Helicopters can't steer

[Torak]

How can I make a flight of helicopters keep their dressings? Whenever I have a bunch of them grouped, trying to get them to do coordinated strafing runs, they keep colliding. Hilarious results ensue, of course - for the enemy, but it usually means there's a lone UH-60 cruising past a few hundred Shilkas later in the cutscene.

It's primarily for cutscenes, but I guess the solution would also work in missions.

Someone told me to use setpos, which works to some extent in cutscenes, but it's rather less successful when all the choppers have to do things.

[mikeb]

i think it was me that suggested setpos. only works in simple cutscenes (responsibility clause!)


i don't know what else to suggest.  in cutscenes i prefer to keep stuff simple or i just cheat.  try making them not in the same group which may otherwise force them into a formation.  otherwise use camera techniques.

for example with very tight faming and cleverlt chosen angles you can make it seem that there are 3 helis in a group all passing a shilka but in  reality it's 3 non-grouped heli's flying miles apart which all pass seperate shilka's.  hollywood fakes everything of course, making it look realistic is all about the way you film it.  deleting, setpos, creating stuff may seem unrealistic but not if you pick the right cameras.  think of it in this way - at first it may look crap but inagine that as the "behind-the-scenes" crew capturing the reality behind the "magic" for the DVD extra features.  what you need to do is film that unrealistic, staged garbage in a way that makes it look fluid, dangerous, exiting and real.

sorry i haven't given any concrete answers but it's really about presentation of the action more than the action itself

[Torak]

Yes, I know. It's mainly so I can have CAS missions running in missions. You know, a flight of LBs going overhead, miniguns kicking up lines of dust, and so on. But it rather loses its appeal when they decide to do an aerial version of the destruction tango...