CMay

DnA, I don't know if you're still reading this, but I've almost entirely stopped playing Take on Helicopters after 1.06. I used to play every couple days or at the very least every weekend, but now I just haven't touched it at all. I hadn't really thought about it, but basically the reason I stopped playing is because I primarily did multiplayer with a friend and ever since 1.06 my framerate is horrible in multiplayer. I can play singleplayer and my framerate is fine regardless of the map, but since 1.06 only in multiplayer my framerate dips down into unplayable territory. I mean it's playable...ish, but basically reduces it to the point where it's not really enjoyable (15-20fps). It's a shame, because y'all made so many performance improvements that I can crank the settings up and things look amazing, but now for netcode/gameplay code reasons the performance is significantly reduced only in multiplayer even if I lower the settings. I'm always the server, so I don't know if this also applies to being the client. There's nothing at all particularly crazy that I'm doing in multiplayer, sometimes it's literally just 2 PMC soldiers and 2 helicopters with nothing else on the map just to fly around together, though we have done more complicated missions. Just hope y'all are aware of this and consider doing some profiling to see where the problem is, assuming you can reproduce it. I couldn't provide this feedback on the beta patches before the release made it out, because the multiplayer wasn't working at all for me. Multiplayer may not be a very high priority for y'all as I don't get the impression that the multiplayer is roaring with activity, but since I hear that DayZ standalone may be using ToH as a base that this may get addressed sooner rather than later. Thanks for everything y'all do, because ToH is by far the closest thing to my dream helicopter game!

It will be excellent to get this full patch released, it has so many great improvements. Do y'all have any big ideas for a 1.07 in the future not listed on the roadmap, or perhaps a minor patch in a few months with some fixes like the non-RTD helicopters landing gear issue, a controls setting slider to let you adjust how sensitive the controls are for ArmA 2 vehicles relative to your existing ToH sensitivity settings, etc? I've not been able to test multiplayer yet, due to the key issue, but I know that in previous versions things like sling-loading objects and rolling/pitching your helicopter greater than 90 degrees in any direction wasn't getting synced properly in multiplayer. Multiplayer issues probably aren't a high priority, because it seems like my friend and I are the only people ever using it, though we haven't done any since the beta patches (key problem). I know we're probably looking forward to trying one of my downtown missions again after the full release is out. 1 player starts as a weaponless pilot with an unarmed light chopper, the other armed person starts inside one of those open cylindrical buildings in downtown, so the pilot has to land the chopper down through the center to get them. After that there are a series of enemy soldiers on top of various buildings, but there is always a nearby building taller than the building they're on or some higher point on the same building where the pilot has to land in order to give the person with the gun a clear shot. Some of the landing spots are pretty crazy, since you have to stay outside of firing range/view of the enemy to safely land. Being able to use sniper rifles now should open some new interesting possibilities for downtown missions. Actually never played any singleplayer, because we were just always doing multiplayer. With the key problem on the beta release, I got around to playing some of the campaign and now I'm fairly interested in going through that storyline once the update is out and on steam. Thanks for all the patching so far and I hope getting this patch out the door gives y'all a good reason to do some more ToH promotion to increase sales.

That seems to work, though it does reappear any time the landing gear or landing lights state changes. As a note on that issue with the F-35B landing gear retracting, it only seems to occur on those skyscrapers. I've tried it on a bunch of shorter buildings and the landing gear stays down fine on those. ---------- Post added at 08:07 ---------- Previous post was at 07:58 ---------- OK, tested the landing gear problem on the skyscrapers with some of the ArmA 2 helicopters too and it happens with them. the Ka-52 auto lowers its landing gear when it approaches a surface, but once it touches down on the skyscraper the landing gear goes crazy into a loop retracting and lowering simultaneously. So it just sits there like hopping and the option to get out of the chopper is unavailable even though you look landed. There are a couple other ArmA 2 choppers where the landing gear automatically drops down and I suspect this happens with those as well.

Saw your response before I ended up uninstalling ToH. That saves some time. I mentioned particularly that it was happening with ArmA 2 choppers, but I should have been more explicit the first time as the way it was phrased might give the impression that it was happening with all. Sorry about that. While we're at it though, there are 2 other issues I forgot to mention. 1. Using any of the ArmA 2 aircraft and maybe vehicles too, there's a permanent distracting indicator stuck in the center of the screen like "Landing Gear Up", "Landing Lights Off", etc. That can't be intentional. If you tried to fly the aircraft in the ambient category in ToH originally, the same thing would happen, but now that there are so many new ArmA 2 aircraft to use it's a more important issue. In first person/cockpit view it's a little less of an issue, but it's still poorly placed. In 3rd person though it's pretty distracting and doesn't seem like it belongs there. 2. Landing on top of a building (in this case a skyscraper in Seattle) causes the landing gear to retract and leave the aircraft on its belly on the roof. To be more specific, this happened with the F-35B, though I think it may have happened before with one of the choppers. This is also something that does not occur with ToH choppers. Here are some example screenshots of these 2 issues: http://imgur.com/a/IJyhj

I have wheel brake bound to the right shoulder button on the wired 360 controller, so just to make sure I tried using the keyboard hotkey as well (nothing else is bound to either of these inputs). Tried it with an empty chopper in the editor, one that's already flying with a crew, on Seattle, on Chernarus, disabling Lingor and Hinds, running it with no parameters at all, running it with a newly generated clean profile/config, etc. takeonh.exe crashes guaranteed when I disengage the wheel brake, whether I'm flying with gear up or landed with gear down. This doesn't happen with any of the ToH choppers. All of my ToH file timestamps are either 2012/05/18 (ToH purchase date), 2012/07/18 (Hinds purchase date) or 2012/08/28 (1.06 RC2 release date). Being that y'all cannot reproduce this, I'll wipe ToH and do a fresh install which I want to do anyway to see if it resolves #2. Don't have a backup, so I'll just redownload it from Steam and respond after trying it.

Have been enjoying the past couple beta patches, but hadn't gotten around to trying Rearmed. After testing 1.06 RC2 for a bit, there are a couple issues I've noticed. BUG: Disengaging the wheel brake in the Merlin HC3, Mi-17 or other ArmA 2 choppers that support the wheel brake causes ToH to crash 100% of the time. ISSUE: Trying to host or enter a multiplayer game says the cd key is invalid. I assume this is related to running a non-steam beta version with the Steam version, with registry entries possibly stored differently (haven't looked). ISSUE: Trying to launch ToH with the -mod parameter to add ArmA 2, OA, OA:Expansion, ToH, Rearmed, Hinds and Lingor causes the string to be too long for both Steam's launch options and for Windows shortcut target input. I got around this by making a batch file and launching it via that. I had tried launching it without any extra parameters and ToH was only seeing ToH + ArmA 2 and Chernarus wasn't showing up, so everything was only working properly after adding them all manually. Will the final release detect all of these automatically and just have them disabled to start with in the Expansions list by default? Thanks for updating ToH. Nothing like sniping from skyscrapers in Seattle and just walking around aimlessly in Chernarus with excellent clouds.

This patch vastly improves ToH's performance. Using a GTX 275 I used to have to run ToH with shadows disabled, the resolution lowered to 1280x720, low visibility, low object distance, low object detail, etc. Now I've got shadows on Very High with the resolution at 1920x1080, etc in the middle of downtown and it finally looks similar to the marketing screenshots while running beautifully. I've run into an issue with it though. Was flying around on Seattle for over an hour, tweaking my settings to get the most out of the engine when I decided to go try out South Asia. Bad idea. Once I loaded in South Asia (with a mission time of noonish) the helicopter was clearly there and controllable, but the screen was entirely black. Decided to give up that plan and go back to Seattle, but now Seattle was extremely bright like an HDR blowout. The ground was white and only if I could turn the camera just right would things kind of look normal, then sometimes it would turn black just like South Asia. There was no normal slow fading between these brightness levels like you'd expect with HDR, it would just flick between these states. Decided to try restarting ToH, but the issue persisted. Tried restarting the video driver, but the issue still remained after starting ToH again. It's as if loading South Asia set a variable somewhere that ToH then stored and now it is always too bright or infinitely dark. The closest thing I've seen to it is if you try adjusting the color bit depth of ArmA 2 to something less than 32bit, everything will be too dark. Grabbing at straws, I tried changing the HDRPrecision which did not help. In any case, if I just go back to running the current stable patch on Steam then everything works fine. The second I run it with -mod=Beta, the issue returns. Unfortunate too, because it was soaring beautifully and being more amazing than ever for that hour. When a new stable version of this+Rearmed gets released it will be a good day. Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to test if it'll help you pin down the issues. Thanks. EDIT: When beta 96166 came out I ran the beta uninstaller for the older one, then went in and manually deleted all of the unnecessary/beta directories and installed the new 96166 beta patch. Everything seems to be working fine now.