Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok so I've been playing around with this for the last week or so mainly because I just bought one of these:



and needed to get back enough helicopter skills to not smash it straight away.

RealFlight G4 is the latest version of one of the better RC sims out there and it occurs to me that quite a few BETEOers would probably like it if they ever had a go. I reckon anyone who has ever been into flight sims would really enjoy it even if they haven't the slightest interest in or inclination to ever want to fly an RC plane or helicopter. There's not a lot to do as such other than fly around but mastering doing just that has an incredibly addictive difficulty curve to it. I'm sure that there's actually a really good and fairly unique game in there somewhere. I know it's sort of been tried before with some helicopter game back on the PS1 but it was a pretty poor effort really.

It isn't cheap if you go out and buy it.

But it is well worth seeking out. If you didn't buy the version that comes with one then you'll need some sort of dual analogue controller, ideally a proper RC transmitter type one that you can get off ebay for about a tenner but failing that any would do though, for planes a normal joystick would work too.

There are other sims out there, even some free ones that are pretty good but have rather poor physics and pretty shoddy graphics:



http://n.ethz.ch/student/mmoeller/fms/index_e.html

RealFlight on the other hand is actually a pretty tidy piece of software and visually impressive for such a niche product:




There's also a community made version of pretty much every conceivable type of plane available free for download.

Anyway I think it's much fun, but I might just be exceptionally weird.

I have no real interest in RC planes and helicopters, but I've always fancied a car of some sort. The proper racing looks like fun.

I used to race 1/10th off roaders - had an absolute blast doing it. Always promised myself that one day I'd get back into it.

Ooh, I like the look of that.

I've got a car, it's properly cool. You can have a go if you ever come to London, Myop.



[edit]Ooh, here's a video of my mad RC skillz.

The only problem I've found with cars is that unless you are actually racing then they get boring pretty quick, there's simply not much challenge once you've jumped them around a bit and seen how fast they can go. Racing them is ace though.

I thought RC Stunt Copter was rather good, to be fair. The controls worked fairly well, the challenges were entertaining and the sarcastic commentator (who sounded just like an old friend of mine) was both genuinely amusing and also had enough comments that the seldom repeated enough to be annoying. What are the controls like for this sim then? Can it be done with just one joystick?

The problem I recall with RC Stunt Copter was the feel, all dull and wrong. This sim, it's difficult to explain but the physics are so accurate (in the main at least, crash physics aren't too great but then that's not what it's really about) that more than another game I've played you have the sensation of actually moving a physical object around. The nature of RC with an essentially fixed viewpoint means that there's not really much at all lost in the translation to the screen.

Planes you can pretty much alter the throttle every now and then and fly with just aileron and elevator inputs, so yeah a normal joystick would work. Helicopters though require continual management of all four of the main controls or they just crash so you really do need some sort of dual analogue inputs, preferably with the throttle axis having no centering srping. Ideally something like the controller from this:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-6CH-USB-RC-He ... 286.c0.m14

But just for a mess around anything would do. Of course if you actually buy RealFlight then it comes with a controller but like I said it's dead expensive so you might want to shop around.

Yeah, I think helicopter sims in general suffer from needing a lot more than just a joystick... you should really have two AND pedals, even more so than a fixed wing sim. As a result I have always been happy to accept the fudges and assists like auto collective and such in sims like Flight Simulator and Longbow 2. Likewise, in Superbike 08 I have several assists on as I am not dextrous enough to manipulate with just my hands half a dozen controls simultaneously that in reality are sensibly divided among all four limbs.

Well it's slightly less complicated than a console FPS where you are constantly manipulating four axis's as well as a pad full of buttons and triggers (what the hell is the plural of axis? I tried axes but that's just the plural of axe).

Axices? Haha.

perhaps... But you don't use a whole set of FPS controls at the same time, but in Superbike you need to be steering, shifting down and controlling two brakes at the same time. I honestly can't see how, with the default controls at least, how you are expected to do it as you would be trying to hold one face butto to brake while tapping another to shift down. And the plural of axis is axes.

You just pronounce it 'ack-sees' instead of 'ack-sez' (plural of axe).

I see what you mean regarding bikes, however the controls for RC helicopters are pretty much perfect as they are, split between four axes on two sticks, as evidenced by what some people can do with them. I don't have any great dexterity but after a bit of practice I can at least fly one and do basic stuff like rolls, loops flips and inverted hovering. The reasons for real helicopters using pedals is probably just as much to do with the fact that helicopters were purely mechanical devices with big clunky linkages that needed a bit of force to operate them, together with a desire to make them slightly familiar to fixed-wing pilots.

I reckon you get a lot more precision from a full set of chopper controls than from to multi-function sticks. Trying to get precise amount of one axis and a differing amount from another on the same stick is very hard, especially if the two functions aren't related (so for the control stick of a plane its not a problem, but having tail rotor and collective together would be trickier)

Not at all. The collective axis is not sprung and has a very slight notched feel to, you simply don't get any unwanted interaction at all between it and the yaw control. It feels completely precise and allows for very fast inputs, far more so than kicking some pedals around ever could.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a nerd-off.

You came close to owing me a new laptop due to spitting tea out over that last remark

nerd indeed

In any case full size helicopters already do have multi function sticks, the cyclic control affects both pitch and roll. You need to fly all the controls to keep a helicopter in the air, they are all related, so you don't want to be pitching the machine forward when you are trying to roll left any more than you want to be raising the collective whilst you are trying to yaw to the right. With practice having the yaw control and collective on one stick feels perfectly normal and you just instinctively give the correct inputs. An RC helicopter is slightly less complicated than its full-size counterpart in that the collective and throttle aren't co-ordinated mechanically but by programming mixing curves into the computer so that as you push the left stick forward the throttle increases along with the pitch of the main rotor blades at a rate designed to maintain a fairly consistent head speed. Unless of course you are flying in "idle-up" mode designed for aerobatics in which case the throttle is wide open at the top and the bottom and slightly lower in the middle with 0 degrees pitch at mid stick to about 11 degrees of negative pitch at the bottom and about the same positive at the top, allowing you to fly the machine inverted or to power through loops and rolls with no loss of altitude.

Very true. The cyclic falls into the same category as the flight yoke of a fixed wing aircraft in that it controls the general attitude of the aircraft. I also reckon that big clumpy controls are easier to use when you're feeling the movements of the thing you're controlling (because you're in it)

Which is where using a steering wheel on a console falls down.

I remember once playing Colin McRae on PS1 using an RC car style controller, it seemed pretty much perfect as I recall. Really precise control around the centre with the benefit of not having a stupid enormous pretend steering wheel bolted to a table.

One of these days I'll try this out -

as it might be quite good for Sega Rally compared to using the big steering wheel.
(can't remember if my Saturn is set up actually)

I've just been looking to see if anyone does a 360 one, they don't as far as I can tell. The only drawback I can see would be that the steering pretty much takes up an entire hand rather than just a single thumb, not sure where you could put gear changes and other stuff within intuitive reach.