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I honed my skills on IMO the best Helicopter Flight sim ever produced, it was also an EA produced game. Janes AH-64D Longbow. If you’re going for realism you can’t go past ‘Janes’ games.

In Longbow, some of the most fun I had was when my chopper had been shot up real bad. You’d get ‘bitchen-betty’ giving you all sorts of warnings, you’d have to fly with full left stick, the night vision didn’t work and your left MFD was down. You were leaking fluids and most of all you were having FUN!

There is so much work put into survivability of aircraft, especially attack choppers that I think it is essential that these be factored into PR.

I understand that it would be incredibly difficult to recreate Longbow in BF2, but my suggestion is this:

Make it so that your vehicle (Tank, APC, Helo, Jets etc) doesn’t just go from a perfect vehicle (performance wise) to instantly exploding. There needs to be some performance loss. Of course, getting hit by a MBT 120mm tank round should instantly explode a Chopper. But at the moment, you can have a very damaged chopper and then have it hit by one .50 cal bullet and it will instantly explode.

A good way to balance the work/benefit of this proposed feature would be to have simplified versions of the above Longbow example.

• The Choppers should start to lose RPM, if you’re low enough you survive (Don’t let pilots eject from Choppers unless they are on the ground as I have never heard of a pilot climbing out a Chopper window and parachuting to the ground in combat before)[Not sure if the new version stops you from doing this already].
• The tanks should stop working (eg. Can’t drive, turret stops pivoting, the .50cal could still work though until the tank gets properly destroyed).
• Jets start to lose thrust and can’t turn, giving the new pilot class time to eject (make it a proper eject, not just a fall-out-of-the-bottom-of-the-plane-eject) so that you can then survive from a low level shoot-down.
• Jeeps/HMMWV stop working (guns still work) similar to the above tank example.

These features could later be upgraded so that there was more detail such as a shot to the Cobra’s gun will disable the gun, or a blown out tank tread stops the tank from moving but still allows the turret to pivot, or a missile to the left engine of a F-15 makes it lose half its thrust and puts the jet into a constant right turn.

Sorry about the long post, but I thought I’d give it some detail.
-Bacon

Awesome ideas dude.

Problem is, this game engine is solely based on the Live or Dead type deal. There IS inbetween, but there are no coded effects for inbetween.

Im no coder so I will not state if it is possible or not to code effects for different levels of damage BUT, from what little experience I DO have, it's just not possible with the BF2 game engine...Sadly.

It would be amazing to have these physics tied to vehicles too. Although at the same time, sometimes I think if we were to get TOO real on the public, they may abandon us. Although there is no real sure way of knowing that so...Not to mention, I dont think the realistic vehicle physics such as your suggestions would be too realistic for the public to handle. I feel it would attract more attention.

So IMO, if it IS possible to code anything for any type of effect at different damage levels, I think its worth a shot!

PS- We like detail.. I believe I've suggested something like this before as well.

Yeah, there are some things you can do by using the damage effects other than just bleed health and display fireworks. Just before I quit modding for EoD, I remember giving the Huey an engine in the rear that would activate (or rather get added) when you got low on health. In other words, it started spinning unless you constantly adjusted it. It wasnt very complicated or realistic, but it was pretty neat, heh. You really felt the helo was doomed unless you got it repaired.

I'd like to see some effect in prmm too.

PrvtBacon wrote:I honed my skills on IMO the best Helicopter Flight sim ever produced, it was also an EA produced game. Janes AH-64D Longbow. If you’re going for realism you can’t go past ‘Janes’ games.

YOU ARE THE MAN

dude the janes games were the first games i loved to play

ATF, Longbow, Fleetcommand, IDF, F-15, F/A-18, 688i etc.

Janes > all

All very very good ideas. Instead of having vehicles loose "heatlh" points and suddenly burn and blow up, have them endure real damage.

I have never heard of a pilot climbing out a Chopper window and parachuting to the ground in combat before

I remembre seeing a video of an ejection system attack helicopters (similar to the cobra or apache). When you eject, the main rotor blades are cut away and the canopy blown away, just like with jet fighters. Pretty cool.

But I don't remember which helicopter it was and if it was an actual system being used or an experimental prototype.


But which ever it is, I agree that the pilots and gunner of attack choppers shouldn't be able to "eject" that easily.

dawdler wrote:Yeah, there are some things you can do by using the damage effects other than just bleed health and display fireworks. Just before I quit modding for EoD, I remember giving the Huey an engine in the rear that would activate (or rather get added) when you got low on health. In other words, it started spinning unless you constantly adjusted it. It wasnt very complicated or realistic, but it was pretty neat, heh. You really felt the helo was doomed unless you got it repaired.

I'd like to see some effect in prmm too.

That would be so awesome to actually have to maintan control of a helicopter going down. And so realistic.

I wonder if it would pe possible to lock the enter/exit key in helos, so that it only functions when the object is touching the ground. This would stop people using the helos as taxis and allow the real pilots to utilise the tool to best advantage. It would also stop an entire squad jumping onboard a helo as it thunders past them a few feet from the ground, let's face it, it's a multi million dollar piece of equipment, not a bus.

DAWG wrote:I wonder if it would pe possible to lock the enter/exit key in helos, so that it only functions when the object is touching the ground. This would stop people using the helos as taxis and allow the real pilots to utilise the tool to best advantage. It would also stop an entire squad jumping onboard a helo as it thunders past them a few feet from the ground, let's face it, it's a multi million dollar piece of equipment, not a bus.

Isnt removal of parachutes pretty much the lock? I mean you are free to jump out if you wish... Its just not a very clever idea, unless you're over water.

I lost my sim-game virginity to ATF. I loved that game HARD.

Anyway I agree 100%. I know there is really no evidence of it at the moment, but I know in BF42, when a vehicle got below a certain amount of damage, it started moving rrreeaaalllyy slowly, the turret barely budged, and of course a few seconds later the thing exploded. I'd like to see this exact same kind of thing happen, where once you take a certian amount of damage your vehicle starts to degrade. Even better, the more damage under that threshold, the worse the performance. I dont know if THAT is possible but it certainly should be possible to atleast affect baseline performance once the vehicle reaches a certain low health.

{GD}geogob wrote:I remembre seeing a video of an ejection system attack helicopters (similar to the cobra or apache). When you eject, the main rotor blades are cut away and the canopy blown away, just like with jet fighters. Pretty cool.

But I don't remember which helicopter it was and if it was an actual system being used or an experimental prototype.

Most likely a Eurocopter Tiger. The entire cockpit is ejected on those things. I think some Russian choppers have a similar system too, but having said that most are designed to crash and save the crew because of the added complications of ejection systems.

Oh and the Jane's games were made by Austin Skunkworks or something, EA just PUBLISHED them (yes EA, you did a good job then, rather than controled every god damn step thus making recent games a load of **** with nothing in them which you can then fill out with several addons). I have USAF but it doesn't work in XP properly, you can only select quick mission which is annoying. They didn't bother making a patch for it either because EA cancelled the Jane's contract or something.