Is there any way to...

[Beagle 684]

...but you still have no yaw authority above 100km/h and you still can't gain altitude by pulling up in front of that cliff you are aproaching...you just slow down.

[shot 0]

no yaw authority above 100 km/h? the tail rotor's main purpose is to balance out the torque of the main rotor. it's definately not designed to to three sixties while flying 100 km/h!

BTW i was able to fly an real helicopter simulator some time ago and i think the ArmA model comes pretty close. No problems flying it with a trackball

[Balschoiw 0]

Ah I see. So the real helicopters also do reset their stick constantly ? Quite interesting. I thought that once you press the stick in a direction it would stay there.

Thx for clearing that up.

[Shadow NX 1]

Been a while since the flight model was discussed... and it was already discussed a lot... yet it indeed still is crap and i prefer the OFP system in nearly every detail.

Its just frustrating like many other things in ArmA, especially the slow totally down to turn, i mean if combat helicopters would need to do that in rl they would end up as swiss cheese soon.

I hardly can imagine that you cant turn a - real - helicopter at speeds over 100

[HogRoot 0]

...but you still have no yaw authority above 100km/h and you still can't gain altitude by pulling up in front of that cliff you are aproaching...you just slow down.

You're not going to have much rudder movement at 100km..its not what the rail rotor is designed to do. It is to counteract the torque from the engine/main blades so it wont spin out of control. The only response you will get from the tail rotor is at low speeds...ie 20km and below. The ArmA model is "close" to realistic. Notice I didin't say it WAS realistic...but it is close. The autorotation "feature" needs some improvement also. It doesn't work 100% as it should. Also while conducting rolling landings the heli takes way too much damage while conducting this at anything over 40kmph..which is bogus. Blackhawks and Chinooks are capable of doing rolling landings at this speed and above with no problem. And I am not talking out my ass either..I have real world experience to back up my post.

[shot 0]

Balschoiw: no they don't, but you can kind of 'reset' the stick to be able to get your hands off the controls for some time.

In my ArmA 1.08 i use a trackball to put the heli in a for example 30° bank. After this i don't need to move it to the right anymore, the bank angle stays the same and the turn is performed very well. So what about the constant moving stuff?

The turning while hovering is kind of slow but compared to the real sim it's not so far from reality. All of the modelled helicopters have some kind of mass which needs to be moved first!

For 3d acrobatics like three sixties with any speed and a turning rate of 1800°/s you need an RC helicopter. But these things have some different weight / power ratio than a real helicopter

[MehMan 0]

Well I don't know what you're doing, but for most of us with keyboard+mouse the FM is hell when doing turns. Planes and helicopters. It's annoying and frustrating because you can't get it to handle the way you want it to. You move your mouse to the right, see the helo bank and bam the mouse recenters and so does the helo. And again. And again. Until you've managed to make a full turn like an epilepsy victim.

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]In my ArmA 1.08 i use a trackball to put the heli in a for example 30° bank. After this i don't need to move it to the right anymore, the bank angle stays the same and the turn is performed very well. So what about the constant moving stuff?

Try this: Fly in some height with any helo push your nose down. It will magically come up again after a while. One could argue that that´s a matter of speed ration lifting up the collective, but that´s not true.

It´s the funny Arma autocentre.

Push it further. Now we want to circle above the target, something that was incredibly ok with OFP and is a vital part of helo assistance in real life.

In Arma you have to constantly push the mouse to be able to get anything comparable to an ellipsoid, a circle is totally out of question with mouse and keyboard anyway.

We´re talking about very basic helo-stuff here, not some fancy RC stuff shot.

Without constantly moving your mouse you are not able to send your helo into a simple curve as the direction vector from input is simply resetted regularely if you use mouse+keyboard, not speaking about the funny look of that sort of flying.

It´s simply wrecked as it is. Do yourself a favour and try to do a circling maneuver in OFP and than come back and tell us that it´s perfectly ok in Arma.

It´s not, it´s a huge deficit, one among other huge deficits that came with Arma and all we got up to now was the remark from Suma on the BTS that they will most likely try to embedd something different in Arma 2.

Thank you very much. That´s what we were really waiting for.

[mr burns 131]

I like ArmA´s helicopter ( ! ) flight model more than the one FS2004 - not saying that either is good though.

That autocenter bug is annoying yes, makes it also impossible to fly at a constant altidude. Sometimes it reminds me of dolphins swimming ...

[NoRailgunner 0]

Balschoiw, irl you don't have very easy flight controls like in OFP helos. Remember when many ppl catches those Hinds and became devastator of missions.

Anyway, BIS should working on controllers mouse+keyboard improvements. Wouldn't it be nice if they test it in ArmA before releasing in ArmA2? Maybe an kind of "community support"

[LeftSkidLow 1]

I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for the mouse and keyboard guys, they want the flight model to be uber realistic yet they are using a freaking mouse and keyboard! Am I the only one that sees something wrong here, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

[max power 21]

I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for the mouse and keyboard guys, they want the flight model to be uber realistic yet they are using a freaking mouse and keyboard! Am I the only one that sees something wrong here, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

+ 1000

+1 for the post, +999 for the crazy pills crack at the end.

[DVD 0]

Armed Assault is not a simulation.

It is may 300% more realistic as other games, but fail in infinitely ways, to be a "combat simulator".

BI should think about what they want, for ArmA2.

Eighter a much more realistic game, like OFP was, with good compromises between realism and gameplay.

Or a die hard simulation.

ArmA1 isn't one of that both options.

[Beagle 684]

no yaw authority above 100 km/h? the tail rotor's main purpose is to balance out the torque of the main rotor. it's definately not designed to to three sixties while flying 100 km/h!

BTW i was able to fly an real helicopter simulator some time ago and i think the ArmA model comes pretty close. No problems flying it with a trackball

I talked this over out of couriosity about the "Jane's Longbow II FM" with a "Heeresflieger" BO-105 PAH Pilot a few years ago. Fact is that yaw authority ist present trough the whole range of flightspeed up to 300 km/h... 100km/h is just 54 Knots..thats approach speed and of course you can yaw the Helicopter to any deegree at this speed. Ever saw a light plane doing the crab approach with the nose ponting 30° off from flight path to slow down... I did when I sat in the right seat.

Second...the flight controlls of most helicoters do not autocenter...since there is not trimm..there is just a noticable center position but stick and pedals stay in the positon you habe pushed them...I tried it myselvs in a stationary Bo-105 abnd I even used the SACLOS aiming and tracking sytem for the HOT-Missiles.

And, by the way...all other simulations I know of allow you to yaw even at ful speed to aim rockest or fixed Gunpods. Such wepons would be useless like in ArmA if helicopters t were that badly manouverable like they are in ArmA.

[LeftSkidLow 1]

no yaw authority above 100 km/h? the tail rotor's main purpose is to balance out the torque of the main rotor. it's definately not designed to to three sixties while flying 100 km/h!

BTW i was able to fly an real helicopter simulator some time ago and i think the ArmA model comes pretty close. No problems flying it with a trackball

I talked this over out of couriosity about the "Jane's Longbow II FM" with a "Heeresflieger" BO-105 PAH Pilot a few years ago. Fact is that yaw authority ist present trough the whole range of flightspeed up to 300 km/h... 100km/h is just 54 Knots..thats approach speed and of course you can yaw the Helicopter to any deegree at this speed. Ever saw a light plane doing the crab approach with the nose ponting 30° off from flight path to slow down... I did when I sat in the right seat.

Second...the flight controlls of most helicoters do not autocenter...since there is not trimm..there is just a noticable center position but stick and pedals stay in the positon you habe pushed them...I tried it myselvs in a stationary Bo-105 abnd I even used the SACLOS aiming and tracking sytem for the HOT-Missiles.

Yeah its been discussed to death about the tail rotor effectiveness, its a bit off.

Crabbing into the wind to keep a certain ground track is different though, in a crosswind landing in an airplane you are pointing into the wind and no so much fighting it as you would be fighting the relative wind in ArmA. Most of my crosswind landings are in helicopters though, and it is much easier and doesn't really involve pedal inputs to hold a crab. Flying out of trim does require a lot of pedal at higher speeds though, and the amount of heading change is limited and varied with airspeed of course, but does seem to be more than ArmA allows.

I can't speak for helicopters that have hydraulics, but the ones without do have a cyclic trim which effects the center position of the cyclic. If the BO-105 cyclic you played with was not in flight, yeah the cyclic would just slop around. When you are actually in flight there is some tendency for the cyclic to want return to a "center" which is basically defined by the cyclic trim. A lot of it has to do with center of gravity, so the cyclic force changes throughout flight with fuel burn, dropping cargo,pax, etc. The pedals have the tendency to return to center or at least whatever pitch setting causes the least drag, and some pedals have springs that center the pedals slightly left to make hovering easier. The collective is usually pretty free but varies from helicopter to helicopter on the rigging, some collectives want to pop up, some drop, etc. Really none of it matters all that much, you just do what u gotta do with the controls to make the aircraft react.

[max power 21]

Armed Assault is not a simulation.

It is may 300% more realistic as other games, but fail in infinitely ways, to be a "combat simulator".

BI should think about what they want, for ArmA2.

Eighter a much more realistic game, like OFP was, with good compromises between realism and gameplay.

Or a die hard simulation.

ArmA1 isn't one of that both options.

In what ways was OFP more realistic?

[Beagle 684]

@ LeftSkidLow

I asked the Pilot about the pedals and he said they would stay that way and do not return to center with force ... same as the cyclic stick. This is to compensate the lack of a electronic antitorque system in the PAH. I would have exspected this to be is a feature on most turbine helicopters from the 80s.

[cutterdk 0]

Quote[/b] ]"repeating input" what kind of nonsens

Actually not, as it´s the way mouse + keyboard control fro Arma is implemented. The virtual mouse input position resets to 0.

In OFP the method was very different as the position of the mousecursor was not set to zero position all the time, which mean that the steering was consistant, while in Arma you have to use impulse steering, constantly moving the mouse into the direction you want to drive or fly to. Even with this the result is very clumsy and not satisfying at all as it is impossible to do consistant curves or turns with keyboard and mouse.

If you tell us now that it´s perfectly possible you´re telling bullshit as it´s the method of input that simply doesn´t allow such things.

Quote[/b] ]I can make thoose babies dance without any sweat.

Yeah...from left to right and into the ground...  

Compare the method of control with OFP and come in again.

Well fly with a joystick and you dont have thoose "repeating inputs". Flying wiht mouse and keyboard is not flying.....its.....erh....stupid

And yes i can still make thoose babies dance, and yes on the ground left and right........AND whereever you want it.

And i dont have to compare to OFP, becourse i really dont care how its works in OFP, im playing Arma and not OFP.

Oh and by the way, I also made thoose babies dance in OFP

[shot 0]

After some ArmA flying yesterday i figured out that it's just the (nose) pitch which is levelling off, the roll of the helicopter stays as it is if you don't control the heli. I don't know why this is or if it's a bug, but like cutterdk already said you should you either a joystick ( which makes sense since the real thing doesn't have a mouse to control it or what i'm using, a trackball. The flight behaviour doesn't bother me since you have to use the controls all the time anyway, i think thats all about heli flying. Pointing somewhere with the mouse and the heli goes there is not what i'd like to have in ArmA.

For the yaw authority: Of course there's some rudder control up to 300 km/h, but for sure there's not enough power to put rotate it by 90°. Look for the max. sideways speed of some helicopters - that's basically the limit where the tail rotor does not have enough power to keep the heli in a 90° angle.

[max power 21]

Aircraft that are stabilized with fins will tend to try to point in the direction they are traveling. Aircraft that are traveling very quickly and have a lot of lift will tend to rise.. Therefore, if a fin stabilized aircraft has a lot of lift due to airspeed, its nose will tend to rise.

I'm not sure if this is what BIS is getting at, but it's not too unnatural from what I know about fixed wing aircraft. This is what I thought I was experiencing when I was flying ArmA's helicopters around.

[Balschoiw 0]

Quote[/b] ]I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for the mouse and keyboard guys, they want the flight model to be uber realistic yet they are using a freaking mouse and keyboard! Am I the only one that sees something wrong here, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

Noone here is asking for an uber-realistic flight model. Arma is not a sim, it´s an arcade-sim mixture.

I am using my omg freaking mouse-keyboard because I don´t use Arma as a flightsim purely and it would mean to shove around things on my desk whenever I exit a vehicle.

It´s for pure playability reason to have one controller for multirole units ingame. It worked for OFP, but in Arma it fails badly because of the known bugs and limitations. Or do you guide your infantry units with joystick ? My joystick setup is for flightsims as my wheel setup is for driving games. If I start up such game I get my desk preparations ready before I start the game. Switching between all those input devices during gaming is impossible and

not even working as Arma doesn´t support it right now.

If you are permantly using your joystick, hurrah ! But you shouldn´t try to force that on other players who do not favour changing their controller all the time.

Fact is that the steering should be possible with all supported embedded controllers. Fact is that Arma fails here.

Fact is that noone should be forced to buy a joystick just because BIS fails to implement a method of steering that was working perfectly ok in OFP as the stick position was permanently bound to mouse position. This does not mean that the vehicle goes where the mouse points to, that´s utter nonsense. In fact the mouseposition was directly guiding the stick without any reset or autocenter bullshit that set the rudders back to zero whenever there was no input for a while.

That method of steering was infact much more fluid than what we have today and all those who say that that´s not true are simply not having their facts straight.

Go into editor, fire up a camel and you´ll see that it´s not consistant steering, but impulse steering which is total nonsense as it doesn´t work like that in real life aswell, not to speak of the whacko flightpath you get in Arma.

Quote[/b] ]In what ways was OFP more realistic?

It kept the stick´s direction where it was set to and had no magic autocenter gadget that no real airframe has. Watch the tailfin of the camel inflight with mouse-keyboard and come in again.

Quote[/b] ]Well fly with a joystick and you dont have thoose "repeating inputs". Flying wiht mouse and keyboard is not flying.....its.....erh....stupid

Oh what a great suggestion. If you had read the thread you´d realize that we are specifically talking about the deficits when playing with mouse and keyboard and as long as BIS totally forbids the use of mouse-keyboard we have every right to complain about the way it is implemented and supported.

Your wannabe-elitist joystick-talk is not of any interest here.

It´s about fixing the current control method and giving back direct control over the airframe to users that simply DO NOT WANT to use a joystick or DO NOT HAVE a joystick.

It was perfectly working in OFP, so we are not asking for some kind of revolutionary developement, but a fix for the current control-method.

So please troll on...

Quote[/b] ]Pointing somewhere with the mouse and the heli goes there is not what i'd like to have in ArmA.

It didn´t work like that in OFP aswell and noone is asking for such. We only ask for a persistant mouse-stick relation without forced autocentre-reset that doesn´t allow to fly constant pathways for exactly that reason.

Not more, not less.

So @ all of you happy joystick flyers:

I appreciate that it´s so much fun flying with joystick, but that´s no solution for the mouse-keyboard issues that Arma users have because of the whacky autocentre feature and autoreset feature, BIS implemented for whatever reasons.

We are not asking for your flightskills with joysticks, we are trying to point out the obvious deficits and bugs with mouse-keyboard. Is that so hard to understand ? If you do not support a change of that controller mechanisms, simply don´t post as it´s not interesting how well you can control your airframe with joysticks, pedals, whatever.

On a sidenote: You all must be perfectly happy that you have lost control over guideable onboard weaponary aswell than, e.g. the Kamov onboard gun. It is rendered immobile in Arma because of the new limitiations introduced by BIS, while it was working as supposed in OFP. I do see Evolution, but I can´t see how scrapping features can be assumed Evolution while it´s infact degrading features.

Next, do you use ground vehicles ? Have you ever noticed how funny they are to steer now with the autocentre thing ? No ? You don´t see that the way it was handled in OFP was much, much more fluid and consistant as your wheel didn´t reset all the time but stayed in the direction you put it. You don´t see that as a flaw or even bug ?

It´s about mouse-keyboard controller mechanisms !

[shot 0]

You're right, just to make things easier they should remove the left/right ( roll ) centering mechanism. It doesn't make sense for this kind of 'simulator' and since it's just the pitch ( not the roll ) i assume it's not there by intention.

For vehicles i can't tell, i think it was not possible to drive around very comfortably in ofp as well as in ArmA

[cutterdk 0]

Quote[/b] ]Well fly with a joystick and you dont have thoose "repeating inputs". Flying wiht mouse and keyboard is not flying.....its.....erh....stupid

Oh what a great suggestion. If you had read the thread you´d realize that we are specifically talking about the deficits when playing with mouse and keyboard and as long as BIS totally forbids the use of mouse-keyboard we have every right to complain about the way it is implemented and supported.

Your wannabe-elitist joystick-talk is not of any interest here.

It´s about fixing the current control method and giving back direct control over the airframe to users that simply DO NOT WANT to use a joystick or DO NOT HAVE a joystick.

It was perfectly working in OFP, so we are not asking for some kind of revolutionary developement, but a fix for the current control-method.

So please troll on...

Lovo you too bro  

Well lets say "I dont want to use my mouse to control my man in arma, I want to use my joystick!!!"

Hell yeah lets all complain to BIS that it is NOT possible to use joystick to control the man in arma.

And "wannabe-elitist joystick talk" all i said dude is, that i have no problems at all with the flight model here in arma, nor did i have it in OFP. But i guess that envy comes in lot of different shapes and formes  

[Dallas 9]

Whenever I play online I see two kind of people piloting choppers. n00bs and aces. Well three, aces who get overconfident and kill a few passengers while showing off their skills(your's truely). The majority of pilots are rock solid, mastering whatever mission they are assigned to. Great communication, navigation and aviation skills. As combat pilots: Deadly. As transport pilots: Accurate and fast.

Can the current flight model be perfected? Maybe.

Can the current flight model be mastered? Without doubt.

[frederf 0]

As much as I'd like for flying in ArmA to be more accessible, I cannot get behind any change that "dumbs down" or "simplifies" piloting in any way.

It's not much, but so far we've got flight dynamics that are somewhat demanding and somewhat realistic and that's very rewarding to me. Please don't take that from me.