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[CMay]

Have been excited about projects like this since it's a standard dream of exploration hitting critical mass on a huge scale, but the other projects of this type haven't shown anything that promising much less released a playable version.  To top it off, Anteworld includes a helicopter which I happen to particularly enjoy (from a perspectice somewhere between arcade and simulation).  So I picked it up and noticed the helicopter is mostly unflyable which doesn't bother me as it's an alpha, but thought I'd provide some feedback.

Driving the truck works fine with the default 360 controls without any modification, but the helicopter is almost unusable and the airplane is flyable but limited.  I've nailed the perceived issues down to a few things.

1. It seems to rubberband all the analog inputs/axis rather than applying some of them additively.  If you try to control yaw it will apply the yaw in the direction you asked, but if you let go of that control it will rubberband back to the position before you applied the control which makes it impossible to turn.  What should be happening is you stay turned, but stop turning rather than un-turn.  Same thing applies to throttle, etc.

2. As soon as a helicopter is spawned it always starts spinning uncontrollably.  Managed to regain control by some miracle once or twice, but otherwise have to rely on Hover mode which feels as if it hinders freedom of control compared to how flight feels under manual control.

3. There's no option to bind the cockpit head control so you can look around, which probably would benefit from rubberbanding back to the center.

4. The 3rd person camera can only be controlled with the mouse.  It would be cool if there was a bindable button you could hold down that would let you convert one of the axis into a camera control, making it useful during flight without having to give up your other controls.

5. At max throttle the aircraft feel a bit slow even near the ground.  Aircraft are made to be slower in most games to inflate the size of their maps/world, but with Outerra using an entire Earth they can probably go at realistic speeds.


Other related issues I've noticed:

1. If you pull up the menu while in vehicle/aircraft, you lose control of it and it becomes locked in place in the air.

2. After you leave a spawned craft, the game's framerate drops significantly and eventually causes the video driver to crash.  Even if you exit Anteworld before the driver crashes, you will still have framerate issues until you restart the video driver manually.



To give an idea what I'm comparing the flying experience to, there are helicopters to fly in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising which had an excellent arcadey/simmish feel and the available landscape to fly around provided a very similar experience to the current version of Anteworld, except if 3d trees and grass had already been implemented on a small island.  Flying helicopters around in Just Cause 2 was quite enjoyable as well, except that you had to use a mod to use the cockpit view which was lacking.

It will be nice once grass makes it into Anteworld, because one of the things that really helped give you a sense of speed when flying close to the ground in Dragon Rising was seeing the grass speed by.

[cameni]

The flight dynamics is controlled by JSBSim, so it tends to be more realistic, without helper systems. There will be a more arcadeish mode later, with several real effects turned off and some stabilizers added. Heli is hard to master even with joystick now, just like in reality without helper systems.

At max throttle the aircraft feel a bit slow even near the ground.  Aircraft are made to be slower in most games to inflate the size of their maps/world, but with Outerra using an entire Earth they can probably go at realistic speeds

That speed is realistic, you must be aware what aircraft you are flying. Faster models will come.

If you pull up the menu while in vehicle/aircraft, you lose control of it and it becomes locked in place in the air.

Will be fixed. Currently you get out of the vehicle when going into menu, you can get back using enter key.

After you leave a spawned craft, the game's framerate drops significantly and eventually causes the video driver to crash.  Even if you exit Anteworld before the driver crashes, you will still have framerate issues until you restart the video driver manually.

This is a problem of current object rendering pipeline on some graphics cards. Should be fixed when the new pipeline is enabled (together with the importer).

[CMay]

Thanks for the response cameni.  Any thoughts on the 360 controller input concerns with rubberbanding or are you also saying players with flight sticks have this problem and it's not specific to the handling of the 360 controller inputs?

You're right that the speed potential might be accurate across just the landscape, maybe it'll be easier to tell once more frames of reference exist on the landscape and control is less finicky.

Just watched the videos on the new pipeline.  Those improvements well help a lot to bring things up to date.  Looking forward to it.

[cameni]

The problem is that in reality (and in the current state) you need to trim each axis, to compensate and null the forces that affect the aircraft. Moreover, this compensation is dynamic, you have to trim again if the speed or other factors change. For example, the rotor gives the whole body a spin, that needs to be compensated for, either by a constant twist amount or by trimming the axis. You are basically asking for a mode where it would auto-compensate. This can be done either by computing the compensation force dynamically, or, more simply, by turning off the (natural) force in the flight dynamics model. So yes, it affects also people who fly with joysticks, but simmers generally prefer realism over convenience, and would use trim dynamically.

[CMay]

Hadn't experimented with trim much other than pressing the d-pad to see what it does.

I just gave it a go and was able to stabilize the helicopter.  Can now fairly consistently fly without hover mode.

Rather than yaw (anti-torque) rubberbanding, it didn't seem to work at all.  It remains that the triggers/axis on the 360 controller rubberband to 50%.  As a workaround I'd been binding things to buttons instead, but that solution won't fly for yaw.  It is a separate issue from trim.

Noticed the update too.  Like the grass and the nature sounds.  It's nice that the grass is colored the same as the generated terrain under it so the transition is pretty smooth rather than that color just appearing out of nowhere.  Can't wait until we can crank the draw distance up on grass.  UFO deceleration in atmosphere also feels great.