3rd Person Helo View made right

[madrussian 347]

I had a realization today about a major difference in the choppers in ArmA vs good old OFP, and I think many of us could potentially benefit greatly from the discovery.

Please bear w/ me here, as it's a bit difficult to explain.  Here goes.

In OFP, while flying a helo in 3rd person, you were always looking straight ahead.  No matter what sort of maneuvers you did, you could always see where you were headed.  That is because your camera view was ALWAYS perfectly in-line with the body of the chopper.

Fast forward to ArmA.  Ever since the first time I hopped in a helo and took to the air, I was aware that something was terribly wrong.  After several patches, things got better, but there was still something I couldn't put my finger on.  Thank god I finally figured it out!

In ArmA, while flying a helo in 3rd person, you are NOT always looking straight ahead.  In fact, depending on what maneuvers you do, the camera can be 90 degrees off of the direction the chopper facing... or more!  It's very difficult to fly when you can't see where you're going.

I'd go so far as to say that flying helos in ArmA in 3rd person is currently like playing a console game with a really bad chase cam.

The solution:

I'd like to modify the config in ArmA to get the proper 3rd person view back.  I've looked around in the config.bin (converted to a config.cpp using Unbin), but unfortunately I'm just getting started with configs, and I'm not sure I'm looking in the right place.

In my ArmA config, in CfgVehicles I see the following:

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE"> class ViewPilot {

initAngleX = 5;

minAngleX = -30;

maxAngleX = 30;

initAngleY = 0;

minAngleY = -100;

maxAngleY = 100;

initFov = 0.900000;

minFov = 0.420000;

maxFov = 0.900000;

};

Initially this looks like perhaps the right place to make the change.  (Perhaps minAngleX and maxAngleX, or minAngleY and maxAngleY?)  However, when I open my config.cpp from OFP expecting these four variables to have different values, unfortunately they are the same, so these four can't be the right ones, right?

Do any of you with config.cpp experience know what variable(s) I should be looking for?  Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

Interesting side note- In looking at videos of helo flight in VBS2, the 3rd person view appears to operate just like it did in good old OFP, straight down the body of the chopper.  Imagine that!

[csj 0]

To be honest, you lost me alittle with your problem but I think you are referring to this

extCameraPosition[] = {0, 2, -15};

this handles the external camera view in the cfg.

Not that I use the '3rd person' view as you call it for flying helos but I did a little test before replying here.

I found that I had to really throw the bird around quite unrealistically to get much deviation in the camera angle and that was prolly only 15 degrees.

(note: testing was with my own bird not Bi birds)

the pilotview you have shown controls the view from the pilot's seat.