small problem with ai helos in LwAmi 3.02
 

Hello,

today I was making some tests on a few missions and I've experienced a wierd behavior with MH60 helos. The tests were made with LwAmi3.02. After dipping and pinging some times the helos ditch themselves (I mean, after they start pinging and are about to move forward and gain altitude they nosedive in the water). I guessed there may be a problem with the helodipping doctrine because I saw the same behaviour with different helos, all using dipping doctrine. I fooled around with the above mentioned doctrine file changing the setalt parameter (from 45 to 55) and it seems that that way the helos would crash in the water less often.
Don't know if this was a known problem. Hopefully there will be a correction.

Regards,

Aaken

Have you tried turning on pathfinding for the helo's ?

might help.

might not.

g/l
dave

Well, I did just find an issue with the helo doctrines from stock DW that never got corrected, but this may or may not be directly related to this.

My suspicion is that the helos are trying to evade underwater weapons and/or not properly reseting the doctrine when they lose a dipping contact, but these ought to be fixable.

The reason that you see this behavior more often with LWAMI than in stock is because helos don't really do anything other than buzz around and prosecute buoy and link contacts, they don't perform proper searches. The doctrine is the Sub Command doctrine with most of it commented out because they couldn't get it to work or didn't want to spend the time to get it to work.

The other issue is that the physics engine is very screwy for helocopters and the AI autopilot makes it worse. When it tries to evade weapons, it will often ditch, you can see this if you have ever been shot at in the MH60 with the countermeasures autocrew on at low altitude... you will go into the drink all the time.

Cheers,
David

Yes LuftWolf, I thought it could have something to do with faulty physical model of the helo. I noticed that most of the times the helo hovers at a certain altitude while dipping the sonar and then, when it starts moving forward, descends another 17 meters before starting to climb up at normal cruising altitude. Since it seems that the dipping altitude set in the doctrine file in 45 feet (13-14 meters) it's quite possible that the little stupid chopper will just crash in the water all the time. This behaviour seems to be independent from any weapons released under or above water. I just set the dipping altitude to 90 feet (27 meters) and it seems that the little bugger doesn't kill himself anymore. Maybe this solution or something similar should be tested some more and maybe retrofitted to the LwaMi doctrine file.

Sounds right because anyway I think when they are dipping it is between 80 and 100 feet (unless I am wrong here)

So hopefully it is somewhat easily fixable!

Did we found out with the helicopter sending links contact as soon as they are leaving the deck? I think Luftwolf found something about the sensitivity of the Link the other day for this?

That was without the Mod.

However, I'm going to make some edits to the helodipping doctrine for LWAMI 4.00 to clean up the behavior all around using some new tricks I've learned, and script some special sections to prevent crashing and be absolutely sure that the helo doesn't promote any link contacts while lifting off from the deck.

I have some good tools available to me for this and I understand what's going on pretty clearly I think, so I should be able to make some clean code that does the job nicely.

Cheers,
David

You are the best Luftwolf!!!!!!!

Ok, a beta of these fixes will be included in the playtest release coming today. :up:

I have noticed this behavior as well, it worsens as expected with time compression involved. The helos seem to be susceptable to crashing into the water when engaged in combat after torpedos are in the water then are told to change waypoints, also when link control is restored to the helo after being controlled by ship, they will occasionally crash.

I put in a fix but the control doesn't seem to be working fast enough.

My only solution is to raise the dipping altitude to something like 75-100ft and force any helo that decides to fly under 60ft to go back up to 100ft, regardless of the situation.

The reason I hadn't done that previously was because often helos need to fly lower than 75ft, and I was unsure if the sensorenable commands were working properly... now that i know they are I can just disable the sensors when the helos are moving above like 5kts or so, regardless of what altitude they are flying at.