optional alternative flight model

[xnodunitx 0]

Thats because people want it to be easy so that anyone can do it.

I myself downloaded the earlier demo and the US demo and I didn't have any trouble piloting at all..well..on the US demo I had to take a bit more time to get used to the controls, if you start using the mouse and not the keyboard, it tends to be alot easier people.

And for the love of...stop with the helicopter sim, tank sim and all that.

No Armed Assault is not a tank or helicopter sim but it is the midgrounds, you can do much more with your vehicles with this engine than you can others.

You can have operational horizons, scripted, scripted maps, scripted image display which shows the weapons your vehicle is carrying and if you want to get complicated, accurate counters that can count when any sinigle weapon is fired or reloaded.

Plus you can have damage systems so the vehicle is not "just a vehicle" but something more.

In modern fps games, sure you have great graphics, but in a vehicle, is there really alot of danger when you are in a tank and an AT missle/rocket hits the front or side? Okay it does alittle more or alittle less damage..thats nice, here you have to worry about a tread going out, the main gun being damaged and unusable. And it can go even further. T

ake Franze's AH-64's for example (And no this is not self advertisement, I would use another vehicle for reference to sound less up tight but I have yet to see one with the same "abilities") You don't have to worry about "just being shot down", you have to worry about one or both engines going out, main rotor, tail rotor, weapon pylons, chaingun, landing gear enforcement, fuel, all around its just a hell of alot more interactive because the engine allows it, you can't do that in anything other than a sim from what I'v seen, and "Simulator" apparently doesn't mean what it used to, apache air assault doesn't count, and what did it have to fail? Engines, thats it.

Aside from this you can also have particles comming from an object when a certain "action" is unlocked, engines smoking when damaged, speed as well as the inability to ascend, and so on.

Now again, working gauges and instruments, failing tail rotors and so on. Another reason Armed Assault is midgrounds is because it has a good looking enviroment, take a look at any sim, the enviroment is very..retro, even Lock On- Black Shark, a helicopter sim with all its acheivements, has a crappy enviroment yet oddly enough greatly detailed tanks...hm..

So all in all, Armed Assault is not a sim to a specific title but infact a half sim to all, the users have the ability to make it more realistic and more balanced if they choose, helicopter controls, every helicopter, infact any vehicle can be given difference masses at different key points, effecting how that vehicle performs so that no one is the same.

And if you are having trouble flying...sorry to hear that, guess you'll just have to do what we all did and practice. Wether or not the controls are realistic I cannot say as I do not know from personal experience, but it seems this is a subject we'll never be able to agree with. But once the tools are released it may be possible to modify some things to change the way this works. Who knows, guess we'll find out.

[seba1976 98]

This feeling you all seem to have, that you are a large number, is risible. Do you think BIS is changing everything, including the FM, so radically, because 1 or 2 people are "ranting" about it? Stop defending BIS! They don't need that, they need to hear what we think about what they are needing to sell. If BIS is changing things it is because they thankfuly do not clasify all this as "blah blah blah". So you are in nowhere land, BIS is hearing us, you are defending every single decision they make. That is useless to a developer.

The fact that I had to "pop up", after being mostly silent in the forum for years, is out of deception, and to try to help. So, all in all, ArmA has divided the house against itself. You could see that coming. If they touched the core parts of OFP and realism change for any side, the community would experience a division. They said ArmA was going to be a revamped OFP, but they get hungry and changed what they didn't have to. Now we have to have all this "debates" about if we like it or not. Why should they had to change what it was unique, simple, and succeeded? OFP took some people from the gaming community, and some others from the sim community, and created a huge fan base that ArmA is tearing apart. I don't see no reason for leaving OFP and take ArmA, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Take it as you want.

[4 IN 1 0]

This feeling you all seem to have, that you are a large number, is risible. Do you think BIS is changing everything, including the FM, so radically, because 1 or 2 people are "ranting" about it? Stop defending BIS! They don't need that, they need to hear what we think about what they are needing to sell. If BIS is changing things it is because they thankfuly do not clasify all this as "blah blah blah". So you are in nowhere land, BIS is hearing us, you are defending every single decision they make. That is useless to a developer.

The fact that I had to "pop up", after being mostly silent in the forum for years, is out of deception, and to try to help. So, all in all, ArmA has divided the house against itself. You could see that coming. If they touched the core parts of OFP and realism change for any side, the community would experience a division. They said ArmA was going to be a revamped OFP, but they get hungry and changed what they didn't have to. Now we have to have all this "debates" about if we like it or not. Why should they had to change what it was unique, simple, and succeeded? OFP took some people from the gaming community, and some others from the sim community, and created a huge fan base that ArmA is tearing apart. I don't see no reason for leaving OFP and take ArmA, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Take it as you want.

i think you might need to reread most of the post saying what BI have done worng b4 adding such kind of comment, point is, if BI done something wrong, we told them how it is wrong, hoping that they change them, in a good way, we want the game get moving about, not stuck in the same old problem without improvement, you may say that ArmA tearing apart, but it only happen when ppl dont want to move.

so the same old word(and i dunno how many times i have say the same b4) :realistic FM doesnt mean it is hard to fly

BTW i use blah blah blah so that i dont have to quote the hold damn post making it more easier to read(interjection you may call), if you think its offending you(in which case i would use a single "blaaaahhhhhh"), so be that

[max power 21]

This feeling you all seem to have, that you are a large number, is risible. Do you think BIS is changing everything, including the FM, so radically, because 1 or 2 people are "ranting" about it? Stop defending BIS! They don't need that, they need to hear what we think about what they are needing to sell. If BIS is changing things it is because they thankfuly do not clasify all this as "blah blah blah". So you are in nowhere land, BIS is hearing us, you are defending every single decision they make. That is useless to a developer.

The fact that I had to "pop up", after being mostly silent in the forum for years, is out of deception, and to try to help. So, all in all, ArmA has divided the house against itself. You could see that coming. If they touched the core parts of OFP and realism change for any side, the community would experience a division. They said ArmA was going to be a revamped OFP, but they get hungry and changed what they didn't have to. Now we have to have all this "debates" about if we like it or not. Why should they had to change what it was unique, simple, and succeeded? OFP took some people from the gaming community, and some others from the sim community, and created a huge fan base that ArmA is tearing apart. I don't see no reason for leaving OFP and take ArmA, and I'm not the only one who feels that way. Take it as you want.

Let us not forget that this is a discussion forum, and you'll always find someone to disagree with you on pretty much anything. This includes reactions to BIS's changes to the game.

I've never had a problem controlling the helicopters in the game. I've crashed a few times, and it took me a while to be able to land in a helipad circle without autopilot, but I'm better now with this FM than I was with years of playing ofp and its FM!

I think if you had the same experience with it that you would probably tend to agree. I am curious, what is your framerate when you are attempting to fly? I found from the first demo that low framerates make things extremely difficult.

[seba1976 98]

My FPS while flying goes from 35 to around 50, I would say 40 for the most part. I had a nice picture for this but for the life of me I do not know how to insert it here.

[max power 21]

My FPS while flying goes from 35 to around 50, I would say 40 for the most part. I had a nice picture for this but for the life of me I do not know how to insert it here.

Well then that is certainly not part if your difficulty.

edit: you have to host it and hotlink to it. Remember that there is a limit for hotlinked images: they must be under 100 kb or you might get a warning level!

[seba1976 98]

so the same old word(and i dunno how many times i have say the same b4) :realistic FM doesnt mean it is hard to fly  

There is a problem with the definition of "hard". Would a RL pilot say that flying a helicopter is hard? I really don't know. What I know is that I'd surelly say that flying a RL helicopter would be imposible for me without proper practice. Maybe it is that once you learn something it is not too hard for you anymore. Coming back to topic, I can do now most anything you want me to with ArmA helicopters - without a Joystick - but as I predicted, it will always require more concentration. The workload is gonna be heavier from now on. The fly doesn't look natural, the chopper moves weird, but it takes me where I want to go, most of the time in one piece. It is all that workload what is it, in my opinion, out of place here, no matter how many corrections they can do to ArmA. Is my point clear enough now? You enjoy the extra workload, I don't, RL pilots neither. Let's leave alone the current and the yet to be born FMs. To me the current one is not natural, for you, it is. If I compare a video from RL helicopters against a video from me flying a helicopter in ArmA, they do not look alike. With Flashpoint, the two vids would look very similar, despite the FM being so simple. For me, it was a bad decision from BIS, end of story.

[seba1976 98]

you have to host it and hotlink to it.  Remember that there is a limit for hotlinked images: they must be under 100 kb or you might get a warning level!

Thanks plaintiff, just for the record, what's the most used host to post here?

[max power 21]

They use all kinds... photobucket... imageshack... you can take a cruise through the arma photography thread to get an idea of what people are using.

[4 IN 1 0]

.....

how define if it is hard? well atless we wont be able to know if we didnt even try, thats whats all about

to clear myself, the FM lacks the general characteristic as from day 1 which is why current FM(even till now with the damned demo FM) creating extra workload that normally you wont have to think of even for real life chopper pilot.

as i said, realistic FM doesnt mean it is hard to fly, but you dont need it to be ulter realistic that you put every single details into it to make them impractical too, balance out what is too much, left those you want, then you have a FM that many ppls like

[seba1976 98]

.....

how define if it is hard? well atless we wont be able to know if we didnt even try, thats whats all about

to clear myself, the FM lacks the general characteristic as from day 1 which is why current FM(even till now with the damned demo FM) creating extra workload that normally you wont have to think of even for real life chopper pilot.

as i said, realistic FM doesnt mean it is hard to fly, but you dont need it to be ulter realistic that you put every single details into it to make them impractical too, balance out what is too much, left those you want, then you have a FM that many ppls like

A "realistic" FM tends to take a longer learning time, and you generally crashed most of that time - unless you have some previous experience. That's generally refered to as "harder", when compared to simplified ones. You cannot say that Enemy Engage is not "harder" to fly than OFP. You cannot compare Gunship with MS Flight Simulator X and say that later is not harder than the other.

As long as fixed wings aircraft goes, it's generally less evident, specially with modern jet simulators - and once you're in the air. But as soon as you try to land, or even take off, you simply won't do it unless you are instructed how. In FSs like IL-2 series, you'll even have a hard time trying to take off. Landing is always "hard" if the flight model is less permisive, even for real pilots in RL - depending on the aircraft, of course.

So if you have experienced all this, read about it, or even hear real or virtual pilots talk about it, you cannot really say that realistic FMs do not mean hard.

[4 IN 1 0]

....

thats because "realistic" is a relative turns, what your example is already going "extreme realistic" compare to a half sim such as ArmA, point is you put a (relativily) "realistic" FM based upon what you already have here, tune it to more user friendly so that it wont crash all the time and leave some space so that you can take care of other things,, they are so close in the 1.05 FM thats only need tweak them more they will have the problem solve, but right in the demo and possiblily US release, the FM is just too unrealisticly stupid that it might not draw your attention away, but it also doesnt make any sence at all

think that its a Porsche, at first when they addin the 4WD version 911 they almost mess up all the fun part of having the engine at the back, but they keep tuning them and the new version is as fun as the good old one, but not as danger

[charliereddog 9]

I downloaded the US demo this week, and it took quite some time to get used to the FM. In a way, I prefer it to OFP, as it's a little more responsive, but otoh its easier to crash I think.

One thing I have noticed is that it's much harder to stop any sideways movement. Is there wind in ArmA? I seem to sideslip lots even when hovering or moving.

Also, a real tight turn seems to drop the nose unrecoverably?

Any good hints/tips on how to fly in ArmA out there?

[max power 21]

Now that you mention it, I made this video about flying:

http://files.filefront.com//;7215406;/

The other things you'll just have to get used to. The flightmodel works in such a way so that deflection of the main rotor in any direction will cause the same amount of accelleration, and it doesn't auto-centre. As it picks up speed, the rotor will start to 'bite' into the air and act like a wing, so the left bank that started to accellerate you leftwards becomes a leftwards dive. You should keep your rotors flat unless you mean to be accellerating in some direction. Also, any accelleration that you make must be countered with an equal amount in the opposite direction to return to a stop. For example, if you drop the nose 30 degrees for 2 seconds, you will need to raise it 30 degrees for 2 seconds to return to a hover. Same with any direction. At low speeds, you can also be travelling in any direction relative to the nose of the aircraft, and rotating the aircraft will not change your direction of travel. More importantly, it will also not change your angle of pitch. If you pitch nose down 15 degrees, you will begin to travel forwards as you accellerate forwards. If you go hard onto the tail rotor to the left, at 90 degrees left you will still be pitched in the original direction. Relative to the nose you will be travelling rightwards, banked 15 degrees right and accellerating rightwards. In order to counter this to return to a hover, you would have to bank to the left.

edit: you can actually see me, in that video, nearly crash by letting the sidewards accelleration get away from me. The aircraft starts to dive in to the left. You'll notice that I level the rotors and pull out of the dive by banking to the right.

[ahmedjbh 0]

the best chopper control model was desert combat for bf1942.

Rewarded good pilots and punished the noobs, but showed them that with practice they can 1 day become good.

[seba1976 98]

Quote[/b] ]One thing I have noticed is that it's much harder to stop any sideways movement. Is there wind in ArmA? I seem to sideslip lots even when hovering or moving.

Not much to add to what plaintiff said. The helicopters in ArmA do not tend to self-stabilize as they do in OFP, so whatever movement you have originated with your input, you'll have to make a second input in the oposite direction if you want to stop the effect of the first one. Also note that you do not have to sustain that second input necessarily until you see a change. If you do, you'll enter a neverending loop where you always overpass your desired attitude for the aircraft. Give helicopters the time they need to change their attitude. For example, if you are pulling the stick toward you - or moving the mouse away from you - to reach a hover, you'll need to invert you input and flat the main rotor before you actually stop moving forward, otherwise you'll end up flying backward.

Quote[/b] ]Also, a real tight turn seems to drop the nose unrecoverably?

I never saw that in Longbow 2 or Enemy Engage, and no fly manual says that's the way thing should go, so in my opinion that's something BIS has to correct, since it is the most common cause of crashing right now. It should happend, but not to such extend. Despite the amount of nose down attitude the FM will produce, you'll have to introduce a little input to compensate the lack of lift, so the way to go, would be to pull the stick back - or move the mouse away from you - while you bank left or right - and that's where the mouse falls short. Again, the problem here with ArmA is that you'll have to apply a risible amount of input because the nose down tendency is too strong.

Quote[/b] ]Any good hints/tips on how to fly in ArmA out there?

Yes. Fly from the cockpit, and avoid the external view, for some reason, it complicates things. And another one, from now on, helicopter pilots in ArmA will have to start reading some basics about how to fly a hellicopter. If that is good or bad is what's on the table.

Cheers.

[4 IN 1 0]

the best chopper control model was desert combat for bf1942.

Rewarded good pilots and punished the noobs, but showed them that with practice they can 1 day become good.

well you can say that, but its miles off from what it works here

after all, we are not talking about rewarding good pilots and punished the noobs

[grandroyal 0]

Problem with the flightmodel now...

There`s no feeling in the flying anymore. You just can`t feel the chopper. Like driving a train made by paper in the air.

All you people that defending this game so proudly..

Have you ever played OPF? Mabey just a couple of hours?

OFP has gone MTV and I cry  

[4 IN 1 0]

Problem with the flightmodel now...

There`s no feeling in the flying anymore. You just can`t feel the chopper. Like driving a train made by paper in the air.

All you people that defending this game so proudly..

Have you ever played OPF? Mabey just a couple of hours?

OFP has gone MTV and I cry  

read through the topic b4 you post, then you will know ppl thinks about the FM(oh and you are right, sort of, as the 1.06 FM is a huge step backwards from OFP)

[Control 0]

What really pisses me off in this discussion is people trying to tell others what to think, what their goal should be.

As an example, my goal with the chopper FM in Arma is for it to be the most realistick helicopter FM in any PC-simulator...

If you don't agree, fine! If you claim that I'm representing a very small minority of Arma players, fine!

But don't tell me that I should not have this desire. I might be alone or I might have as many followers as those who want it to be more like moving a helicopter in something like C&C/Red alert

[charliereddog 9]

Thanks for all the tips, PLaintiff I like your video method as it's much easier to visualise what you're saying.

I did managed to complete the heli training mission on the demo Not that hard, but I think my best was crashing within 12 seconds of being airborne!

I'm getting used to it now, and yes, I am using the mouse. I played around using the keyboard, and actually found that easier slightly for turning, but not for anything else!

Cheers, heres hoping Bis corrects the turning/crashing issues.

[kid 0]

the lack of effective rudder is really a massive problem for me.

The worthless flight model in general is something I can understand. People don't want to have to study stalls, angle of attack, laminar wing flow and thousands of other factors to be effective pilots, but dumming down a control surface?!

While it is true that there is more pressure at high speeds to keep the plane pointing in the right direction, this does not in any way eliminate the effectiveness of the control surface, it only means that the rudder will have to work harder. It is true (especially in a chopper) that after a time the force needed to swing the craft cannot be generated (or is generated with much more difficulty) with the tail rotor, but this happens at very high speeds, and tail rotors are not equal. The Cobra rotor would be a far more powerful mechanism. Yaw is critical for proper aiming, after all.

What most people consider to be realistic lack of rudder at higher speeds is incorrect. At high speeds, there is less yaw and more slip and of course far more friction.

The difference between yaw and slip is a fairly complex one, and one that is difficult to observe. It's a bit of a misnomer to say yaw OR slip, as in both cases the plane yaws, it's just a matter of permanent direction change, but this has become the accepted syntax.

I had meant to try to define both when I first started writing this post, but now I realise that I am not well suited at all. There are people who have already done it far better than I ever could, and their word should be looked at first.

If anyone's interested, search simhq or airwafare or the il2 forums for the meaning of slip.

I'm a simmer, though, and I'd like a FM every bit as hard as in real life.

[max power 21]

the lack of effective rudder is really a massive problem for me.

The worthless flight model in general is something I can understand. People don't want to have to study stalls, angle of attack, laminar wing flow and thousands of other factors to be effective pilots, but dumming down a control surface?!

While it is true that there is more pressure at high speeds to keep the plane pointing in the right direction, this does not in any way eliminate the effectiveness of the control surface, it only means that the rudder will have to work harder. It is true (especially in a chopper) that after a time the force needed to swing the craft cannot be generated (or is generated with much more difficulty) with the tail rotor, but this happens at very high speeds, and tail rotors are not equal. The Cobra rotor would be a far more powerful mechanism. Yaw is critical for proper aiming, after all.

What most people consider to be realistic lack of rudder at higher speeds is incorrect. At high speeds, there is less yaw and more slip and of course far more friction.

The difference between yaw and slip is a fairly complex one, and one that is difficult to observe. It's a bit of a misnomer to say yaw OR slip, as in both cases the plane yaws, it's just a matter of permanent direction change, but this has become the accepted syntax.

I had meant to try to define both when I first started writing this post, but now I realise that I am not well suited at all. There are people who have already done it far better than I ever could, and their word should be looked at first.

If anyone's interested, search simhq or airwafare or the il2 forums for the meaning of slip.

I'm a simmer, though, and I'd like a FM every bit as hard as in real life.

The problems with lack of rudder authority can be mitigated by properly preplanning your rocket attacks. Plan to be under 150 km/h and have the nose on the targets before hand, and make small corrections with the rudder. If you're playing on the easier mode, using the target box to help align yourself with your target makes things easier aswell. The 1.05 fm in ArmA isn't really condusive to freeform, reactionary flying. If it's your style or you can try it, you'll find flying from a series of preplanned maneuvers to be much more effective.

[seba1976 98]

Quote[/b] ]What most people consider to be realistic lack of rudder at higher speeds is incorrect. At high speeds, there is less yaw and more slip and of course far more friction.

Yes, maybe to avoid confussion we should complete the phrase "less tail rotor authotiry at higher speeds" with "to produce yaw". We should also say, just to clarify things, that no matter what speed, you'll have to use pedals everytime you change the collective, to compensate the change in torque. But that's way out of the scope of the FM of ArmA, that only introduces a very few elements of a helicopter FM.

Quote[/b] ]The difference between yaw and slip is a fairly complex one

It simplifies a little if you consider the term yaw is applied to turning around the vertical axis of a helicopter while it is not changing it's flight path, and slip is used when the helicopter is performing a turn changing it's flight path. So if you do not compensate with the pedals when begining a turn, you can always slip or skid. Though inherently the same, yaw is used to describe the movement around the vertical axis, while slip and skid are used to describe movements around the center of a turn maneuver that is changing the flight path. I think it is harder to describe than to understand. That's why I've tried .

[kid 0]

Quote[/b] ]The problems with lack of rudder authority can be mitigated by properly preplanning your rocket attacks. Plan to be under 150 km/h and have the nose on the targets before hand, and make small corrections with the rudder. If you're playing on the easier mode, using the target box to help align yourself with your target makes things easier aswell. The 1.05 fm in ArmA isn't really condusive to freeform, reactionary flying. If it's your style or you can try it, you'll find flying from a series of preplanned maneuvers to be much more effective.

that's the only way I can do it. I am quite happy in an attack chopper, making runs at the enemy in a straight line, but always there are times when proper rudder would really come in handy. Not to mention war against humans.

Before we put new maps on our server, we played the vanilla "Black Hawk Down" a decent bit. A preplanned straight littlebird run against a human with a PK does not last long, at all...

My squad has a few chopper simulator pilots, who can manage to fly in an oblique flight path until the final turn very close to target when they bank and fire. In that scenario, rudder means the difference between a good run and a bad one.

Quote[/b] ]Yes, maybe to avoid confussion we should complete the phrase "less tail rotor authotiry at higher speeds" with "to produce yaw". We should also say, just to clarify things, that no matter what speed, you'll have to use pedals everytime you change the collective, to compensate the change in torque. But that's way out of the scope of the FM of ArmA, that only introduces a very few elements of a helicopter FM.

Indeed, that may not be needed, but it could still be appreciated. Most people love this game for the realism, I don't understand why they would campaign for overheating barrels but make the choppers and planes as easy to fly as anything (and they really are that easy)

I think it simply has to do with the offline market, which is by far the biggest part. People want to be able to fly anything and everything, which requires a little "dumming down". What I want to see is an alternative flight model that is much closer to reality and much more difficult to master that can be forced server-side, so whoever flies on that server must bloody well know what he's doing.

I'm surprised there's so much talk about the heli flight model and so little about the planes...

Pity, I was really looking forward to that little biplane...