Project Reality Forums

First of all I'm glad to hear, that you acutally taking care of the choppers in 0.5. Secondly I want to make sure, that you know about all issues concerning them - or at least I thought I might help a little with those issues my teammate and me experienced.

I'd like to mention, that my mate and me always play together, spending most of the time in BF2 flying on attack helicopters with me as the pilot and him as the gunner. We did it in BF2 this way and it's the same in PR. In PR I enjoy flying the littlebirds too - for transport and attacking missions. I spent like half of my total 400 hours playing time in a chopper, normally being the pilot.

1. Attack chopper MFDs and thermal vision
I read, that you are going to implement a new gunner view for the two man attack choppers like the cobra. Like that one in USI I guess. That would be a first step. With enough zoom - a great plan.
Even better would be to include some kind of thermal vision like in the real MFDs - if possible in BF2 engine. At the moment those gunner views, like the missile view, are simply black and white. Thermal vision would actually make targets more easier to identify because they are brighter than the sorrounding area. But even with brightly marked guys running on the streets you would need to identify them as enemies first though, which would actually prevent you from shooting everything that is bright and moves.

2. imba M4? Let's talk about RPG uber pwnage
What really makes me mad is that we have an absolutly overpowered RPG in PR at the moment. Flying in an US chopper in PR is like you are already dead - you just don't know yet. If you don't fly like a crazy ***** like 1 to 2 meters above the ground with full speed you and 5 other guys are dead. Instant RPG hit ... -6 points for everyone and some happy MEC guy laughing his *** off.
So what's the problem? The RPG is way too fast and too precise. I feels like playing the railgun in Quake4. Aim, shoot, instant hit, everything dead. Works even fine on infantry. An RPG is not a missile. It's a heavily ballistic weapon. It works like a kind of mordern armor piercing ballista.
Have a look at this video to see how it works. It has pretty much recoil, so it is damn hard to aim on great distances. It needs some time until the rpg reaches it's target - it's not just instantly there. And have a look at how this guys is aiming in the skys to let his RPG fly about max 200 meters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNHFe5Xqn-Y

The point is that MEC guys with RPG or heavy AT can beat a cobra. You know about that and are taking care about it with better MFDs. But please keep in mind that there are other choppers like littlebirds which should simply not be hit that easily. Same goes for infantry.

3. Littlebird gatling ownes sniper rifle
As you can guess I'm talking about the AH6. Most of you guys who jumped into that nastly little fighting machine will have excerieced that a gun can acutally be too acurate. Yeah right, you are unable to hit infantry ground targets with the AH6 gatling because I shoots exactly where you aim. And if you aim between an enemy soldiers legs he won't get hit because hundrets of heavy gatling bullets will pass between them without even scratching him.
Like I mentioned, I really do a lot of chopper piloting including littlebird flying in BF2 AF. In PR it is possible to hit ground targets with the gatling gun. But it's so damn difficult and quite time consuming as you need to circle around an enemy soldier a few times. This is possible for targets on open field or on the roofs. I don't even try to hit targets in the streets as you will simply be pwned by an RPG as soon as you dare to thinking about it.
When I play MEC I dont even care about the AH6 when it is attacking me with gatling gun. The bullets can hit the ground just in front of me - I don't care. And that's what nearly all MEC guys do. You simply are not scared of that helicopter ... but you acutally should be. Would be great if you could make it just a little more powerful (ie: inacurate). But just a little - it should always be challenging to operate that machine.

4. Sitting ducks on a chopper
Yup. Dead ducks on a chopper. They simply don't know yet. I guess everyone of us has been shot out of a chopper. Once, twice or more often? I'm not talking about the pilot or the copilot. The guys on the benches on the outside are pretty much frag food. Well of course you can get shot there ... but is there some kind of hitbox problem? Sometimes it feels like the infantry hitboxes are as big as the chopper itself.
My mate and me experienced this while trying to fly a littlebird with him as support gunner on one of the benches. We searched for targets and tried to kill them from the air. At first you need to be fast because otherwise you will get pwned by an RPG. But on the other hand you need to fly slow and close to the enemy too, because there is an acuracy/recoil/damange problem with the m249 (support gun) - I will write about that later on. The problem is, that it somehow is quite easy for ground troops to hit infantry on the chopper. The other way round it's damn hard to hit them - with a fast shooting support gun. Shouldn't it be the other way round? I had a video on youtube or somewhere showing black water mercenaries practising those runs with littlebirds and m249. Their shots were very precise. I'll see if I can find it and post it here.
However, this results in my mate getting shot quite often. Because of the m249 recoil/inacuracy you need to be too close to the enemy ground forces. Another problem about this is, that he gets -6 points for losing a vehicle. But of course the chopper isn't lost. At that very moment I'm still flying around in the chopper and will simply pick him up again on the carrier. So nothing is lost. In our first attempts to do kill runs with the littlebird he got kicked a few times because of negative stats. Would be nice if that could be corrected.

5. LMG like m249 underpowered
As I mentioned it's quite hard to hit a target from the chopper. One could think it's because of the moving chopper and so on. But if you play the m249 as a GI you will have the same problems there. It simply does not what a support gun should be able to do. You should be able to pin the enemy. Make him stay in cover. He should not want to look out of his cover while being suppressed by a support gun. This means the weapon should be more acurate and/or inflict more damage. I don't know exactly how to improve those weapons to make it not overpowered again (i read in another thread, that support guns had been imba kickass weapons in earlier PR versions). But as far as i know this issue is a possible candidate for 0.5 - didn't find a complete and detailed "possible changes in 0.5" list in the forums here.

6. Other things that might be nice ... like sounds
My gunner was complaining about the weapon system sounds. I personally don't care that much about it, but a few new sounds could improve the game's atmosphere. He was talking about gatling gun und hydra rocket sounds. I have two videos here, that show choppers using those weapon systems. The first one is a Blackhawk DAP or AH6 - not sure. The sencond one is an apache, as you can see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n34bTingq54
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsok0qo9hnY

The sounds are quite catchy and of course damn loud. Especially the hydra rocket in that apache video sound very cool. The gatling gun simply sounds damn scary. They have in common that you can hear them over far distances. Very lound and powerful sounds. Not that silenced as they are now in PR. So sounds like these in PR would be great.

Here is another video my mate gave me. It's about the m203 grenade launcher sounds. Well I actually don't use that weapon and don't know it's ingame sound that well. But perhaps you think this is something which would be great to have in the game, too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlFwNU-qUKo


Thanks for reading although this posting got much longer then I expected. 7 days remaining to release 0.5 guys. Don't let us wait too long.

Cheers, Tex

This is like the emporium of fixed problems in 0.5.

Really? My question is are the RPGs being nerfed? I've flown a few time, and not low to the ground I might add, and I can honestly say I have been downed by an RPG 2 times. The way I normally die is small arms, AA fire, or crashing because I've been hit so much.

So in my opinion I think the RPGs are fine, and their speed is fine, and their damage is fine. Cuase if you get an explosive shell goin straight into a chopper it equals death.

Edit: By the way that RPG is the RPG-2, the one PR has is the RPG-7 so wouldn't the volocity of the AT weapon be faster after about 20 years of change?

RPG's weren't nerfed. YOU SHALL SEE.

yeah, rpg's are fine. I rarely get shot down by them. Mostly it's those mounted machineguns on the vehicles that get me.
You just have to make sure that the area's clear before you attempt to land or do things that involve low level flying.

I really like the thermal vision idea! There is always a but ... so ...
BUT, imagine trying to aim at a tank in Thermal vision mode - since its a big yellow tank with red bits, how do you tell if its an M1A1 or a T-55?

Don't attack choppers have a hybrid thermal/nightvision system?

ahh, I think I know what you mean ... the black and white imaging system. Sorry, I was thinking pure thermal (with blue for cold, then yellow, red and white). Still ... from videos, the resolution is pretty low, so the same problem applies.

Yeah, that's what I thought of. The hybrid system. Just check out this video on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqd7jjZ_7D0

There is another video showing the hybrid system even better. But in that video the chopper is killing a couple of guys in full zoom. I don't want to link that video here.

Not sure about being able to do any kind of thermal vision.

wrt the RPG as an example of an issue in PR v0.4.. the problem there is not so much that the RPG is overpowered.. it's that the attack helicopters are underpowered.

We added a level of realism fidelity into the infantry weapons in v0.4 that grossly overmatches the Infantry capabilities against vehicles of all types. In v0.5 we are attempting to bring the vehicles into line with the Infantry in terms of realism fidelity.

I dunno if the whole approach is going to work.. there are limitations and complications when modelling RPGs at realistic velocities.. then looking at vehicular systems and attempting to model those at realistic velocities and capabilities. It might make for really shitty game play lol.

But we're not going to make major significant gamey considerations or compromises until we get a good chance to polish up the approach of attempting to model things as realistically as the engine will allow. So I'd say by v0.6 we'll have a pretty good idea if the approach we are taking is going to be workable.

That obviously calls for larger maps where there is a large complement of vehicles and I'm hoping we can get that done too. I'm still bugging Rhino to try and make an 8km square map cuz he think it's possible

wrt Attack Helo specifics, well.. you'll have 38 rockets and a chain gun with some pretty powerful zoom capabilities (assuming you are operating as a team). So teams should be staying out of an area where there *might* be bad guys and an attack helicopter should be emptying it's ordinance into that area for as long a range as possible.. then the Infantry can move in and clean up. RPGs are unguided and we've made some improvements to manoeuvrability of the helicopters, so er.. bob and weave

Like I say.. we'll see how it goes and by v0.6 we'll hopefully have polished things up and the realism approach will prove to require minimal gamey concessions to make for a compelling mod.

'[R-DEV wrote:Katarn']This is like the emporium of fixed problems in 0.5.

lmg recoil as well?

The point is that MEC guys with RPG or heavy AT can beat a cobra. You know about that and are taking care about it with better MFDs. But please keep in mind that there are other choppers like littlebirds which should simply not be hit that easily. Same goes for infantry.

Great to hear about the attack helicopters egg. But please don't forget about the other choppers. I personally don't think the RPG is overpowered in damage. If an RPG hits a chopper that's the end - no discussion. But atm it's too easy to hit one. Like a said, you use the RPG like a railgun. If the RPG-7 is that fast - okay that's fine. But the RPG flys even more stable than a sniper rifle bullet. And a sniper rifles advantage is acuracy. That's the sense of a sniper rifle. An RPGs advantage is armor piercing damage. It's made to kill light to medium tanks. How can such a heavy weapon be THAT acurate? If the RPG wouldn't be that acurate on high ranges life would be much easier for choppers with transport mission.

By the way think of a situation on Muttrah city. MEC have conquered all the flags. The USMC is sitting on it's carrier. Now 15 MEC guys spawn as RPG riflemen und position along the complete coast. If they all have a bit skill at shooting the RPG, the game is lost for USMC. No chopper will be able to drop troops because they will be blown out of the sky.

This situation normally will not happen, but it shows what the RPG is capable of: Killing choppers at high ranges. Even with the attack helicopter you will need to move a little, because there *might* be an RPG rifleman somewhere hiding who will instant-kill you with his railgun-RPG even at a high range if you don't do.

If you watch those real videos from choppers on youtube, they don't move a bit. Why? They are simply out of range of any RPG-like weapon. It's not that an RPG could not fly that far. It's acutally the acuracy that fails. An RPG fired at an helicopter that you can barely see will go hundrets of meters into the nirvana.

In reality an attack helicopter can strike at a range of 8 km. In PR we don't even have a map that is that large. So what did you do? You tuned the chopper down, so that its skills match the map size. That's right to do. But you forgot to tune down the RPG. The RPG might be really realistic as it is at the moment. But it's not scaled down to the map size. And that is not right.

Huh you musnt of played PR Helis for long yeah? iv had times in LB Transports where i have RPGs flying at me but i adopt a Zig-Zag line making me a hard target (the LB can do a really hard turning Zig-Zag ) and i never drop the troops off on the target basicly you tell them to much heavy AAA and SAM must drop you off here away from the flag, all it means is a short treck for them as all the MEC (muttrah example) will be lined up looking in the skys

Well ... of course it is possible to fly where no enemy is. It also is possible to fly 100 kilometers high and drop troops with parachute. You can also dodge RPGs by flying curves and zig-zag. But if you fly a lot - and I don't mean a lot like 3 troopdrops and then nobody is left behind on the carrier, I mean like flying the whole time/map (300 points for each side) just bringing troops into the battle zone - it's annoying how often you get hit by an RPG.

TexTheAfk wrote:In reality an attack helicopter can strike at a range of 8 km. In PR we don't even have a map that is that large. So what did you do? You tuned the chopper down, so that its skills match the map size. That's right to do. But you forgot to tune down the RPG. The RPG might be really realistic as it is at the moment. But it's not scaled down to the map size. And that is not right.

er.. did you actually read what I posted?

What I said is that in v0.4 we added a lot more realism fidelity into the Infantry weapons. In addition we equipped the Infantry to be a lot more aligned with how a real world infantry unit is structured than compared to vBF2.

Much of that was adding fidelity that DICE left out because they were making more of a game than we are attempting to make (but we still want it to be fun to play).

Within limitied resources who work on a voluntary basis.. er.. it's not like we "forgot" the vehicles.. we just needed to cut off development at some point and get a release done. That was v0.4.

In v0.5 we are attempting to infuse that same fidelity of realism into the vehicles. We never consciously "tuned" anything down. Most of our development effort around weapons systems is taking the "gamey" foundation and tools DICE provided and attempting to model the systems as realistically as our time and the engine will allow. Plus it's a learning process (and a time consuming one at that) to see just how far we can go with that approach (sometimes taking steps to get there and sometime making mistakes along the way).

wrt RPGs and helicopters, I'd bet you and I are in the same boat as 99.95% of the folks on this forum.. the closest we have come to firing an RPG at a helicopter (or being fired upon) is watching Blackhawk Down and playing video games. Neither of us *really* knows what it feels like. And even if we did I doubt any computer gaming engine can accurately model such an activity.

And as I said .. we'll probably need to v0.6 to get it all sorted and polished. And er.. it might suck heh. Dunno, but working on it is more fun than playing ArmA

Am typing this in between tasks related to building our v0.5 release candidate so if all goes well, y'all will be able to try the next installment fairly soon.

cablecarandsnakefight wrote:lmg recoil as well?

wrt LMG recoil.. I hope we have fixed it. One last set of changes in the v0.5 release candadate that need testing.

We used a completely different approach than what Dice did with the weapon handling, and with what we were doing in 0.3x.

Plus a "legacy" consideration to balancing these weapons was that in v0.3x and prior you could have an entire team be SAW gunners, so the weapons were artificially neutered and some of that carried over in my thinking in v0.4. Plus I made a couple of mistakes (M4 heh).

So it's not quite as simple as it sounds (eg: just grab an older version of the LMG files).

But within the model we have now, we've attempted some fixes and have been evolving the model to take LMGs into account. Tester feedback has continually been for more controllable recoil reflecting the bipods, buttstock design and firing stances typically used with SAWs.

A way to solve RPG's/H-AT being used as AA is to have the backblast hurt the user when the weapon is pointed up (to take out air targets). I also think that is actually a real problem of the RPG. Someone should try it out, point an RPG 60 degrees up and see what happens?

Fishw0rk wrote:yep.

Nice! I feel i've obsessed too much about it as it is already, so I wont inquire any further and simply await 0.5 and see then.

And on rpgs; just like you say tex the problem lies in unforgiving, mirrored real life ballistics in a static and arcadey pond like game universe. But is it really a problem? I've never seen a lb get hit from more, than say fifty feet and the game still allows for better safe margin than that in most cases. If not all.

edit:

'[R-DEV wrote:eggman']wrt LMG recoil.. I hope we have fixed it. One last set of changes in the v0.5 release candadate that need testing.

We used a completely different approach than what Dice did with the weapon handling, and with what we were doing in 0.3x.

Plus a "legacy" consideration to balancing these weapons was that in v0.3x and prior you could have an entire team be SAW gunners, so the weapons were artificially neutered and some of that carried over in my thinking in v0.4. Plus I made a couple of mistakes (M4 heh).

So it's not quite as simple as it sounds (eg: just grab an older version of the LMG files).

But within the model we have now, we've attempted some fixes and have been evolving the model to take LMGs into account. Tester feedback has continually been for more controllable recoil reflecting the bipods, buttstock design and firing stances typically used with SAWs.

Great to hear! Thought that about the neutering would be gone with the new limited kit allocation seeing how wham bam the designated marksman is allowed to be in comparison with the regular classes, and no change to be made there. But as said in the other thread; I understand there are other things to take into account. Thank you for the official response!

Sorry, please don't understand me wrong. I'm not criticizing the way you handle things and I'm telling you to work god damned harder on this bloody game because you need to statisfy my personal wishes.

And yes, I read your posting. With "tuned" down I wanted to say, that choppers in BF2 are not capable of doing things that choppers do in real life. You actually didn't tune things directly. You took them the way they were from dice and modified them. Like you said.

So in my opinion choppers are somehow "tuned down" so that they fit into the BF2 engine. If you compare them with their real life counterpart they are "much weaker". If you compare the ingame RPG with the real life RPG that gap is not that big as it is for the choppers.

So I'm not telling you this in a way like "why havn't you seen this before and implemented it the correct way b*tch?" . I acutally want to mention it, so that nobody forgets about it and maybe give some raw idea on I would try to solve that problem. And as a feedback I would like to know if you tend to think something like "yeah, sounds logical, we'll talk about that in our sweet dev discussion round" or something like "hmm ... no ... err ... no! What the f*ck are you talking about?".