Last time it happened to me. I ordered hello to hower via fly-to waypoint. It reported sub very closee, behind the helo. I orderer engage command from nav-map. Hello moved a little but stopped again, not changing altitude nor bearing.
I orderer fly-to, helo started to move. While moving, I ordered engage again, hello turned & dropped. Torpedo exploded.
I forgot torpedoes does not explode on CM and I ordered other dip. Helo updatet position of the sub (wreck), and without fly-to I ordered another engage, to be sure. Now torpedo started to move at high speed without changing depdth. It somehow started to turn quite wildly and crash soon after.

Maybe it was bacease of 'engage' command form nav-map, maybe bacause the sub was dead. Don't know.

Yes, the engage command will sometimes override the autopilot, depending on where the target is in relation to the helo.

My advice is to use weapons from the Nav Map only if you have a Fly-To waypoint already headed in the direction of the target, this applies especially to using missiles... think of it as having to line the helo up so the IR seeker is facing the target, since the missile will malfunction if this is not the case when it is fired in many cases. The autopilot will do this sometimes, but not always. And I still say that you should ALWAYS drop torpedoes using a Torpedo Drop waypoint because then you know if the helo overflys the waypoint, that is where the torpedo will fall, and it won't conflict with any other autopilot instructions.

It really is not perfect... Jamie has said on this forum that the ASTAC interface and helo control in general needs some work. What we put on top of that depends a lot on a "best case" user imput at each step of the line (that is, not issueing duplicate commands, being aware of the helo position, etc...). When you combine that with the general tendency of all in-game helo's to crash and users who are unfamiliar with the constraints, then yes, there will be some crashes until people become more comfortable with it.

I promise, if you tell it to do one thing at a time, and don't tell it to do anything but Fly-To immediately after a dip (and nothing tries to shoot it down) it will only crash a mildly frustrating number of times (that is, 1 in x trials where x>0). :-j

Someone mentioned that the AI helo crashes a lot. I was wondering what was happening when I was playing against the AI OHP because the helo would get close and then just disappear on me.

At first I thought it was just bad tracking on my part till I was reviewing a mission and they just up and vanished on me. They were going in the drink.

I found a way to make it crash, at least for me, when I am playing that sneaking sub guy. I wait till I hear that oh so nice active dipping sonar and get it near detect values and shoot a torp (it will sometimes do it on a noisemaker) and poof, they go for a swim every time. It is like they are reacting to the noise transient and are in too big a hurry to get to you. They are TOO aggressive and are ignoring flight rules it seems.

I JUST reinstalled my entire OS and everything so I KNOW all I have is DW patched to 1.03 and the 3.02 LWAMI installed. Nothing else done to the game. I flip it back to stock and they do not crash with near the frequency.

Just dived one of my MP missions (sub v sub) SP with LwAmi 3.02 and the AI was so good I thought I'd drifted into MP.

1. The AI subs were aggressive and had excellent avoidance.
2. The torps really bit and were harder work to avoid.
3. The ping rate increased.

As I have been diving 'stock' a lot lately this was a very pleasant surprise. :|\

Thanks to all. :rock: :up:

Yeah .. even with rookie helo pilots, much better overall experience.

Hi guys . Yesterday I played multiplayer (multistation) game with six people. And Seahawk sonar operator had some problems with marking contacts on active sonar. We all had LWAMI 3.0 Official installed.

Could anybody confirm that problem ?
I have experienced the same problem when playing single player mode with FFG before (LWAMI 3.0 official) .

I will do some more testing now in MP with Seahawk.

BTW . Great MOD , especially like the new Broadband :arrgh!:

I have done some further testing . . . as co-pilot / dipping sonar operator. Multiplayer. On both : LWAMI 3.0 official version , and DW 1.03 .

On LWAMI :

The autopilot was terrible. Did not respond to commands.
Could not mark any contacts with active dipping sonar.

Patch 1.03 :

Slightly better working autopilot . . .
I managed to mark one contact. (which wasn't the closest one).
Even the contact appeared on the nav map , there was no message from the game, like : . . . . i have a new contact, bla bla bla . . .

Both of those sound like interface issues...

While it is possible that DB changes may have some effect on whether contacts can be marked, I think the mod being responsible is highly unlikely--combine this with the fact that both issues still occur without the mod, and, well.... you're in the wrong thread. :hmm:

Both of those sound like interface issues...

While it is possible that DB changes may have some effect on whether contacts can be marked, I think the mod being responsible is highly unlikely--combine this with the fact that both issues still occur without the mod, and, well.... you're in the wrong thread. :hmm:

@Tusipex-- I suspect Molon is right here... you may have to try to finesse it a bit more, sometimes contacts are harder to mark then they should be, depending on your display and mouse.

Yeah, it is really hard to keep the helos in the air sometimes. In fact, the AI autopilot for helos is not great at all... I had to change every helo's mass to be over 10 tons, because the light helos like Lynx would crash 100% of the time when dipping.

When the AI autopilot gets confused, it's like he sets the collective to 0% and just lets the helo fall into the ocean like a brick. :shifty: :dead:

I think for future version of the mod, I am going to perhaps raise the dipping height a bit, but first revisit the issue of helo turn radius because this may actually be the root cause of the miscalculations.

In any case, the dipping capability added in LWAMI 3.xx really just exposed a weakness of the game that is there already, which is unfortunate, but helos have always crashed in DW at a high rate.

Are the non-markable sonar traces fixed?

NO, and they're not going to be EVER.

At least not by me and the Mod team, that's strictly SCS's department, and that's never going to happen because it is a artifact of a fix of the click-to-mark cheat from SC.

In other words, anyone who plays DW has to live with it... anyone who uses the mod has to deal with it being more noticable, but not worse in terms of how it influences gameplay.

As a community, we went over this months ago, the thread is probably a few pages back if you want to search for it and see the full discussion.

PS It's possible you have a more extreme version of the problem due to your hard/software setup... in which case there is still nothing I can do.

The good news is that I am becoming more and more convinced that the AI helo crashing issue IS in fact a problem that can be resolved using database parameters, that is, in the phsyics engine itself rather than the helo AI autopilot (so who knows, maybe these fixes will even correct the Countermeasure Autocrew crashing problem).

I'm going to do a lot of testing in the next few days, so I'll let you guys know. :know: :up:

So what is that Countermeasure Autocrew crashing problem?

First time I'm hearing that one

The Helo Countermeasures AC follows always the same pattern when evading, regardless of current speed and/or altitude.

That means : Down nose to gain speed and turn away from the thread while releasing CMs. If you are at 50ft and dipping this will put you in the drink in a heartbeat with no chance of stopping it fast enough.