Helicopter Feedback (Dev branch)

[twisted 128]

Just a quick note - please avoid discussing helicopter flight simulation in here and consider creating a new thread. (However I can't promise any further improvements (except rly major issues) in that field. You may also find some more information about the previous process in http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?147740-Helicopter-physics-impressions-simplified or http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?159764-Recent-Helo-Changes-Unflyable )

The thread creation may also apply to the Electronic Warfare (radarz n stuff) subject.

Thanks a lot guys and keep the feedback coming!

i loved TKOH (and TKOH HINDS a ton) and i sadly understand that level of detail flight model isnt coming to arma3. But there are elements/ touches that i'd truly like to see. these are things that id hope would be seen as pretty damn important for getting the helicopter feel right.

Torque on collective raise and lower. that needs to be controlled/offset by pedals.

faster loss of height when reducing power substantially.

some sort of ground effect.

heli more reactive (size and weight dependant) to input.

physx implemented on aircraft impacts. right now its very clunky and an impact often just has the heli fall straight down. my pretty shitty flying should generate more spectaular crashes. (not that major but would help the game feel as modern as it deserves)

-------------------

in my very limited experience just those things would go a very long way to making the heli part much more immersive.

thanks for one of the great games and the recent hard work you all have put into improving it a lot.

Edited March 21, 2014 by twisted

[izaiak 1]

A guy is modifying files to make a mod to increase helicopter flight.

The first release is for the little bird. If BIS don't have the time to do it, help modder like this guy to achieve their mod and to do something great. Why integrate this mod to your game after ?

both of Players & BI studio will be winner.

+1 for physX integration.

Edited March 21, 2014 by izaiak

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

After work today, i'm going to show some flying skills with helicopters, and i would love to see feedback on how that flying resembles input, and how it could be improved.

[RushHour 11]

My problem as a keyboard user the is the throttle/brake input.

A visual meter showing 0-100% throttle would be the best option. That way if you put the throttle at 60% it´s gonna stay at 60% throttle all the time until you decide to push the button some more and get 100% or back of the throttle.

So the throttle input is decided based on how long you pushed the button.

It will be just like a HOTAS where you decide with your hand how much throttle you will apply and it will never move until you decide to move your hand to increase or decrease power.

[CaptainAzimuth 714]

As a Keyboard + Mouse user myself, with both jets and HELO's throttle are the same, with no percentage, just Thrust. no Thrust, and negative Thrust values. In other words, when your flying, you press Q, that means 100%. When you stop adding thrust, this now means, it doesn't stay at 100%, rather, it stays at what ever thrust necessary to keep you at your current speed, in a straight line. Same with both HELO and plane. The HELO can stay at what ever height your at without adding thrust, because in a way, it is sort of auto altitude.

[RushHour 11]

Yep i know all of that already. You can vote on the plane helicopter controls in my signature as well, i think it´s best if they are separated as intended.

[Doombell 10]

My problem as a keyboard user the is the throttle/brake input.

A visual meter showing 0-100% throttle would be the best option. That way if you put the throttle at 60% it´s gonna stay at 60% throttle all the time until you decide to push the button some more and get 100% or back of the throttle.

So the throttle input is decided based on how long you pushed the button.

It will be just like a HOTAS where you decide with your hand how much throttle you will apply and it will never move until you decide to move your hand to increase or decrease power.

While I agree that keyboard controls could probably use some more precision for aircraft (trying to take off in the fixed wing showcase before giving up and pluggin my joystick back in involved a lot of precision throttle tapping during taxi), it DOES approximate how a modern autopilot aided system would work. I am saying this from the limited experience of DCS Black Shark, but at least in that you set a target altitude and the autopilot simply gets a partial override of your current input to try to achieve this.

A pure rotor angle input would lead to even more control input as this would likely lead to your altitude gain/loss being even more dependent on height and speed, and end up with you having to micromanage your upward acceleration.

I don't suppose anyone knows what all these offset/coefficient or whatever values added to the newer revisions mean? Do they allow further configuration of the effectiveness of anti-torque or other controls between airframes or are they about how speed effects them?

Edited March 21, 2014 by Doombell

[gonza 8]

I pilot choppers with Mouse and keyboard.

the biggest problem for me is the that helicopter drops too slowly when collective is decreased

A simple modification cool be to add a key to increase some control commands power ("Shift" for example) (for collective en pedal)

a feedback is open since 2013-03-07

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=1970

Quick stop without gain altitude in real life !

In arma now it's possible but not as easy as in real life.

In real lift when you decrease the collective the chopper drop instantly (not 20 sec after like in arma).

In combat, it is really important to be able to stop without gain altitude because you must stay under the radar coverage.

Edited March 22, 2014 by gonza

[RushHour 11]

it DOES approximate how a modern autopilot aided system would work.

It does when you have absolutely no input and just let the aircraft fly straight. If you make a banking it will take over the throttle so you need to keep that pressed to maintain throttle when you bank out.

This just doesn´t happen in real life. If you set the throttle to 60% in real life that´s gonna stay at 60% throttle regardless of what you are doing. The speed might change but the throttle input will not.

---------- Post added at 16:24 ---------- Previous post was at 16:20 ----------

Also another thing that i can confess i haven´t tested yet but is regarding the blackbird or whatever they call it in the game. The Apache´s cousin.

I saw a documentary and it has the ability to turn the chopper 90 degrees while still maintaining the same flight path. Think it was 100mph or km/h where it could snap left and stay there. Was pretty remarkable.

It was quick too in the manouver itself. Someone with more knowledge about the chopper could probably chime in on that.

[Doombell 10]

If you set the throttle to 60% in real life that´s gonna stay at 60% throttle regardless of what you are doing. The speed might change but the throttle input will not.

Actually, it sort of will, in an assisted system, which I think is a fair assumption of any of these modern helis. Your collective setting will simply have a range around the 60% setting that the autopilot would override to set you to for example 68% when under target altitude or 54% when over. The problem is that for keyboard control, there is ONLY the equivalent of a target altitude setting, with an actual manual input being abstracted completely.

In the sort of system I describe you could (even though it would generally be considered bad flying) just set the manual collective input far enough away from the autopilot's desired range that you get something like un-assisted flight, but offset a bit by the autopilot countering with its maximum input. For this game it is just as if the autopilot has an unlimited range. For a fly-by-wire aircraft this would probably be closer to how it works, but I don't know if any helicopters use a system like that, or if you would want them to.

The assisted flight method is generally a good thing for anything but harsher manoeuvres (not sure if it's worth implementing for manual inputs like joysticks in Arma scale terrains, or if that is even possible), but it could use some behaviour for severe changes, like holding ctrl+collective up/down (I think ctrl is free while in vehicles?) to simply max it out in either direction and set target altitude to where you end up when you let go.

As for the comanche's snap turn ability it has been mentioned quite a lot in the tail rotor discussions, and I believe the ducted fan design is what gives it more torque authority, even at speed (I think the funny little tilt could even be to direct forward airflow or downward airflow from the main rotor through the fan, or at least part of it). A lot of people seem to think this means it can keep flying at high speed sideways though, which sounds quite unreasonable to me, and as far as I can tell has never been stated by the sources people use. I was hoping this was what those coefficient values would give better control of, since I believe all helis have a very sharp cutoff to torque right now at a certain speed.

[RushHour 11]

Actually, it sort of will, in an assisted system, which I think is a fair assumption of any of these modern helis. Your collective setting will simply have a range around the 60% setting that the autopilot would override to set you to for example 68% when under target altitude or 54% when over.

I doubt any of these helicopters will override the manual control of a helicopter just so it can decide what throttle input should be used in regular flight. I´m not talking about banking over the safety limit or hitting the G roof in jets.

The helicopter won´t back down on the throttle by itself, it´s you who decides how much throttle you want and how little you want. With Keyboard it doesn´t do that, only with HOTAS.

Problem would be solved if the keyboard acted just like a HOTAS but instead of axis position you have a visual display of it and through the amount of time you push the key. Total control over the engine, as it should be.

[Doombell 10]

I doubt any of these helicopters will override the manual control of a helicopter just so it can decide what throttle input should be used in regular flight.

I think you are vastly overestimating how desirable full control is. If any particular heli would have autopilot for collective or not is harder to say (UH-60 seems to only have the systems connected to attitude control, while the CH-47 does seem to have it.), but having this vary between aircraft would probably be very unfriendly to beginners.

A bit of searching seems to suggest any newer aircraft either already have these systems, are being upgraded to them, or are even planned for upgrades to full fly-by-wire (Apparently the Comanche was supposed to be the start of these upgrades, but the cancellation delayed it. Articles were a few years old, not sure what the current state is), which would potentially have even greater degrees of assistance.

The problem isn't in there being flight assistance, the problem is in either our capabilities for input (the altitude target changes too slowly), how rigid the system is (it's possible it simply doesn't let an aircraft descend beyond a certain speed) and/or the properties of the aircraft (I am not sure if the lift at zero collective is low enough, but I haven't seen any extensive tests on these things.).

It is also possible that most of the values are reasonable, but clash with the lower scale of terrains in the game.

[RushHour 11]

I think you are vastly overestimating how desirable full control is.

Not really. Just want it to work as it should, and does with a HOTAS.

[Doombell 10]

All I see your proposed change doing is moving the problem to another place, where it is harder to deal with.

Instead of an altitude hold system that is too slow, you would get an upward acceleration system that is too slow.

You could use a controller emulator like Glovepie to test out exactly the control you suggest if you want to try it, though. All you need is an axis bound to increase or decrease from your collective up/down keys bound to collective.

[RushHour 11]

And i don´t see how you can see problems in something that quite obviously fixes the problem. Creating a virtual axis for the keys replicating a HOTAS.

Hell i might take one for the mouse as well, would stop the whole forward nudging all the time.

[izaiak 1]

+1 , need more really HOTAS control, but adapt it to keyboard : push A button, increase % of throttle, push B button decrease % of throttle ( or collective for helicopter ).

Stop to be limited by "few mouse gamers". In this way, don't give us the ability to flight and let only AI able to fly ...

[RushHour 11]

Maybe you could even use the scroll wheel, that would perhaps be slightly closer in feel to a hotas setup then pushing buttons down.

[nodunit 397]

Funny thing is that TKOH's flight model has a system wherein you increase collective by a % rather 0 to 100, by raising or lowering the collective you would see an icon moving up and down based on how long you hold it and it wouldn't move outside of flight influences, this system behaved like that for mouse and keyboard and also meshed well with joysticks.

[twisted 128]

Funny thing is that TKOH's flight model has a system wherein you increase collective by a % rather 0 to 100, by raising or lowering the collective you would see an icon moving up and down based on how long you hold it and it wouldn't move outside of flight influences, this system behaved like that for mouse and keyboard and also meshed well with joysticks.

TKOH did many things right - after a few shaky starts. What confuses me is that BIS must have these guys with the hard earned experience they gained making TKOH and TKOH HINDS. that kind of experience should help them really make the helicopters pretty awesome and implment things like that collective system you mention eaiser (though i only used joystick and throttle so i have no idea about keyboard percentage based collective)

[nodunit 397]

Nobody can say for sure except BI themselves, and we know they won't.

Some say its about difficulty to the player and that the added layer would influence how the missions had to be layed out, and yet TKOH had an excellent set of difficulty options, the lowest being everything performing the same way Arma 2 did save for a few small changes such as the collective input which was for the better, all the way up to wind and drag influence right up to needing to trim your aircraft and keeping your hand on the cyclic and pedals pressed to counter the torque.

Not to mention that people only play higher difficulties to challenge themselves in different ways...if you took two people, one with the easiest setting and one with the most difficult and told them both to rocket strafe a convoy of trucks whilst avoiding a barriage of small arms fire then chances are the person on the higher difficulty would not ask you to line the trucks closer together to make things easier on them.

Others say it would have been performance and while this is sort of understandable, I've heard the arguement that janes longbow was able to use a system like this waaay back when hardware was far far more limited..its not exactly a fully fair comparison as we're using two different engines with different methods, it does make one wonder just how true this statement really is...

Others have speculated licensing, cost and time issues, time being a very plausible one considering "the great revamp" that Arma 3 seems to have gone through, or perhaps it was the time it took to impliment physX? For example why did we see the Ifrit and Hunter so early in development and yet physX testing for them began many months later during alpha? Who can say..

I can't blame BI for it entirerly however, the community was pretty well split when what was essentially a committee discussion came up, with many speaking for and against it..shame to because the way the implimentation was done in TKOH offered a chance to make both parties happy but instead hindered the opportunity to advance.

Edited March 25, 2014 by NodUnit

[gatordev 219]

As usual, NodUnit makes some good points. Couple that with some people that think a military helicopter is the hardest thing in the world to fly and won't be happy unless you have to spend all your time moving all your controls at once, and it gets complicated. That may very well be fun for some (and that's okay!), but it doesn't necessarily make it realistic. Then there's another group that appreciates the simulation aspect of BIS games, but still wants to have fun and focus on the task at hand. It may still take some skill to do whatever that task is (marksmanship, flying an aircraft, etc), but it doesn't need to be the end all focus to be "fun." It's a complicated equation BIS has to take into account.

All that said, don't think because it's a military helicopter, all your energy should be directed towards the flying part. I can't speak for a Commanche (though I'm guessing it's AFCS was pretty damn good) or Apache, but I can tell you I can hover a H-60 with one hand and no feet while smoothly moving the collective up in down. A lot of the work that many want in-game isn't there in the real world, for good reason. An exception would of course be something like the H-6, but even then, you get far more feedback in the real world to make control movements second nature than you do in a computer game (or even a multimillion dollar simulator).

I've been away from A3 for several weeks due to RL stuff, but from what I saw before, things could be better, but they don't have to be at the TKOH level. I would have far more fun flying a A2 helo in-game than I usually do in TKOH (something I've mentioned to Franze while testing one of his and Nod's creations) and I say that as someone who does this for a living. But I understand we each have our own standard of fun.

[Tonci87 163]

I don´t get it why so mayn people think that helicopters (especially military ones) are hard to fly IRL. Actually it is supposed to be damn easy (the basic stuff) after some practise and in good weather.

[nodunit 397]

Depends on your experience..and a lot of other things irl. By now we'd probably call the flight model in Arma 2 easy but there are people out there that have difficulty with the basic concept of pitching down means losing altitude without collective input, I've seen people say that DCS FM sucked and that Crysis (1) has the best flight model, and that was literally a gliding type model, battlefield 2..hell battlefield 3 had more environmental influence.

[izaiak 1]

many people think to know things .... But they are not at all xD

[twisted 128]

no one is saying hard for hard sake is worthy or asking for hardest levels of difficuly. far from it. but right now its pretty simplified to its bare bones. and there are characteritics of flying a heli that just arent modelled here. pretty fundamental things too. that i hope bis might consider looking at ( after bipods and weapoon resting of course :) )