Air Marshalling for Helo Landing Idea

[Raptor 6 Actual]

From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_marshalling

"Aircraft marshalling is visual signalling between ground personnel and pilots on an airport, aircraft carrier or helipad....marshallers give take-off and landing clearances to aircraft and helicopters, where the very limited space and time between take-offs and landings makes radio communications a difficult alternative."

The concept here will be to implement a system similar, but not alike, to the ILS used on Airports and Aircraft Carriers. As you near the LHD or any ship with a helipad, an action menu will popup asking which position you would like to land at. From there, the script will generate, by setpos, a Flight Deck personnel member that has new animations indicating what action the pilot must make to land safely onto the deck.

Currently, I am working on 10 different animations for this project:

1) Lift Off
2) Land
3) Move Upward
4) Move Downward
5) Move Right
6) Move Left
7) Move Forward
8) Move Rearward
9) Hold Hover
10) Release Sling Load (still considering whether or not this is needed yet!)

Also, incase the pilot cannot see the Deck Hand, a "Hint" box will also popup helping to coordinate the landing. Hopefully, this will be made possible via triggers associated with the ship. It will be like the Aircraft Landing system created in OFP (Sorry, I don't remember who created that beautiful script). A I need the script to only be activated by the pilot of a helo or VTOL aircraft and not just random players just walking on the deck (or anywher on the vessel for that matter). I know it can all be done, but I'm concerned with finishing the animations at the moment. I obviously need to wait for ArmA 2 tools to be released so that I can figure out what Animation program it will use, if different than Maya or other programs.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, or suggestions, please feel free to email me at jeffwhite1979@<hidden>

[Welcome To Hell]

I think its a pretty good idea, but kind of useless.

[Alex72]

Should be cool at airports and the carrier. :)

Good luck with your project! And dont forget to ask for help when needed.

Regards
Alex

[Delta Hawk]

*Cough...* However, I will say that being ArmA 2 is base off a Marine BLT and a MEU, I will say every Battalion has a "Airs Officer(s)" (usually Lt or Cpt) who coordinates ground/air assets and is ultimately responsible for the landing and departure of helos and airplanes via UHF man pack radio and visual signals, i.e. smoke or IR Strobe. He is also responsible for coordinating casevacs (9 lines), CAS, and troop movements. While this feature would be useless in a small game, if you have a multiplayer game of 50+ it would be useful and very authentic.

And while someone does direct aircraft on aircraft carriers, LHDs and airports, make no mistake there is a tower that over seas all flight deck operations that directs that aircraft and gives all commands to that pilot. Air Marshalling for a ground combat unit is more involving for one person than it is for a LHD and does have possibilies for missions since they can't just build a tower in the middle of asscrackastan. Is it worth it to do animations? For the LHD and airports yea, but for ground combat unit, it's almost done entirely via radio and signaling devices by the Arr-O or qualified personnel.

[schaefsky]

Like the idea.
Sure, for most players it will be "just" eyecandy, but hands up:
Who of you would choose out of two girls, all exactly the same in terms of body, personality and coolness or whatever you like to call it, who would choose the one with the ugly face? After all, it's just eyecandy...

@<hidden> 6 Actual
If you need help scripting, I volunteer to help.
That said, I would recommend that you try yourself and let me (or someone else) have a look at it. That way, it would be less work for me, and it would be more frustrating for you, since I might just tell you: that's all nice and fine, but do it more like this (that has happened to me more than once, and my official job description is "software engineer" :b:).
The beauty about it would be besides me having less work that you might learn something in the process. After all, knowledge is power.
Oh, btw: I don't know shit about animations ;)

[Vandrel]

Simple title for this would be "Ground Guiding" as we like to call it


I think its a pretty good idea, but kind of useless.

Maybe a useful feature for VBS but I don't see it being used much in the ArmA world.

[Schilly]

Simple title for this would be "Ground Guiding" as we like to call it



Maybe a useful feature for VBS but I don't see it being used much in the ArmA world.

Not entirely true... If you play in a realism setting which a lot of units out there do, this might be useful... I know when my unit (20th SFG) plays a CooP with other units we play on Expert mode... which means no hud, no 3rd person, ect.. Still have instruments to rely on but still can be a pain some times.

[Vandrel]

Ground guiding is used to guide a vehicle around crowded areas to ensure the vehicle doesn't hit anything, other uses would be for fast roping to guide a chopper into a specific place (ie: flight deck of a ship) or hooking a grounding cable to the belly of a chopper landing on a ship, or seldomly for LZ landings when conditions require.

The issue I see is that there's a large variety of different hand and arm signals for ground guiding that would make it very difficult to use in ArmA2 and as I noted I wouldn't see it being used often since the vast majority of this community prefer a quick method of spawn, run, attack, die, respawn and repeat. The "expert" mode servers could benifit from such a feature but those are few and far between.

[HailStorm]

I think it would work well in single-player missions, eg. guiding a supply helicopter into a small constrictive clearing. in any case, it would definitely add immersion to any mission where it's used.

Just because radios can be used doesn't mean they can - often pilots need a set of eyes on the ground concentrating on their aircraft giving directions, and those usually close enough are in too loud an environment to talk over the radio - not to mention the limitations of open channels and radio silence.

There aren't that many signals in total - as most are simply used to maneuver an aircraft to the ground, they don't get much more complicated than what Raptor 6 Actual has listed - the list of basic signals are about roughly double that, including both fixed-wing and helicopter, and including such things as winches, chocks, and specific engine directions. I do hope Raptor also later includes the "turn left", "turn right" and "stop" directions - that means his collection can also be used to guide fixed-wing aircraft on the ground.

Raptor 6 Actual, if you need any more help with this, I've done a few stints as a marshaller on several occasions and I'm also a trained pilot, so I can help with any of the technical aspects, and I also have some resources you can use. PM me if you want anything.