. I kind of wish there were separate keybinds for the nacelles and the flaps, as you can't control the flaps in auto-hover mode--unless you go through the scroll menu.

[max power 21]

Looks like if you don't use analogue throttle for aircraft, you can control the mv-22 adequately.

[AlloyRabbit 1]

Wow.

Did you have to make that change in A2/OA (since ToH seems to read those profiles for imported craft keybinds) or did you set that in ToH?

It's a shame BIS will likely never get a chance to fix this stuff. =/

[max power 21]

I changed the controls in take on.

I should also say I confirmed your bug that the mv-22 likes to float using the analogue throttle and brake controls.