Military AI Works

Hi guys, has anyone come up with a hover-taxi xml for skidded helos? Still playing with Huey and wondering if this is possible. Also, how do you make the parts of the rotor head turn realistically?
Thanks for your help

Jake, I thought hover taxi was the holy grail of xml coding, but I had an idea overnight that came to me after using a block of Kevin's timer code in my current project (not a helicopter). I've just tested the principle on my Blackhawk model and hey presto it worked. It just needs a little bit of adjustment in the timing value to settle the helicopter back on the parking spot just before the rotors shut down.

Rather than reveal the technique publically, I'll PM you what I did. You can then carry on the test from what I did this morning. Before I do that though, 3 questions:

- I am assuming this is for FS9. Is that right?

- Are you also using xml lift/tilt code for the helicopter?

- what is it you want to do with the rotor head?

John

If that works there are many helos that can be developed

It gets better. I had a thought in the shower, as you do, that maybe using timer code could present a problem with multiple departures at the same time. The variable length of ATC chatter might delay the hover taxi trigger to an inappropriate time depending on how many aircraft were departing and whether that was VFR or IFR chatter.

To test that I set up 3 helicopters all scheduled to depart together, two VFR and one IFR. I was really pleased with the result. Each aircraft started up and rose to the hover taxi height, but stayed there until taxi clearance had been given. That looked quite realistic - as if pausing for a check before moving off.

Landing back after a circuit, engine shut down is just 2 seconds ahead of the return to ground level. If that can't be tweaked with the timer value, it's something we can live with.

To capture what I've done, I'm going to post the method in the xml section of the Design Team Forum.

John

Maybe you should bathe more often, John.

Apologies but it was too good an opportunity to miss.

This is exciting! A major breakthrough coming up, fantastic work John.

Hi guys, sorry been gone. Sounds exciting John, I'll check my PM's.
Yes I still use FS9
As for the rotor head, I notice on the other helos it rotates with the rotor, but doesn't seem to be transparent. Am I saying the right thing?

I'm also looking for a good texture for the spinning rotor. The Huey's main rotor seems to spim slower than most othr helos. And BTW, if it matters, I'm using FSDS and PSP7.
Thanks Guys

The Justflight traffic ones that Mark (tranquil) painted lift off and taxi. I'm currently doing repaints for the R-44 model. I know nowt about making models fly but if the Traffic 05 ones do it I'm sure any can be made to do the same. Regards. Ross

http://rossrepaints.jimdo.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Ross-Repaints- ... 3/?fref=ts

Jake, I've written up the process I used for my hover taxi test in the xml section in the Design Team Discussion area of the forum. I assume you have visibility of that. For the rotor head - are you talking about the 3-D head (prop0_still) or the semi-transparent discs (prop0_slow) and prop0_blurred)? If you want to spin the rotor head you could try linking a copy to each disc, but it won't spin very fast.

John

Just because things can never be easy, early UH-1s have a very distinctive stabilizer bar above the rotor head.

To make rotor disk textures:

- Take a top down screen shot of the still rotor blades in Gmax or FSDS and paste this into PSP or any program with a radial blur tool.

- Crop square and re-size to whatever size you want the finished textures, eg 512 x 512 pixels.

- Create two copies of the re-sized images.

- Radial blur one copy to give the right appearance of the “slow” disk

- Radial blur the second copy, but with a greater degree of blurring to create the “blurred” disk

- Copy the “slow” and “blurred” disk images and convert to greyscale.

- Invert the greyscale images so they are negative. This will give you the alpha channels.

- Import the alpha channels and convert the images to dxt3 textures with Dxtbmp.

- Adjust the density of the alpha channels if necessary after viewing in FS9.

You can if you want to, amalgamate the “slow” and the “blurred textures on one sheet, eg 1024 x 512 pixels, but do this from the outset so as to keep the alpha channels in register.

John

John Young wrote:It gets better. I had a thought in the shower, as you do, that maybe using timer code could present a problem with multiple departures at the same time. The variable length of ATC chatter might delay the hover taxi trigger to an inappropriate time depending on how many aircraft were departing and whether that was VFR or IFR chatter.

To test that I set up 3 helicopters all scheduled to depart together, two VFR and one IFR. I was really pleased with the result. Each aircraft started up and rose to the hover taxi height, but stayed there until taxi clearance had been given. That looked quite realistic - as if pausing for a check before moving off.

Landing back after a circuit, engine shut down is just 2 seconds ahead of the return to ground level. If that can't be tweaked with the timer value, it's something we can live with.

To capture what I've done, I'm going to post the method in the xml section of the Design Team Forum.

John

John,

I am fascinated by the work you are describing.
So I started wondering how hard would it be to leave in some variables that would reflect on pilot skills for different AI models.
I suddenly remembered my first time pulling up to hover in a TH-57B. It was not all that pretty.

Keith

Yes I think that's possible Keith, but you would need separate models and maybe FDEs for each pilot skill level. It's a lot of extra work that would have to be set against the potential interest and the tedium threshold of the designer to work with yet more variation.

John

Thanks for all the feedback guys, i have a lot to do.

First of all, thanks for the help. I've spent a lot of time on this animation over the last week or so but still cant et it to work. I have a good takeoff but no hover taxi. The problem seems to be when I link the hover taxi part to the take off part, FSDS crashes.I have all parts as children of the "Anim_hover_VTOL" part (fuse), which is the take off anim. Then when I try to link the "anim_hover_taxi" part (a small cube animated as directed) to this part, FSDS crashes.
Any ideas?
Thanks

You should be linking the fuselage (anim_hover_VTOL) to the hover taxi cube, not the other way round Jake. Which way is causing the problem?

John

actually, neither will work I think, but I'll go back and make another pass.

Is the crash because FSDS doesn't like the hierarchy or it doesn't like the code you've set up for the hover taxi? To test the latter, change the name of the hover taxi cube to something like c_gear_x (something you know that works) and see if FSDS still objects.

John