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Helicopter physics impressions - simplified

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How could a more realistic FM break Missions? :confused:

Please elaborate.

I believe what he means is that if the FM is changed that it it effect handling and timing in missions causing them not to run as planed, plus the TOH flight model adds more stress to the engine :(

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I think some people forget the feeling of satisfaction that comes with accomplishment of something difficult...aaanywho, is it my imagination or do some of the helo's not seem to accelerate as fast now? (which would be a good thing)

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My current issue with the helicopter flight physics are they appear to not represent G-Loading in the horizontal (lateral) anymore. In other words, I recall being able to (as in real-life) do a sharp turn to bleed off extra speed in order to slow down quickly. My last flight in the Blackfoot (AH-99) failed to slow down significantly, and in some cases INCREASED airspeed in a turn! If you simply pull up while decreasing collective it still slows down quickly, but not in a high-G turn. Doing a break-turn in both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft have the same general effect, and are OFTEN used as standard practice for slowing down quickly.

Just curious if this is going to be addressed?

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The FM for choppers is horrible. Compare flying a chopper in ARMAIII with FSX or DCS, especially DCS (the Huey is a good example). When I drop the collective I expect the loss of lift to result in an almost instantaneous nose drop (taking into account the effect of autorotation) however the ARMAIII chopper just stays where it is. This definitely needs to be fixed.

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How could a more realistic FM break Missions? :confused:

Please elaborate.

What ric said; DnA implied that missions were designed around a less realistic flight model and that they would not 'bother' with redesigning the missions around a TKOH-style FM (as opposed to whatever FM changes they are implementing).

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I think they probably design missions with a certain level of difficulty in mind. I think maybe that putting in the more complex flight model increases the difficulty of the missions quite a bit, especially only landings, especially if the frame rate really dives when you're landing in a crowded area like it does in Take On.

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I don't think a more realistic flight model necessarily has to = more difficult.

There are some things that are more difficult now b/c of the unrealistic flight model.

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Hello

i've got a question about controls:

when controlling helis with proper flighsticks, you can map "throttle" to your hardware "thrust lever". is there a way to map this absolute throttle behavior to keyboard? i play with keyboard mostly and i hate it, that on keybard you have this "relative" throttle, where you basically can go "up" and "down" but there is no absolute "amount" of throttle. you basically keep pressing Q to make sure, you are going 100%. i would like a way to choose an absolute amount of thrust.

it's difficult to describe. hope you know what i mean! this is bugging me since the original ofp, but i never dared to ask.

I feel it is somehow flight model related, because it ruins the perceived realism of the FM, even if it is technically only about controls.

Edited by twistking

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I don't think a more realistic flight model necessarily has to = more difficult.

There are some things that are more difficult now b/c of the unrealistic flight model.

The Take On flight model is harder than the ArmA 3 one. But, I'm curious, what realistic flight model could be easier than arma 3's? It's not like ArmA 3's flight model is difficult. I guess what I mean is, how would you increase the realism of the flight model but make it easier? You can't be talking about blade stalls, vortex ring state, translating tendency, p effect, torque and thrust imbalances, and other quirks of helicopter flight, because they makes flight harder. What makes it easier but more realistic?

Edited by Max Power

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The only thing that comes to my mind being more difficult because of the unrealistic flight model is rotation, actually: yaw (only for the MH-9/AH-9), and especially roll, for all helicopters, is way too unresponsive.

In real life, if you were to quickly tilt the stick to the left, the helicopter would bank pretty quickly. In Arma, however, things take a looong time, which makes adjusting attitude difficult (and makes it almost impossible to dodge/break/maneuver).

Adding simulation of vortex ring state or anything that Max Power said would most definitely add more difficulty, which isn't a bad thing as the current flight model is really easy to fly (compared to real life/simulators, and even just considered on its own).

Ah, one thing from real life that would make it easier: bringing autorotations back!

It's been around 2 months that they're broken now, I would really appreciate them to be fixed.

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The only thing that comes to my mind being more difficult because of the unrealistic flight model is rotation, actually: yaw (only for the MH-9/AH-9), and especially roll, for all helicopters, is way too unresponsive.

I haven't flown all helis since I can't stand current FM but for MH-9/AH-9 I would add the rapid loss of lift when dropping your analog collective. Just fly around a bit (using HOTAS) and look at the vertical velocity indicator and try to stay at the same altitude, you will see the needle jumping erraticly around 0 for every little altitude correction you do.

This also makes it impossible to do smooth landnings when using analog collective (I've spent hours trying to tweak the curve) and you end up breaking your skids most of the time.

/KC

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Hello

i've got a question about controls:

when controlling helis with proper flighsticks, you can map "throttle" to your hardware "thrust lever". is there a way to map this absolute throttle behavior to keyboard? i play with keyboard mostly and i hate it, that on keybard you have this "relative" throttle, where you basically can go "up" and "down" but there is no absolute "amount" of throttle. you basically keep pressing Q to make sure, you are going 100%. i would like a way to choose an absolute amount of thrust.

it's difficult to describe. hope you know what i mean! this is bugging me since the original ofp, but i never dared to ask.

I feel it is somehow flight model related, because it ruins the perceived realism of the FM, even if it is technically only about controls.

Asking myself the same and hope that maybe someone might be able to answer this .

Pretty please with icing on top ?

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Hello

i've got a question about controls:

when controlling helis with proper flighsticks, you can map "throttle" to your hardware "thrust lever". is there a way to map this absolute throttle behavior to keyboard? i play with keyboard mostly and i hate it, that on keybard you have this "relative" throttle, where you basically can go "up" and "down" but there is no absolute "amount" of throttle. you basically keep pressing Q to make sure, you are going 100%. i would like a way to choose an absolute amount of thrust.

it's difficult to describe. hope you know what i mean! this is bugging me since the original ofp, but i never dared to ask.

I feel it is somehow flight model related, because it ruins the perceived realism of the FM, even if it is technically only about controls.

could be made like the Mouse-WHeel speed control of the game: Splinter Cell 1.

the same also would be cool for driving vehicles to set a speed - and not having to press W / E or Q for only 3 speeds...

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i hope this is an appropriate place to further discuss this issue!?

Mouse-wheel throttle would be cool, but for helicopters (and planes) two buttons would be sufficient. One for increasing throttle, one for decreasing throttle. Perhaps additional keys for defined throttle values. (10% 50% 100%)

we would also need a representation of throttle in the HUD and on the cockpit MFDs and/or in the generic arma UI.

i think this would tremendously improve the flight experience for the keyboard-crowd.

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at least the predefined values keys could be altered via mouse wheel. sometimes its important to have 3 speeds set around 80-95% sometimes around 30 - 45 etc etc...

the thing is: mouse wheel is just a quick way to do incremental value changes on the fly (pun intended) without having to use the left hand nad letting go control.. its just more intuitive.

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Have you tried binding scroll wheel to analog throttle? In recent DEV branch update, they changed the way digital collective works when mapped to gamepad axis (previously, it was unplayable with collective on gamepad axis, because you would drop unless you held the gamepad up as it interpreted the center position as 0 collective, instead of the "autocollective" keyboard has). Perhaps the change had improved scroll wheel collective as well? I can't test it myself, no A3 access ATM, but try playing with assigning scroll wheel to either digital collective or analog collective. You can obviously unbind the scroll wheel from action menu and use ],[ keys for that. Also, there is this GlovePIE script somebody made back in Arma2 that emulated the scroll wheel into analog axis for throttle - should be on the forums if you search for glovepie.

As to heli FM, I can't get anything else than xH-9 into a nose-down funnel. I know these heavier helis should not be so agile, but at least a wide nose-down funnel should be somewhat possible, or what do the simmers here think?

Same with hard breaking to side to lose forward speed - it was way too easy in A2 with any medium heli (to the extent the airframe/rotor would probably overload in RL) - now it's the other way around, almost impossible, the medium helis seem to behave more like a Hind in attack run to me.

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action menu not on mouse wheel? sry unpossible :) used to it since OFP.

All I want is a modifier key, when I press it -> all mouse wheel action goes into speed change and not Action menu..

For example: [shift] + MWheel-Up / MWheel-Down alters the SPeed for [W].

so while driving (holding [W]) - you can [shift]+MWheel-Up --> faster speed (still holding [W]). when u let go [W] and start driving again [pressing[W] again) its the speed that has been set before.

I mean mouse wheel not a auto drive but as incremential speed control. while holding [W] you can alter all day long and drive slow / fast etc - but when you let go [W] thje car stops - alter ing now just sets the speed for later when you start again driving (pressing [W]).

If you we want cruise control we could add just another button / function somewhere else.

anyway this speed change incremential with mouse Wheel can be used for: walking / driving / flying speeds (ok Helicopter not speed but thrust)

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The Take On flight model is harder than the ArmA 3 one. But, I'm curious, what realistic flight model could be easier than arma 3's? It's not like ArmA 3's flight model is difficult. I guess what I mean is, how would you increase the realism of the flight model but make it easier? You can't be talking about blade stalls, vortex ring state, translating tendency, p effect, torque and thrust imbalances, and other quirks of helicopter flight, because they makes flight harder. What makes it easier but more realistic?

Basically what Cykyrios said. The Helis are currently very unresponsive. That makes it hard/impossible to do or to abort certain maneuvers. They also loose height very slowly even when you hold collective down wich makes low&rapid insertions almost impossible. So giving them a better responsiveness would indeed make the game more realistic&easier. But impossible stuff like flying upside down for a minute should be impossible.

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to be honest i found tkoh helicopters quite responsive and able to do some amazing manuevers. I installed TKOarma and the fact that the flight model seemed more 'true' made me try what i thought would be smarter manouvers but also accomplish more because the heli responds like it 'feels' it should.

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Basically what Cykyrios said. The Helis are currently very unresponsive. That makes it hard/impossible to do or to abort certain maneuvers. They also loose height very slowly even when you hold collective down wich makes low&rapid insertions almost impossible. So giving them a better responsiveness would indeed make the game more realistic&easier. But impossible stuff like flying upside down for a minute should be impossible.

Exactly. It's all about the responsiveness. It was great in Alpha, especially MH-9 and AH-9 were a pleasure to fly because their flight model was actually pretty nice (in my opinion). The delay between movement of the stick and the response to that in game was very good, about 20-40 ms probably at 40 FPS. The response curve (if that's the correct therm) felt really good as well with MH-9 and AH-9, loved flying them in Alpha. Maintaining the control input lag at minimum with nice response curve is really crucial, because in order to keep the chopper in control properly you need to do small corrections multiple times per second with your stick. If the input lag of controls is any higher, it feels really sluggish and decreases the accuracy of your maneuvers remarkably. Learning to fly the choppers is really not that hard even with the Alpha flight model – people should just watch the tutorials and most importantly go to editor and simply practice the difficult things like hovering and smooth landing till they're programmed into their spines. That doesn't take much time really.

Agreed also that the descend speed should be much higher with collective down, insertions are unrealistically hard now with most of the choppers because you have to fly at very low speed or make several circles to kill your speed during insertion. Additionally, some choppers seem to have not inertia at all (eg. PO-30 Orca) and killing their speed is really hard – U-turns and circles don't decrease speed at all – on the other hand we know that they're WIP and that the flight models will be improved in future.

Edited by Ezcoo

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So far I very much like flying in ARMA 3, I have to use a mixture of joystick and keyboard to get steady controls with pedal left and right assigned as A,D.

It would be cool if i had one of those Saitek X52 Pro's, that way I could map pedal left and right + freelook with the thrust stick.

Landing seems to be a little difficult, auto hover makes it a little easier at the moment, even then touching down takes a while.

First day playing ARMA still have much to learn.

- Strannix

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Basically what Cykyrios said. The Helis are currently very unresponsive. That makes it hard/impossible to do or to abort certain maneuvers. They also loose height very slowly even when you hold collective down wich makes low&rapid insertions almost impossible. So giving them a better responsiveness would indeed make the game more realistic&easier. But impossible stuff like flying upside down for a minute should be impossible.

Okay, so it's not really a flight model thing so much as a control authority thing.

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the flight control seem to be quite WIP at the moment. just recently some tickets popped up at the issue tracker describing problems or bugs with analogue controls. i did not read throgh them, because i'm a keyboard-pilot most of the time;)

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Okay, so it's not really a flight model thing so much as a control authority thing.

Well not entirely, The Alpha FM was good in terms of responsiveness but it still had serious problems.

-Helicopters picked up speed to fast and even in turns and stuff

-You could do unrealistic maneuvers without consequences (like flying upside down for some minutes)

-Completely impossible to loose hight and speed at the same time (This is still a problem)

So it is both a control authority and a FM Problem (I use M+K, by the way.)

Compared to what we have now and to what we had in the Alpha, Arma 2 has the superior helicopter handling.

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also auto-rotate seems to be broken/missing at the moment.

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