I've been doing research for programming the aircraft. I bought Falcon 4 and MS Flight Sim for help and have been able to get a good idea of the components of the heads up display in fighter aircraft. However, I need a source for a helicopter HUD to use for vertical flight only gunship aircraft. Does anyone know of any on-line sources for helicopter huds or any helicopter simulators to get? Also, should aircraft need fuel? Pro: keeps players from staying in the air forever Con: could get annoying as you're chased around by someone and then die because you eventually run out of fuel
Only heli sim I know would be comanche 4. will prolly find a few things on google images =o I'd say no to fuel but require full landing to rearm and stuff. As long as they aren't overpowered, I don't see why it would be much problem
I agree. Though, I think transport aircraft should have fuel. If you can spawn in them like in APCs, they should not be able to just float above some base forever.
I agree that having to re-fuel would be pretty annoying. Besides, there's not going to be much point to flying around endlessly, since you'll run out of ammo after a while. Requiring players to have to go back for anything but ammunition might cause them to decide to simply ditch the vehicles, instead.
Fuel, That would be quite annoying >.< Just limit the ammo so that it would reqire to land and resupply often (Enough to harras and get some kills, but not enough for Solo) I always thought Helicopter HUD was almost the same of a fighter jet , The heli cockpit has alot of screens for cameras, since most modern heli's are equiped with night vision, as well as a screen to guide missles
Fuel - no. Make weapons strong enough to be useful but ammo limited enough to make sure players have to re-arm. Allow re-arming only at airfield or when fully landed in the field(not for example by hovering above an ammo crate). As for ammo, I'd personally suggest a few guided (homing?) rockets (6 or 8) each about 4 times as strong as a grenadier rocket, a .50 cal MG. Something that reminds me of a Commanche or Apache gunship.
i dunno about fuel or ammo supply. personally, my biggest fear is noobs who buy aircraft and crash it 5 seconds later. i know theres not a lot you can do, but i found that this was a huge problem with bf 1942.
It won't be as bad as the battlefield games because aircraft will cost money. If you crash, you just deprived your team of resources. Aircraft aren't free and won't respawn after a certain amount of time.
Yes to fuel, but in order to refuel all you have to do is fly over this way transport craft arent able to stay in the air forever. Though in order to rearm you have to commence a full landing, this way you arent able to spam the ground with rockets and bombs.
Well im not a big fan of aircraft in FPSs. Most of my hate comes from Planetside, where the aircraft there were horendously good agaisnt infantry. I can see this becoming a problem in Empires, unless they have paper armour? I assume theres going to be a High damage low armour/HP one (bomber?) and a gunship type med armour/medium damage anti tank one?? Will they have an eject system? as im pretty sure this will just cause problems with people using them as disposable 1 way transport in attempts to ninja Com vehicles etc.... I cant actually see any map in the game big enough to warrent air power yet lol. Is the Hl2 engine going to be able to cope with this?? As for cockpits well all you need is an artificial horizon and altimeter really I wouldnt give them unlimited fuel but at least 5 minutes worth. The good pilots are going to domiate with these things, much like a good tank driver can. Deffinately make sure they can only rearm at a vehicle rearm/repair bad, that way it will be a more important building as right now they are pretty useless compared to 1 engineer and a box of ammo. Are there going to be anti air defence turrets? will grenadiers rocket launchers drop a plane in 1 or 2 shots?? I think they should maybe 3 to be fair. Anyway im really biased, I hate games like BF2 cos of the planes, i love the infantry/armour fights.
the best I can recommend is Jane's combat simulations like Longbow there should be a demo of longbow on their site http://www.janes.ea.com/ I found a review of it here: http://pages.prodigy.net/michael_santovec/games/longbow.htm Manual is 300 pages "The three helicopters you learn to fly are the AH-64D Longbow Apache, UH-60A/L Black Hawk and the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior." Next to falcon4, Jane's has always brought out the best flight simulations I have played Jane's USAF and WW2 flight simulator for some time and I have to say those games are very very high quality and just freaking awesome, Both would make it very high in my list of favourite games alltime
Jane's Apache Longbow simulator is fantastic if you want realistic helicopter sim. It's almost too realistic (took me about half an hour to takeoff) but it sure as hell taught me a LOT about helos. As for fuel, something akin to that. It'll keep people from camping (besides rockets and anti-aircraft fire, of course). Though, it might not be necessary if that isn't a problem. Part of the problem is there isn't much information about aircraft save their names, roles, and some (very good) concept art. I'm very curious about the scale of aircraft personally. Will they be the size of a heavy tank, or more along the size of an APC? Speed, and what'll be at our disposal to reliably put them back on the ground.
With Aircraft I can see an actual need for commanders getting homing rockets/anti armor mg's. Cant wait for the research tree to expand.
Simple way to avoid 1 way trips would be to prevent you from leaving the aircraft unless you have landed or are below 20% health.
