UH-60M Interactive Blackhawk
A fully interactive Blackhawk for Arma 3
By Hatchet team
Discord: https://discord.gg/E3neUNMFc5
Background
In the past year, RiverX and I have spent a lot of time working on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, trying to push its realism as far as we could get within the restrictions of arma.
As we learned about what Arma can and can not do, and what we can and can not do, we started thinking about a new project that would allow us to put on a lot more polish and detail.
In February we started work on this new project, and today we've decided to start sharing some progress with the community.
Description
With this mod we aim to implement a highly realistic and immersive UH-60M Blackhawk, with some other minor variants possibly added in the future. Our aim is to add in-depth custom interaction with the aircraft for all 4 crew positions, to turn operating the aircraft in to a real team effort.
As of now, all interaction seen in the startup video is multicrew compatible, meaning the copilot and pilot can take turns pushing buttons and flipping switches however they like, and it'll work as it's supposed to.
Media
Vehicle Interaction
As you can see in the video, we've already managed to get a good portion of the startup procedure functional. If you look closely you can notice that every interaction is followed by a little hand icon being attached to the interaction, along with the name of the person who performed the action, this allows you to see where other crew members are interacting with the vehicle, so you can intuitively know what everyone is doing, this can of course be turned off.
For Mod Developers
The vehicle interaction system is in no way hard coded for the Blackhawk, it is implemented as a completely separate vehicle interaction framework, allowing switches, buttons and animated knobs/levers to be defined completely through the vehicle's (cfgVehicles) config, and we'll be releasing this framework separately with detailed documentation, to bring simple interactive vehicles to the whole arma community.
The way forward
As for release, for now all we can say is "it's ready when it's ready". We intend to release the blackhawk in feature packs, releasing updates with for example FMS functionality, or FLIR functionality.
We hope to start finding community groups who can help us do testing within the next couple months.
We'd also like to take this chance to reach out to anyone with experience operating the UH-60M in real life. We are currently looking for people with real life experience to advise us on getting some of the features down.