CFrag's Lawnmower (Helicopter Training Mission)

[cfrag]

CFrag's Lawnmower
v.20221217 - Update, added Ka-50 III 

 

(This is the Discussion Thread for this mission)
Download Link: please click here

A Dynamic Helicopter Landing Trainer (with limited MP support).
"CFrag's Lawnmower" is a mission where you train, improve, and test your helicopter landing skills. Request a landing by difficulty (easy, normal, or hard), and the mission generates an LZ based on your request. LZs are generated dynamically, from tens of thousands of possibilities, virtually guaranteeing that no two missions are identical (unless you are unusually patient). Landings are rated individually, and after five or more consecutive landings, your overall skill is rated as well. Harshly. So better step up your game, soldier!

Currently the mission supports all DCS flyable helicopters (Huey, Ka-50 (2/3), Mi-8, Hind, Apache, and Gazelle), and you can switch between airframes - just don't do it while tasked with a landing, or you'll score a zero for cheating on that landing. MP Multi-Crew is tentatively included to support Instructor / Student, but may have some lingering bugs during scoring. MP Multi-Unit is currently unsupported.

 

CENTRAL, READY FOR DEPARTURE
You are Lawnmower One, training landings with Central. Landing zones are created dynamically based on the difficulty that you request. Currently there are two locations to choose from, each with endless missions, and you can freely switch locations and airframes after each landing:

• Senaki Kolkhi - the safe starter area
  The classic location from Version 1.0 -- LZ are around the Senaki-Kolkhi airfield. Start here if you have never played this mission before to get a feeling of what you can expect 
   
• Batumi - the city landing area
  Don't we all enjoy the waterfront? While "easy" landings here are as easy as at Kolkhi, the "normal" and "challenging" landings here are designed to make your hairline recede faster; they are a step up from Kolkhi, as they are almost always inside populated areas. Since we are close to the coast, there are off-shore locations to explore, but no landings exercises will be assigned to them. Once you graduate here, sign up for Sea Flea to practice ship landings.
   

Choose your Helicopter (all types supported), then use the 'F10 Other' Command in Communications to request a landing exercise from Central. Landings are scored individually, and you accumulate a total and average score. After 5 or more landings, you are rated based on your average score. After a landing you can change helicopters and continue.

Each Landing is scored based on

• difficulty level (easy, normal, hard)
• time required until touchdown
• Quality (precision)
• Helicopter type

LZ are marked by a ring of tires with a red flag sticking out (easy and normal mission), or a ring of red flags (hard). Additionally, the position of the LZ is marked by blue smoke that is positioned just outside the LZ.

A touchdown outside of the marked LZ fails that exercise touchdown with a score of 0 (as does a crash). Aborting an exercise counts as a failed landing (Score 0) towards your total and average score.

You can request three different exercises:

• Easy:
  your landing zone will be mostly unobstructed and can be approached from any direction. It's big enough even for inexperienced pilots to hit, maybe even land in. There is a generous time limit, and breaking the limit will simply add less to the score.
   
• Normal:
  your landing zone may be partially obstructed, so plan your approach direction. Landing Zone size is still generous. Time limit is shorter, breaking the limit also only results in a lower score
   
• Hard:
  your landing zone is virtually guaranteed to be obstructed from at least one side, and usually there are obstacles (trees, buildings, vehicles, power lines) close by that may even extend into your LZ. Size of the LZ is what you would expect in real-life extraction missions. Time limit is harsh, and breaking the limit will reduce the entire score to zero.

You must also avoid other units moving about, even if they intrude on your LZ. Landing on a road is therefore not advised. 

Helicopter difficulty:

• Ka-50 (easiest)
• UH-1
• SA-324
• AH-64
• Mi-24 Hind
• Mi-8 (hardest)

Nobody ever said it was easy. But it's surely fun!

 

INSTALLATION
To install, download and move "CFrags Lawnmower.miz" to
    C:\Users\[your user name]\Saved Games\DCS\Missions\
or
    C:\Users\[your user name]\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Missions\

TO START THE MISSION 
Start DCS, then click
    - Mission (Note: NOT Training)
    - My Missions tab (upper left)
    - CFrags Lawnmower

 

Version History

• v1.01 - 20210414
  Initial Release 
• v1.02 - 20210417 maintenance release 
   - two consecutive LZ are now at least 2000 ft apart
   - Landing the Zelle or -8 now scores correctly
• v1.20 - 20210418 feature update
    - added support for quad zones as introduced in 2.7
    - muilti-location capable zones and mission modules
    - player module upgraded for group monitoring
    - added location batumi
    - added static and dynamic batumi scenery
    - added normal, easy and hard batumi zones 
    - added Huey, Zelle, -8 and Shark to Batumi Location
    - cleared up message 'make your altitude 500 FEET', and changed wording to also work with Batumi and <undisclosed>
    - scoring for -8 now works correctly. Really. I promise!
    - quality of landing now also takes into consideration the airframe's rotor size (giving some leeway to large-rotor craft like -8 or Hind)
    - now normal and hard LZ are also guaranteed to be at least 650m apart
    - updated roger request to support any location and clear up that it's 500 FEET agl
• v1.30 - 20211123
  - added Hind 
  - updated all libraries
  - re-released 
• v1.3.1 - 20211124
  - after requesting a mission from Central, green smoke now starts correctly 
• v1.4.0 - 20220318
  - added Apache
• v20221218 
  - added Ka-50 III

Edited December 19, 2022 by cfrag

[xelior]

Hello, I've tried some landings (easy, normal and hard) and every time I successfully land inside the ring I get the following error. I'm flying the Mi-8.

Also thanks for the mission it's a great idea.

 

Cheers

Edited April 17, 2021 by xelior

[cfrag]

Thank you for the feedback, @xelior - I think I have found the issue and can post an update within the next few hours

 

Those who are interested - the error pops up only when you fly the -8 or Zelle, because it happens during checking for airframe type for scoring. I changed that code late to include all Gazelle Types, and screwed up the testing there. I never discovered it because I'm primarily testing with the Huey.

 

[cfrag]

Update 1.02 is live. The update includes a check to ensure that two consecutive LZ are at least 2000 feet apart

 

I hope you have fun.

 

SInce you fly the Hip - what is your landing average and what ratings do you get (I'm a bad hip driver, and don't know if the hip score balance is correct)?

[EL_LEJI]

3 hours ago, cfrag said:

SInce you fly the Hip - what is your landing average and what ratings do you get (I'm a bad hip driver, and don't know if the hip score balance is correct)?

 

 

 

 

Thanks for the update

Edited April 17, 2021 by EL_LEJI

[cfrag]

That looks suspiciously like the cockpit of a Huey...

 

So, you managed to get all the way up to Cyclist  . You should get a better score with the Hip, as it's more difficult to land vertically

[xelior]

I've done several tests and I've some feedbacks:

- This one is more a polish thing than an issue. The mission tells you to go 500 AGL to start the landing challenge, but doesn't specify the altitude unit (I deduced later it was in feet). This matter for the Mi-8 because the altimeter unit is in meters and can be confusing when first time discovering the mission. The fast fix is to specify 500 feet AGL and the nice fix would be the specify it in meters (around 152) when flying the Mi-8.

- There is a landing spot that is dangerous to land for the Mi-8 because of the size of its rotor blades. As you can see in the picture #1, I'm almost outside the ring and yet I'm almost hitting the poles with my rotor blades. Maybe it would be interesting to review the landings option with this in consideration.

- The Mi-8 is apparently an "Unknown helicopter" type for the script. See picture #2.

- For a reason still unknown to me, sometimes I'm landing inside the ring (successful landing, not a failed one - at least according to the script message) and I'm not getting any score. I got the feeling this is happening with the hard landings, but I didn't do extensive tests with the other difficulties yet. See picture #2, #3.

My landing average is yet to be determined as with all my tests, problems and crashes I didn't do a stable 5 landings scoring. At the moment I can give you picture #4 which is the result with landing 1 and 2 in hard difficulty being successful but no score attributed, landing 3 and 4 with the easy difficulty and landing 5 with the hard difficulty.

 

Pictures:

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited April 17, 2021 by xelior

[cfrag]

Thank you so much for the helpful feedback and images!

 

Yes, the entire score of a landing is zero if you run out of time in a 'hard' (and only on hard) exercise

 

I'll look into the Mi-80 recognition issue, I probably did a silly typo there. This means that your score modifier is currently a paltry 1.0, not what the hip deserves.

 

I'll add the 'feet' as units to AGL and re-do the voice-overs- I have to do that anyway since the new version also has landings in Batumi (really, really beautiful and really, really difficult because you are landing inside the city for normal and hard). 

 

One of the reasons the Hip gets a higher score is because of the large rotor and the high probability of not being able to do a full center landing. I'll probably add a 'grace delta' for each helicopter type to better account for this. I'm not good enough in the Hip to self-test the hard landings, so your feedback is not only very helpful, but your skill @xelior impresses the heck out of me

 

 

[xelior]

38 minutes ago, cfrag said:

Yes, the entire score of a landing is zero if you run out of time in a 'hard' (and only on hard) exercise

Oh I didn't think about it. The landing message is a bit confusing on that regard. To my understanding, "Mission time" is the time I took to land and "time under" is how faster I was in relation to the time objective, is it correct? "Time under" is missing when the score is 0 (which is logical, it should be time over) so I don't know how far from the objective I was.

 

38 minutes ago, cfrag said:

One of the reasons the Hip gets a higher score is because of the large rotor and the high probability of not being able to do a full center landing.

I was thinking being in center would always be a possibility no matter the location as this is a direct correlation with the quality/precision, but if in your design not being able to do a center landing is part of the difficulty then it's fair.

 

 

38 minutes ago, cfrag said:

I'm not good enough in the Hip to self-test the hard landings, so your feedback is not only very helpful, but your skill @xelior impresses the heck out of me

I still have ways to go before really mastering the beast (and your mission helps me to refine my flying capabilities), but thank you for the compliment 

Edited April 17, 2021 by xelior

[xelior]

New report: I did two hard landings and the second one spawned really close to the previous one.

Picture #1: left blue smoke is the first landing, right blue smoke is the second.

Picture #2: the location of the second landing (the first blue smoke vanished at the time of the picture).

 

Pictures:

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited April 17, 2021 by xelior

[cfrag]

Hmmm. thanks for proof positive that I really screwed than one up  - the LZ should be at least 600m apart, and those... aren't. 

 

Ok, back to the code.

 

I did implement a new score adjustment for the -8 wrt quality - that landing in your second image should get close to 1.0 quality times Hip factor --> big score (3000 ish unless you blew the time limit)

[cfrag]

VERSION 1.2 WITH NEW LOCATION : BATUMI (PRACTICE CITY LANDINGS)

 

Thank you for all the feedback so far. I have uploaded a new update that adds City Landings (normal and hard difficulty only) in Batumi. You can also practice some off-shore landings in Batumi, but you currently won't be tasked with an off-shore landing.

 

You choose the location (Batumi / Senaki) where you land with the helicopter; all helicopters are available at all locations. You can change helicopters / locations after any landing without changes to your current score.

 

I've also added some scoring leeway for airframes with large rotors (Hip, and later Hind) so they can score 100% (for incredibly high results) on "hard" level landings in obstructed LZ. That leeway is only a few feet, but can make a real difference.

 

Have fun in Batumi (it's incredibly beautiful - you really can see how much love has gone into creating this venerable map). Make sure you get comfortable landing close to buildings, trees and powerlines, because I'm working on a Syria version where you'll need that skill.

Edited April 18, 2021 by cfrag

[cfrag]

Mission deleted. 

Too many people downrated this mission without bothering to say what to improve. 

[sobe]

Has the Hind been added yet?

 

 

[cfrag]

Of course. Status remains the same, though. I'll upload the Syria version very soon. 

Edited June 26, 2021 by cfrag

[ZaPHoN]

On 6/2/2021 at 3:15 PM, cfrag said:

Mission deleted. 

Too many people downrated this mission without bothering to say what to improve. 

Ignore them.. Your efforts are appreciated even if I didn't get a chance to try it.

[cfrag]

VERSION 1.3 WITH SUPPORT FOR HIND (and new download link)

So people basically told me to get over myself. Of course you all used kinder words, but I know what you mean  - so, yes, I finally got around to disregard the more asocial elements that haunt all forums, and - more importantly - decided to take myself less seriously (always a good choice). Thank you all for your kind words.

So here's Lawnmower, updated to include the Hind, shiny new libraries and all!

Have fun,

-ch

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by cfrag

[Tanuki44]

 "Haters gonna hate" 

Don't pay attention to it and enjoy creating your missions, at least you have that ability 

[cfrag]

v.1.3.1 - Minor Update: 20211124

• After requesting a landing from Central, green smoke now starts correctly

Edited November 24, 2021 by cfrag

[S3v3nS]

Thanks for the missions!  These are great.  When I don't have a lot of time to play a long mission but want to get some practice in, I jump in a Huey and play the Lawnmower and Dustblower missions. They help you learn to get down quickly and how to land in some tight spots!

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Sorry, I think we need to include the Harrier here too.

[Tanuki44]

@cfrag during hard level training exercises, the score is still at 0, despite an average landing quality of 85.

For other levels : easy and normal, no problems.

I will provide you with the French version later 

[Wrcknbckr]

1 hour ago, Tanuki44 said:

@cfrag during hard level training exercises, the score is still at 0, despite an average landing quality of 85.

For other levels : easy and normal, no problems.

I will provide you with the French version later 

• Hard:
  your landing zone is virtually guaranteed to be obstructed from at least one side, and usually there are obstacles (trees, buildings, vehicles, power lines) close by that may even extend into your LZ. Size of the LZ is what you would expect in real-life extraction missions. Time limit is harsh, and breaking the limit will reduce the entire score to zero.

Could it be that you exceeded the time limit?

Edited December 10, 2021 by Wrcknbckr

[Tanuki44]

But how do we know this time limit?

Thank you for explanations... I had seen that the area was more delicate 

 

[Tanuki44]

On a long distance LZ, I could believe that I was not flying fast enough, but I did the test on several very short distance LZ.

I don't see how to do it faster, get off the 500AGL to directly on the zone, orientate and land 

 we have to be really fast   I was in the mode

Edited December 10, 2021 by Tanuki44