Helicopters and civilian ops project

[Chaz]

@Multiplayer team - thanks for the server. Any chance on changing the frequency of the "Urgent Message!". I believe it flashes every 2 minutes. How about 4 or 5 minutes?

[Multiplayer team]

@Multiplayer team - thanks for the server. Any chance on changing the frequency of the "Urgent Message!". I believe it flashes every 2 minutes. How about 4 or 5 minutes?

 

We will think about it. Currently we are working on fire fighting concept, taking some time already..

[Orwell]

Can you guys start a discord for the server please?

Also, helis seem to be "falling through" the hospital helipad by a couple feet, causing huey tail rotor strikes to occur for a split second, destroying the aircraft. 
Missions do still complete, though.

Amazing server. Had a blast last night.

[Multiplayer team]

We are proud to introduce a new feature to our civilian ops server: Fire Fighting!
 

First things first, like our Search and Rescue feature this is of course an approximation based on what DCS currently allows us to do, which is pop smoke and adjust aircraft weight. Nevertheless we did our best to immerse you into an intense fight against time. The longer it takes the bigger the fire will get. It starts with just one small fire but it will grow fast.

To fight fires all you need to do is pick up water with your Helicopter. Since we cannot change the weight of sling-loads we opted for belly-mounted tanks for now, similar to those used for instance by Cal Fire (http://www.rvcfire.org/stationsAndFunctions/OpsSppt/HRAAB/PublishingImages/H301%20water%20drop.jpg). The tank is filled by dipping the hose of  to the tank into water (you really just need to hover above water!) and wait until a pump has filled the tank. You can use either the sea, a lake or just a small river. Sounds simple right? Just keep in mind your helicopter will gradually become heavier, you'll have to keep pulling collective to keep your helicopter out of the water!

To drop water you use the F10 menu, F1 will release your load until it's empty. We would have loved to give you the option to bind it to a joystick button or similar, but there is no such API currently in DCS that also works in multiplayer. Bummer, we know.

To extinguish fire there's obviously multiple ways. The simplest way is to drop water directly over fire to extinguish it. If you dropped enough water the fire will go out. If it wont go out it will at least burn for a shorter time than before the water drop. But keep in mind the fire will spread! A more effective way to fight the fire from spreading is to drop water in front of the fire to prevent it from spreading.

The most effective way to extinguish a fire is as follows: Drop one load from the outer left side of the fire for as far towards the center as you can. This will prevent a small strip of fire from spreading further. Now return to your next water source and refill your tank, this time you start from the right side of the fire and also cut a strip of growth off from the side. By the time you refill and reach the left side again, you should already see in the smoke that the fire has spread more towards the center. What you want to do is narrow the path of the fire with every pass you make. Ultimately the fire will stop spreading, and you can focus on dropping water directly onto the fire to extinguish it completely.

But don't worry, once the fire has stopped we will immediately spark a new one for your pyromaniac pleasure.

 

Frequently asked Questions:

• I've dropped water directly on the fire but it's still smoking:

unfortunately we are bound to the limitations of DCS. While we can pop smoke easily, we cannot remove it. Fortunately smoke in DCS only lasts for 5 minutes, so after that period we check if the fire is still burning and pop another smoke or not.

• Why are you not using the big black smoke effect?

While the big black smoke would for sure be way more visually pleasing, this smoke will for one never disappear and even worse, if you join the server after this smoke was created you would not see it at all. We'd love to use the bigger smoke though!

• Why no bambi bucket?

We've spent a lot of time researching, writing and testing code snippets. While we could get it to work somehow it would be quite a hack, so we decided the way we implemented it now is the easiest, most believable and most reliable way to do it at this moment of time. We'd love to hear your ideas on how bambi buckets could work and would still like to add it in the future.

• How exactly does the fire system work?

It's of course a very simplified system. The fire is spread on a rough grid of 50x50 meters. When you drop water the position is approximated to this grid. This way we could have a few thousand fire cells without complex math and tons of computation power required. To hide the visual grid effect the smoke positions are randomized on that grid to avoid patternization. The fire growth is also very simple: when a new fire sparks it will also create two seedlings that travel along the wind-axis in a 6 degree cone. If a fire-seedling reaches a fresh grid it sparks a new fire. If there's already water this grid it wont spark. For the time being it does not matter how much water there is on the grid.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PS   We've seen some people struggle to deliver medical supplies to Mestia clinic... PRO tip: You can actually land supplies crate anywhere on the map and just remember the place. Crate should stay there even after restart, and you can just continue later. Please check it.

PPS We've changed frequency of clinic messages pop ups to be slower.

[tomeye]

That is so amazing, thank you!

[Multiplayer team]

We're glad we're seing many of you try our new feature! One thing we noticed is that many pilots struggle to find the best strategy to keep the fire contained resulting in the fire growing extremely large in size 

Like in real life if you drop a lot of water into the center of the fire it will not keep the fire from growing at all. However, if you drop the water in front of the fire as seen in the graphic below, the fire will not be able to grow past the blue lines.

If you work your way from the outside to the inside, you will be able to thin the fire out. After you close the water line in the center the fire will be unable to grow. this is the point were it makes sense to actually pour water into the fire to make it go out quicker. 

In the meanwhile we are investigating possible solutions on keeping the fire from growing too fast, especially when there is nobody around fighting it.

 

We really look forward to your feedback!

[de.Impact]

Just played an hour with a buddy. Really fun mission to load water and deliver it infront of the fire. Scripting is well done and the fire growth/decrease seems really well done.

 

Wishlist: Yak-52 as fire fighting aircraft

[de.Impact]

Is there a discord server btw ?

[Lotam]

Thanks for your hard work on this server. I was pleasantly surprised to see the fire fighting feature.

[machinist_]

When I entered the server today I was surprised about the fire map.

I immediately flew to try it out and I must say that it was a lot of fun.

I intuitively found out how everything works.

The feedback you get from the server is also very good.

The only drawback was. The fire I found was very big and didn't seem like it could be put out in 1 to 2 hours.

I would like to go after 1 to 2 hours from the server with the sense of achievement to have extinguished the fire.

But as I said in the beginning I had a lot of fun.

 

Thanks for the work you put in and keep up the good work!

 

Grüße

[Nightmare22]

I've become obsessed with my Helicopters again since finding this server - absolutely brilliant work - the fire fighting is genius I love it! 
Would also like to see a Discord channel to help communicate and orchestrate approaches to the fire if possible.

Also if possible the Huey water pickup could do with an autostop like the Mi8, as you can pickup more than it can carry and it'll just pull you under (unless that was the intentional idea) 

 

Great work everyone - thank you!

[BlackFoxNZ]

love the new Fire fighting stuff, loads of fun when doing it alone or with other guys. best heli server to date in DCS

[AG-51_Razor]

I got a very kind note and invitation to this new server from my good friend Vitaliy (Lazzy Seal) and I am so glad he sent it! This server is awesome and I will advise all the helo-philes in my squad about it. Of course, I wanted to immediately try my hand at the fire fighting in there and I was very impressed! I have two questions though; is the "Weapons Realease" button the one to use for dropping the water? and is there a graphic display of the water being released?

 

There was only about 10 minutes left before the server was to reset and I had just a few minutes available anyway so I never got a chance to determine if my water ever actually dropped. Rest assurred though that I will be back! I love this fire fighting role, especially for the Mi-8!! It is very obvious that someone on your team has an extensive background in fire fighting!

 

Just one last comment; while I totally get the reasons for requiring the clients to have pure versions of the game to come into this server, it seems a shame to not be able to utilize the C-130J Hercules Mod in this server in a fire fighting role. Oh well, maybe some day it will actually become a real module.

[Kruger]

I just found this thread after spending a combined three hours flying on the server. This has been the most fun experience in a long time. No blowing up stuff, no AAA, just a relaxed and extremely diverse environment to fly the helos and all of that with a bunch of like minded individuals. Extremely good job guys, keep it up, enjoying this a lot! 

Now all I need to do is to finally set up SRS correctly and get into communicating with the other pilots.

[Multiplayer team]

Hello all! 

We're glad you like our server this much! 

 

Based on your feedback we are adjusting a few values here and there. In one mission we have very hot conditions (40°C) which makes the huey struggle with 1500kg of additional weight. So the huey's max load will be reduced a little bit to 1300kg, at the same time we are extending the time it takes to unload all water. This means despite having less water loaded the Huey should still be more effective than before! We plan to add a feature for the pilot to select the maximum amount of water to be loaded individually so you can adjust the difficulty yourself.

 

We have also adjusted fire growth by artificially limiting the fires ability to grow once it has reached a certain size, also if there is no fire fighting helis around the fire will grow even slower. This should help getting the fire out quicker and also those who's machines struggle with too much smoke. 

 

Please let us know how those adjustments work for you so we can tweek them even further. 

[Meathawk]

HELP!!!! How do I extend the rope while hovering over soldiers e.g. in the woods? And what is F10 Radio Menue? F10 is the map right? And if I am not on the ground I cant open the "/" Radio-Menue.
So I outed myselfe as stupid - pls help. 

[Multiplayer team]

Dont worry! When in the air you need to also press Alt to open the Radio Menu! It is called F10 Radio Menu because all mission relevant functions are within F10 after you openend the menu

[Shadow KT]

Hey,

I've been flying SAR missions on the server recently, with different people in multicrew. They are all located in different spots around the globe, but we all noticed one constant, between all of us, which we've only seen on the SAR server.

Some kind of lag/desync would happen from time to time, for the people, which have joined your helicopter. On their screen the helicopter would roll 90 degrees sideways for a couple of seconds and if it so happens, that you are close to the ground, trying to land, it could actually cause you to crash, without any noticeable reason for the person flying. 

Wanted to mention it, as we haven't experienced this behavior anywhere else and we all have decent ping to the server (~30-40) and in general good internet.

Edit: On a side note, the pickup zones, might require some tweaking. They are in general quite small, which creates an artificial difficulty factor, which is not needed. But the main point is, if I get a buddy in multicrew, his guidance into position, above the people in need, doesn't match what the script requires me to do. Seems like the script wants you to be a little bit forward ?

Edited January 27, 2021 by Shadow KT

[Nightmare22]

My obsession with the UK  Coastguard Helicopter (Sikorsky S92a), mixed in with this server and the Mi8 all coming together!

Working Progress

[doodlewhale]

Yes please to the discord idea! It will really help grow the server/group.

[iffoif]

Hello everyone! I also love flying on this server. Did not try the firefighting yet, but am looking forward to it.

 

Personally I dislike Discord (maybe I am too old) as it is totally cluttered and confusing to me. Why don't you just use SRS to communicate and coordinate? SRS basically is an essential DCS addon anyways, a de facto standard for online comms. The mission author could define certain frequencies for e.g. SAR comms, Fire OPs comms, airfield traffic and so on, publish them in the mission briefing and players would just tune into those frequencies. Or mybe just use a "general comms" frequency like 245 or something like that.

 

Back when I had a friend who played online with me, we always chose a "personal" frequency to talk between the two of us and had the other relevant frequency tuned on the other radio. Worked perfectly fine.

Edited February 1, 2021 by iffoif

[Multiplayer team]

We are reviewing some discord options.

As for frequencies, we can put some in briefing, but general assumption was that people can choose their own.

Also in-game DCS voice comms with aircraft radio implemented are coming..

[Torun]

Great mission so far and I enjoy the firefighting! The feedback and guidance provided by the script is amazing and the server runs smooth for me, really among the best rotorhead experiences I know. While the scenario is excellent. sticking purely to the Huey presents a bit of a problem to me though.

I haven't had the chance to experience many weather variants yet, but most of my flighttime on this server was on the Hot map. I have been flying just the Huey until now and as such, the temp has a pretty big impact. I wouldn't say the conditions make using the Huey prohibitive, but it's definitely rather restrictive. Carrying a full complement of patients is but a dream in the mountains, and forget taking on much water. What makes it a problem to me is when you compare it to the Mi-8's performance. I can't say how inhibited its own performance is in those conditions, but there's already a hefty difference in capacity in ideal conditions and I suspect the hot map makes that divide even greater as the Huey ends up hardly doing any work in one run.

Edited February 4, 2021 by Torun

[CaptainRoach]

This server is great it's all I fly now.

 

Could we get the rainy days and snowy days back into rotation? They were fun and challenging to fly. Maybe just for 3/4hr slots since we wouldn't be able to firefight.

 

Also I agree with Torun the hot days are very hot and make the Huey almost useless for firefighting, maybe we could get the temp turned down to 30

[Shadow KT]

Have the desync/lag issues been acknowledged ?