malcheus

Mi8 has an option to include the "rudder" with the trim-button; so if you torque 5 degrees to the right and press the trim button and then release the stick, the chopper will keep the rudder at 5 degrees to the right. I used this for a while, and I was able to fly the mi8, but not very smoothly, and it requires trimming a lot. With rudder pedals, you can omit the rudder from the trim button, so that trimming only applies to pitch and roll. What I found to be the biggest improvement for flying helos, is to get a very decent stick. Sticks with a spring and pressure plate system (like the X55 or warthog sticks) have a weird tendency to give no (or barely any) resistance in the y-axis if a deflection in the x-axis is already there and vice versa. This is because you can roll around the stick in a circle without changing the amount of compression on the spring. This is hardly noticeable on fixed wings, but I found it super annoying in helos.

But is it going to be fun to play human Petrovich? Or will it be a very long scenic ride, one or two ATGM launches and a very long scenic ride back? Ofcourse there is the spotting, but you can do that from the pilot seat of your own Hind as well.

I suppose most games do this by visually labelling stuff: displaying a big green box around Petrovich's selected target, and a button or two to cycle petrovich's targets. But I also suppose that is not what simmers want, as it puts a graphic element in the world that a real pilot would not see.

The biggest problem for me as a player is the tendency to go into VRS, which feels a lot like not having enough power. The huey doesn't have this tendency. I think it's so obvious in the mi8 because it has to land with cargo. It won't be as much of a problem with attack helos, because you will very rarely have to land with all the weight you took off with.

I guess it depends on how much cargo you take along. It's prone to VRS, perhaps that's what he means? As for the AI; First off, AI is a big word for an object that runs a few if-statements; but in the end it doesn't really matter how the AI comes to a certain action, so long as it's believable from the player perspective. The AI being omniscient (which in this case means, it can use all available data for it's if-statements) isn't a problem, so long as it still acts believable. An example of an if statement would be "if you have line of sight: shoot" Shoot being: Calculate the trajectory of the observed object, and put five rounds there. The AI is made a bit more believable by adding a "wait 2-5 seconds", and "spread the shot a bit". But currently, I don't believe it goes much further than that. There's also talk of a spotting mechanic, but I don't know if the AI ever not spots you when in range and in LOS...? In an ideal world, each AI has a viewing angle, and is scanning it's surroundings, had a chance of spotting objects within the viewing angle (and a chance of not spotting things in it's viewing angle based on distance and other variables), etc. But this is way too complicated to simulate for possibly hundreds of objects at a time. Also the player is completely unaware of such mechanics, so it can be simplified with a simple "spotting chance per second when LOS exists". You can calculate this from the player instead of from the AI's as well (LOS goes both ways), so you only have to do the check for AIs within a certain radius and with LOS. Computationally, this should be doable. It would also be a bit more believable (and enjoyable) if the first shot wouldn't be on target every time; so why not make the AI more accurate with consecutive shots until LOS is broken? These should all be relatively simple tasks for an AI (add a diminishing random number to the angle and elevation of each shot), but it would make flying helos much more enjoyable.

I noticed that the bradley only starts turning its turret if it is able to fire, but this is probably part of the "fire at the chopper" trigger. The thing that worries me is that the Hind will be similar in size to the Mi8, and that with this AI, it's nearly impossible to get close enough to an enemy vehicle without at some point allowing the LOS rule to trigger. This will mean that the AI is already aiming (or even shooting) at you before you are able to properly see them, let alone aim for them; unless you use labels that allow you to see through trees.

I tried some manual flying, to keep trees in-between me and the bradley. Something really dodgy is happening: This is what he sees: And this is what I see: No way this shot didn't pass through a tree.... I think it somehow got my location and heading when I hopped over the line of trees behind me, and then opened fire while I was dropping back to ground level or something?

Flying low does work, indeed, but only until you pass a slightly lower tree. The two trees with the black arrows block line of sight, but the small tree in between doesn't.

I didn't give the bradley any assignment, that's for sure. with more dense forest, it shoots. If I try with a lot of forest in between, it doesn't shoot the helo though.

So I figured to just test it in the mission editor: This bradley has no problem shooting the (parked) Mi-8 through two lines of trees (and some loose trees in the way as well). I consider this a big problem when playing with attack helicopters, because trees like that are in many cases your only cover when trying to get close enough to hit armor.

I may be wrong, but from my limited experience playing with the mi8 in unfriendly environments I have a hunch that the AI doesn't care about trees. If you drop to almost ground level, they will happily keep shooting you. But it may be just bad luck on my part.

Probably; I assume all planes with two sticks have them synchronised in the real world. But with fixed-wings it's much easier to change control than with helicopters; you could just trim the aircraft so it needs no input, and then switch control. The only thing is the throttle, but abruptly going from 90% to 30% throttle isn't a big deal. In helicopters, abruptly going from 90% collective deflection to 30% will really upset the flight dynamics. Or the other way around, abruptly increasing the collective in a mil8 will cause both generators to fail, disabling several important systems.

I'm just curious on how they would implement the copilot controls. In the real thing, if the pilot moves the stick left, the copilot's stick also moves left (if I'm not mistaken). If the pilot moves the stick left, and the copilot tries to move it tot he right, whoever is strongest gets their way. But in multicrew, it's perfectly possible for the copilot to pull a hard left, and the pilot to pull hard right. Then who gets their way? I guess one would need a "change control to player 2" sort of option. But then theres the problem that when changing control, all the surfaces jump to the current position of player 2. This could cause some seriously weird maneuvers for the helo. Anyway, sitting in back with the big dakka-dakka seems like a real niche activity; especially since you are doing nothing during the long transfer times.

Then it should still pass over your consoles 10 times per second (given 2 blades) rather than 3-4 times. I for one would love the option to turn off rotor shadows. Also looking at other modules, the Ka50 looks similar (not sure if this is the same version): (at 22:55 it's clear) Gazelle seems a little bit better:

Turning off shadows removes it ofcourse, as I said: Whenever I turn shadows on, there is some horrible flickering going on inside the cockpit But removing shadows altogether makes the game look a lot less appealing. When I compare what I see with other captures from youtube, I do see a difference. For example this one: at 2:40 you see shadows flickering at regular (2-3 times per second) intervals across the whole dashboard. In my clip it seems to be a higher frequency and rather erratically flashing on random parts of the dashboard. It's more clear if you play them at reduced speed. Anyway, I think you should never be able to see a shadow moving across your dashboard, if the rotor spins at 3000 RPM it should flash across your dashboard 100 times per second :music_whistling:

I understand its supposed to look like the rotor blades, but it looks very erratic, pretty much randomly shadowing spots on the "dashboard". I made a capture showing what it looks like: Or direct link:

Hi all, Whenever I turn shadows on, there is some horrible flickering going on inside the cockpit. Has this been encountered before, and is there a possible known solution that lets one play with shadows, and without flickering? I have a hunch people know what I'm talking about, but I can also make a screencapture of it if required. I am using an AMD5700XT graphics card. Cheers!

I'm going to say something that may be a bit controversial, so let me state first that everyone should decide their own budget and have their fun within this budget, and don't worry if you are not achieving the same precision in the game as someone with a bigger budget. What hardware are you using? I noticed a huge difference when changing from a regular control stick (saitek X56, don't buy it) to a VKB stick. It's hard to describe, but it really helps in controlling sensitive maneuvers like flying helicopters or hovering the harrier. I guess the main difference is the center position, where most sticks have a little notch that keeps the stick at the center when not applying force. To get the stick out of the center position, you need quite a bit of force which causes you to lose precision (ie. overshoot). With the fancier sticks there's an option to control it without such a centering notch, allowing you to move it with barely any resistance close to the zero. This really helps in the small corrections between sligtly rolling left and slightly rolling to the right that you encounter. Also the FPS you manage to get make a difference, if the FPS is too low it's more difficult to spot small movements, delaying your response time. In other words, hardware makes a big difference. However, I'm not saying that any of these things is impossible with less fancy hardware, it just takes more skill.

I think pilot's views are interesting and valuable, but I also don't think they can be seen as a ground truth. Pilots can perceive G-forces in all axes, simmers cannot and in most cases only have G-force numbers on one axis. For example while us simmers can happily pull the stick and crank out the maximum G's that the flight model allows, a pilot would feel rather inclined to widen his turn at some point to prevent going to sleep. In other words there are situations in the sim that real pilots never or rarely encounter. To get an accurate flight model, one would have to get their hands on technical documents and flight recorder data. Depending on how many factors are logged one can start modeling: At barometric pressure A with initial velocity B engine thrust C aircraft weight D and climb rate E and G G's (pun intended) the aircraft turns X degrees per second and it's velocity changes Y m/s. The complexity lies in that variables A, B, C, D, E, F and G all influence the outcome X and Y in a different manner, and that X and Y in turn influence these variables. So one would need a tremendous amount of data to about real life behaviour where all of these variables (and probably many more) are logged. Pilots also cannot remember all of these parameters and tell a modeller whether his model is correct or not, they can only tell whether it feels ok.

Thanks for the advice! I tried staying low, assuming that it would be easier to spot an enemy plane against an even background of blue sky rather than the ground. Also the mig21 radar is better pointing upwards, right? Also, which graphic settings make spotting more humanly possible in your experience?

played on the server for the first time today, I'm a bit new to multiplayer so experience was a bit mixed. -I love the absence of the F10 live map, making you rely on AWACS calls. -I love that I now have to actually use a mix of RSBN and visual navigation to find a location -I am either blind, my monitor sucks or I am missing an obvious option to turn on small labels, because I circled around a bogey for several minutes (according to the AWACS BRA calls) without spotting him once, and then he shot me. Is there some trick to this?

Also switching to "special modes" (ie. boresight or horizon scan), instantly locks a target that was previously invisible on the regular scanning mode. Their special-ness should not be resistant to ground-effect or low closure speeds I think?

Sounds a lot like the same problems I have encountered: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=255812 The radar seems really broken at the moment.

Thank you very much for taking the effort to investigate this further. When you did a 360 degree turn first, did you turn on the radar as soon as it stopped blinking? In my test I turned on the radar within seconds after it was ready, and I was thinking that perhaps there is a bug that causes the P to stop blinking before the radar is actually ready?

I can't imagine this being realistic behaviour, or else the AdA pilots flying this plane need to have amazing skills and/or glue their eyes to the radar screen; blink at the wrong moment and you miss a radar contact.