Aircraft: tweaks

[JamesTheClarke]

Issue description:

Currently there is no easy way to configure the aircraft.pbo to specific needs of the various A3 communities.


Suggested solution:

Add a 2D editor module similar to various other agm 2D editor modules (medical system, logistics etc.) to configure the .pbo further.

Possible module buttons examples:

• Radar:
• Vanilla Radar.
• AGM Radar: no ground and air vehicles shown for Littlebirds and Wildcats.
• AGM Radar: no ground vehicles shown for Littlebirds and Wildcats.
• HUD UI:
• Vanilla HUD.
• Kimi HUD.
• No HUD.
• Flight Model:
• Vanilla Flight Model.
• Vanilla Advanced Flight Model.
• AGM Flight Model.
• Etc.

Additional Wish for Aircraft.pbo:

Is it possible to introduce a single rocket firing mode for the Littlebird and Wildcat similar to how a semi-automatic flaring system was introduced?

[BaerMitUmlaut]

Everything you mentioned is done via config changes so it's not possible to set these things with modules.
Apart from the Vanilla AFM, that is a difficulty setting that can be set server- or missionside.

[commy2]

None of this is possible unfortunately, except the single fire mode for the helicopters.

[JamesTheClarke]

Thank you commy2 for taking an interest in this suggestion.

BaerMitUmlaut mentioned that some of this stuff can already be customised via the config files of agm. Is that true? Can we theoretically deactivate Kimi HUD and use vanilla radar setups? We love the flight models of AGM but the lack of Air-to-Air radar for Littlebirds and Wildcats lead to a couple of embarassing blue on blue collisions in first person. =)

PS: Here's another suggestion for aircraft tweaks. Is it possible to offer two fire modes for miniguns? One 2'000RPM and one 4'000RPM?

[BaerMitUmlaut]

With config I meant the game config which is the hard coded part of the mod. It cannot be changed without making a new or custom version of AGM.

[BaerMitUmlaut]

With config I meant the game config which is the hard coded part of the mod. It cannot be changed without making a new or custom version of AGM.

[commy2]

Can we theoretically deactivate Kimi HUD?
Yes you'd have to comment out these 2 lines and rebinarize that PBO using Addon Builder.
https://github.com/KoffeinFlummi/AGM/blob/master/AGM_Aircraft/config.cpp#L830
https://github.com/KoffeinFlummi/AGM/blob/master/AGM_Aircraft/config.cpp#L839
The first line disables the HUD from vanilla and the second one adds the new one.

and use vanilla radar setups?
Same here:
https://github.com/KoffeinFlummi/AGM/blob/master/AGM_Aircraft/config.cpp#L801-L802

Is it possible to offer two fire modes for miniguns? One 2'000RPM and one 4'000RPM?
In Arma the rate of fire is limited by the framerate. If you play on 30 FPS you can only shoot with 30 Hertz aswell. The absolute highest ROF I would go for, is therefore 1800 RPM (30 1/s * 60 s/min = 1800 1/min).
From what Flummi told me is this a direct result from the game being simulated at render time (no-multithreating). In Battlefield for example, a seperate threat with higher clock simulates the bullets, so the firing speed isn't limited by the render FPS.

Now there is a work-around with sub - munitions (spawning one projectile that immediately gets split into 3 with slightly different paths), but that seems to lag out servers, because for whatever reason BI decided to log evey sub munition event to the RPT file. (Writing access is really slow and even blocks server-client synchronisiation apparently.)

Sry for maybe using wrong words. I'm not a information technologist.

[JamesTheClarke]

Thanks a lot for your response commy2, that was very informative.

I will try your solution to deactivate the Kimi HUD in our modset. I got some basic experience with tweaking mods on my own so it shouldn't be a problem. Would be awesome though if that aspect could be modular in a future agm version as the HUD can be very intrusive for certain choppers. That way more novice players to the arma series could customise the aircraft.pbo to their liking without any code knowledge.

Is there a quick and dirty way to customise the vanilla radar setting? Because we do agree with AGM's philosophy that light helos should not be able to pick up ground vehicle signatures. We just want plain air-to-air radar to ensure no blue-on-blue crashes during formation flight with more novice pilots. I've found this page in the BI wikis but I'm not sure which setting could achieve what we are looking for: https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/A3_Locking_Review#lockDetectionSystem

This explains why the minigun fire seems so stuttery from time to time at longer bursts even though the overall FPS is fine. Micro FPS dumps cause the minigun to play "catch" with the main game.

[commy2]

You can play around with this entry:
https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/A3_Locking_Review#radarType

Although I'm not sure myself what all these entries actually do. Maybe we can disable the vanilla radar and replace it with a scripted, more flexible system in future.

[JamesTheClarke]

Hi commy2,

Unfortunately I can't find the line: https://github.com/KoffeinFlummi/AGM/blob/master/AGM_Aircraft/config.cpp#L839 within the config file of aircraft.pbo. Is that screenshot from a previous version of AGM? A ctrl+F search of the doc revealed zero entries of "#include"

[commy2]

Thats not a screenshot. It's the current git build.
All includes are lost when binarizing, so if you tried to DEPBO the official 0.95.3-build, then you won't find that preprocessor command anymore.