The Problem:
When playing on jungle terrains, especially dense terrains such as one my group have been building we have to cut our own clearings for missions using the Hide Terrain Object modules at present. We find when trying to get picked up from these LZ's that the helicopters often descend into the taller ficus tree's and knock out their tail rotor before spinning away into the distance. This often happens several times before a bird finally touches down to pick us up. One of our issues is that once the helo arrives at the pickup waypoint, it goes into an orbit and awaits signal confirmation before turning in to land, and even when we wait for the helicopter to orbit around to a low point in the trees, getting them to approach over a low area that is clear is difficult.
The Solution:
The solution to the issue I believe is to add the Ingress Azimuth from other waypoints such as the land waypoint and possibly an egress azimuth as well so that requesters on the ground can command the helo that once a signal has been detected, continue orbiting until they reach the point on their circle where they can turn in on the approach azimuth (unless the azimuth is set to auto). The helo can then approach over safe terrain, whether it be trees or buildings or whatever at a lower spot, as judged by players rather than descending through tree canopies in an attempt to land.
Additional Notes:
The terrain my group has been developing is a jungle terrain that makes heavy use of object scale in terrain builder to create a more impressive environment. I'm not sure if adjusting a trees scale correctly passes to AI pilots in the game who may not know that the tree is actually double the size and thus I'm unsure as to whether their obstacle avoidance is a simplex bug or just a quirk of ArmA.
Being able to have players provide finer control to aircraft about where is safe to approach/leave an LZ from is useful for a variety of reasons, but in dense environments such as a jungle or city the feature would be incredibly useful.
We are running missions in dedicated MP and I have found that the AI are better at avoiding trees in SP than they are in MP, but again I'm not sure where the issue lays here. Most of the time in SP the helos bob and dodge the taller trees and can touch down but in MP we find they tend to blindly descend into the tree canopy and become a meteor. The feature request aims to work around whatever underlying AI issues are inherent with ArmA by giving finer control of them to players on the ground.
The Problem: When playing on jungle terrains, especially dense terrains such as one my group have been building we have to cut our own clearings for missions using the Hide Terrain Object modules at present. We find when trying to get picked up from these LZ's that the helicopters often descend into the taller ficus tree's and knock out their tail rotor before spinning away into the distance. This often happens several times before a bird finally touches down to pick us up. One of our issues is that once the helo arrives at the pickup waypoint, it goes into an orbit and awaits signal confirmation before turning in to land, and even when we wait for the helicopter to orbit around to a low point in the trees, getting them to approach over a low area that is clear is difficult.
The Solution: The solution to the issue I believe is to add the Ingress Azimuth from other waypoints such as the land waypoint and possibly an egress azimuth as well so that requesters on the ground can command the helo that once a signal has been detected, continue orbiting until they reach the point on their circle where they can turn in on the approach azimuth (unless the azimuth is set to auto). The helo can then approach over safe terrain, whether it be trees or buildings or whatever at a lower spot, as judged by players rather than descending through tree canopies in an attempt to land.
Additional Notes: The terrain my group has been developing is a jungle terrain that makes heavy use of object scale in terrain builder to create a more impressive environment. I'm not sure if adjusting a trees scale correctly passes to AI pilots in the game who may not know that the tree is actually double the size and thus I'm unsure as to whether their obstacle avoidance is a simplex bug or just a quirk of ArmA.
Being able to have players provide finer control to aircraft about where is safe to approach/leave an LZ from is useful for a variety of reasons, but in dense environments such as a jungle or city the feature would be incredibly useful.
We are running missions in dedicated MP and I have found that the AI are better at avoiding trees in SP than they are in MP, but again I'm not sure where the issue lays here. Most of the time in SP the helos bob and dodge the taller trees and can touch down but in MP we find they tend to blindly descend into the tree canopy and become a meteor. The feature request aims to work around whatever underlying AI issues are inherent with ArmA by giving finer control of them to players on the ground.