No Helicopter rotor collision, it break's my PR

[Gracler]

Rotor collisions would be a good idea. Even if its just a game it makes no sense to have an asset swing its rotors into a solid object without any damage at all. Even with collisions damage on I'm sure the good pilots will be able to land in some very tricky spots, but i doubt they will "drive" down the main streets any more when they have to worry about a small sign to flip the helicopter or destroy it completely on impact. only helicopters that fit should be able to make that kind of "stunts"

Like many other pilots probably did I discovered the no collision by an accident....i was ramming onto a building and noticed that i was looking right through the window of a building but no damage to my helicopter.... i was like....this cant be happening? must be a bug? on a few occasions buildings actually saved me from stalling by giving me a bump in the right direction.....unrealistic to say the least.

[Mikemonster]

It would make for some pretty ROLF-worthy crashes until people got used to the new system.

[lukeyu2005]

With rotor collision pilots will be forced to be more careful and pick more realistic LZ not sure about urban maps where the pilots don't really have a choice. Arma has rotor collision the engine just shuts down. But then in arma there aren't really urban dense places like muttrah but even then one can easily land a chopper on just about any street. But fly superlow though them? Takes skill to much skill.

Also if you had realistic rotor collision then one hit even the slightist tap on something hard will cause the blades to snap off. How will you do this in bf2 PR?

Can you imagine how fustrating it will be going to dead dead every time you very slightly tapped something on landing?

i say leave it as it is. If it has been brought up before then the dev's have thought of it. and it's the engine limitations. and besides it's not too bad is it?

Besides i reckon there should be a balance between realisim and fun. As lets face it everytime a round begins we don't want to have to spend 3 hours doing paper work before leaving base? Lol

[DenvH]

Back in PR 0.5, the BH had collision I think. At least you would lose your head when running through it's tail rotor.

[77SiCaRiO77]

that was just for comedy, BH never had rotor collitions

[Rhino]

[quote=""'[R-DEV"]J.F.Leusch69;1627303']we are working on something like this for the future, but its quite a huge amount of work to edit all the helis collision meshes[/quote]

Ye, our problem is that we don't have anyone with the required skill set with time on there hands to do this job currently. Its not a simple thing to do and requires quite a bit of time to go round all the choppers and redo there col meshes and is also something we need to do all in one big lump, as we really can't have some choppers with rotor cols and others without, it really has to be all or nothing.

[quote="Mora""]I thought it caused problems with surroundings. Much like the barrel does on the tanks. You'll flip and roll all over the place if that is included on the rotors.[/quote]

As long as the col mesh is static its fine. If it was spinning and was part of the main mesh then it would cause issues.

[Lugi]

Why not just make it simple and make collision mesh a static circle? You know, same for not moving and moving rotors.

[Rhino]

Why not just make it simple and make collision mesh a static circle? You know, same for not moving and moving rotors.

That was the first thing we tried and it didn't work because the engine doesn't keep track of child col1 meshes.

Trust me when I say the only way to do this is pretty complicated and isn't something many people on the team can do.

[Lugi]

Well, looks like I don't get it, or I didn't say it clear enough. I don't know which mesh is responsible for collision with objects and terrain, but it doesn't matter.

My idea was to have this circle in this collision mesh as a part of it, not some derpy col1 childs or any other tricky solutions, so it will look like that:

Why is it impossible to make?

[Rhino]

That is basically the process yes, but its easier said than done even now we have a script to import col meshes into max (which we didn't before).

In fact so I don't have to keep on going on about it I'll just quote what I put in the dev froums in here and maybe someone from the community might be able to give this a shot even.

Rhino;1511280']Hey guys,

Thanks to Remdul from FH2, Importing Vehicle Collision Meshes into 3DsMax is now possible.

Here is a quick pic of the Z-10's col0 imported into max:


On top of that, the original material IDs are still intact, you just need to re-apply the materials to the mesh again, like here I've applied metal to the body and glass to the windows, just from selecting the material IDs and applying a new material to the selection


There are a few small problems thou with verts needing to be re-welded (very simple, only takes a few secs) and one of the bigger problems is that all the sub part cols are all in the centre of the scene and not where you visually want them to be, but still should export into the correct places providing you dont edit the original .con file after you have re-setup the hierarchy etc, like for example this wheel col here is in the very centre of the scene and not where the wheel should be but like I said, should be fine and if you wanted to be picky you could move it into the correct place with a bit of work.


The worst bit thou is the god damn hierarchy which is just a complete mess and will take a bit to redo but as long as someone knew what they where doing it wouldn't be too hard..




What this all basically means is that we can edit the col meshes on vehicles that we do not have the export scenes for without having to remake them from scratch. This mainly applies to vBF2 vehicles but also some of our vehicles and other mods vehicles which we don't have the export scenes for.

What this means is that we can tweak the materials on a col mesh, adding many different materials to them, tweaking there shape to fix any bugs and add new gameplay additions to them such a rotor blade cols (which I'll go into in a little bit) and also even optimize the collision meshes if we want to.

Although I'm not going to lie, this is still quite a bit of work to do this and will require a lot of work from devs that know about basic modelling, collisions and exporting (so quite few devs in that category) this dose open up quite a few options to us.
This includes this topic here of making small arms penetrate vehicles properly (check post #1 : https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f393-t ... icles.html


So ye going to use the Z-10 as a quick example of what we can do here and first of all imported its main mesh and it was pretty easy to snap the right col bits to the right object as you can see here, and looks like something you would need to do in order for it to export correctly:


And now to set up the materials as they are currently on the chopper, which if we look at the cols in the editor we can see there are 3 main materials (with even some buggy materials in there hehe), which is currently glass, heli armour and rubber. There is also a wreck material but we just assign normal materials to the wreck models in PR.



And then apply the same materials to the same parts to our col like so:


Then we can do some quick optimizations like removing these little windscreen wipers from the cols etc, although tbh we could do much more but that's all I'm going to do for now just for a quick example.


Now here comes the fun part with adding new materials to the cols where we can make for example a 50cal damage the chopper more if it hits the engine rather than it hits the belly of the chopper
Here is just some quick examples, although if we went to do this fully it would be good if MAs could help out with defining when the weak spots are on vehicles etc
Yellow = normal armour
Green = glass
Light Blue = rubber heavy
Purple = engine
Orange = slightly venerable parts.


How much damage what weapons dose to each bit will be defined by the materials assigned to each bit but you can see, a 50cal hitting the engine is going to do much more damage then it hitting the normal armour

Now if we look at the current col1 mesh it looks pretty good already, it surprisingly even has a rotor col which no other vBF2 chopper has but if we look in the editor its way too small for the rotor, and its tail wing isn't in the right place which is easy to fix up too.



so ye quick fix of the tail thins position:


For the rotor col I've deleted the old one, imported the main rotor as a reference, made a new 8 sided one the same diameter as the main rotor and then given it a unique material called "rotor" which is blue and then attached it to the col1 mesh


Now the idea of this rotor col and giving it a unique material is that at the moment we have choppers flying though narrow streets and in-between trees etc there rotors wouldn't be able to fit though where in r/l, if your rotor touched any hard surface it would most likely smash/brake off, meaning the chopper could no longer fly. With this new material assigned to the rotor we can make the chopper take loads of damage if this rotor touches any object like a building, tree etc which will make players much more aware of there surroundings etc and not flying unrealistically as if they do, and there rotor hits an object, they are going to die

With col1 done, moving onto col2 which looks good other than it doesn't seem to account for its weapons and like col1, its tail thin is in the wrong place so going to fix them, although the fix for the weapons rack could be better this is better than what it was before



Fixed up the wreck cols in the same way as above although less attention and much more vigorous optimization using mainly multirez since the cols dont need to be that accurate and also didn't bother with the different types of materials since damage isn't important on a wreck model and then its ready for exporting (other than could use a little more optimization on the main models col0).


Now for exporting, since I only want the cols from this export I'm going to export the model into a different place than where I want it to end up and then I'm going to only copy the collisionmesh from the export and paste it into the right folder, rename the col mesh then also editing the .con on the correct model to include the new materials etc

And here it is in the editor, although as you can see on col0 I've screwed up the order a bit on the sub parts, hence why the tail thin col is on the nose camera/sensor pod


But with ordering the hierarchy correctly that is all fixed






And now if I try and roll the chopper it stops rolling when the rotor col hits the ground, and with a new material applied to it it would also do serious damage to the chopper when that rotor col touches the ground




Now that took me about 2hrs to do with also typing this post, say it would take me between 1hr and 1hr 30mins to do without typing this post so it actually took less time for me to fix the cols than I thought


But ye, you guys can see this new col importing script that now also works on vehicles (use to only work on staticobjects before) is really, really good and has a hell of a lot of potential IMO

For anyone who wants it, you can download it here, its the "colmeshimp.ms" script: http://www.buijs-leur.nl/bfstuff/


So ye what do you guys think, we could change a hell of a lot of stuff here but maybe we should just start with doing chopper col materials and rotor cols before moving onto things like giving APCs front, side, rear and top armours etc

Thoughts?

[Sgt. Mahi]

pff seems like a one day job to me j/k

[PoisonBill]

I don't think this belongs to the BF2 engine, this should be seen in ArmA II R or other titles, this will only piss people off in BF2 R. Many pilots who are playing right now can't even drop you off without crashing, so how will this work? Helicopter platforms aren't realistic on some maps, so if this goes through, some mapper has to make the platforms bigger, which kinda means that many mainbases have to be remade.

[Qadis]

This would be nice and it would add some more skill to flying choppas, but there's no reason to complain about hueys flying in the streets. It's usually suicidal and should be avoided because of enemy APCs and how easy you are to hit with AT weapons, not to mention what happens when you drop a squad in the middle of the street (if you're anywhere near the enemy).