Civilian oriented gameplay in DCS World

5 of us

Five? Get BIS on the horn; it’s time for a sequel!

In a different engine, preferably.

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Five and a half? I never made it far enough to get to that bit. I feel bad now. :expressionless:

When it first came out I vaguely remember all sorts of framerate issues on the AMD side, as Seattle was too much for the engine at the time. I should do it again.

My wife was stranded in the hospital in Seattle with our first born for 6 mos and I was commuting there 4 days a week when TOH was first released. We had made friends from Vashon Island, done the Kenmore Air seaplane tour, Boeing plant tour, etc. So TOH was quite entertaining in that respect.

ORBX Vashon and the PNW do a better job sightseeing in that area, but the TOH background story was fun.

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I always thought it might make an interesting Arma 2 map, given it was the same tech. A sort of Red Dawn Seattle thing…

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That would be very cool. Something like the Homefront premise, although I’ve never played that game. I was covering E3 for SimHQ in 2010, and Homefront definitely had the most impressive presentation. They marched something like 100 soldiers (actors) into the LA Convention Center in very Chi Com/North Korean looking fatigues shouting commands and slogans. It was very unnerving and at the same time entertaining for someone whom had grown up during the Cold War.

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I’m sorry, you’ve clearly misspelled

#WORLD
#IN
#CONFLICT

No joke though. I was up in Seattle to visit @Tyco last year and 95% of my sense of direction came from the first two levels of WiC and TkOH

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I had to Google that one…!

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Yeah, it was pretty questionable for a while whether we could hold on to LA. But then @guod deployed the SimHQ HRT and we were able to quickly crush the rebellion. First @Magnum50 used an RPG with extreme prejudice, and then I broke out the XM8 with some prototype exploding rounds to make quick work of the SAG/Communist party card carriers. :smiley:

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Man…them were the days!

:cry:

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Its true. Google maps lost out.

And then you guys went on to be a dodgeball team? :slight_smile:

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I go to stuck on the whale spotting mission. In TOH… Oh well, got to chat with the developer for a bit at a flight simulators conference/event. Turns out it was largely developed because they just loved helicopters!

What version of DCS or you running ? 2.0.4 ? SSD or HDD ?

I personally never fully enjoyed ToH.
Maybe I had too great expectations, I was an avid helicopter pilot in ArmA.

I thought the engine was not ready for that and I still remember the terrible TrackIR implementation, felt like your head was a bowling ball balancing over a road cone. Leaning slitghly forward and “woosh” your head would land on your hips
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsL_JDtVbww

I did like the concept a lot, being able to walk around your bird to do the preflight check was indeed very neat.

I like Take On Mars a lot tho

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The helicopter flying suffered from all the standard problems ARMA 2 did too, albeit a little less, with the inputs being delayed too much. Oh well, it was a nice game afterall.

@EightBall I was on 2.0.4, now on 2.0.5

Yeah, it had it’s quirks for sure. That scroll menu method for starting helos and managing systems was (is) definitely not ideal for helicopters - too much room to make mistakes. Nothing like hitting “Engine Off” at that really critical time!

I’d love to see TOH in VR though…(or Arma helos)…I can’t think of a better VR platform…

Installed the addons and downloaded the mission. Took an Mi-8 up and had a go at landing at two of the hospitals.

Annnd remembered how bad I am during the approach. 60% of my landing attempts had me enter VRS because I was either too high upon entering hover over the pad or entered hover too far away from the pad. I need practice!

Snipped from my full campaign AAR - which lost it’s formatting over at SimHQ when my FTP address changed when we opened this place…(someday I’ll restore all those links…)

Whale Watch!

Our next mission for Larkin Helicopters is set up by one of our employees. It seems there is an oceanographer that needs video work done for a film he is making. We are to fly out to Puget Sound and rendezvous with the oceanographer’s boat and he will lead us to the filming location where we will take video of whales. Paul will be riding along with the video camera to take the footage. This is mostly a precision flying mission with requirements to be at a certain distance with a good view of the whales, but not so close as to spook them and ruin the chance to video them.


Soon we have the engine fired up in the “Little Bird” and we are on our way north toward Puget Sound…

Soon we spot the customer’s boat…

Paul will be recording - whatever he records will also show up as a small inset on the screen so that I can maintain the proper orientation of the helo to the target…

First we follow the boat to the first filming location…

Once there, we have to hover close - but not too close!

After the first video shoot we are instructed to fly to two other areas to search for whale pods to film…

While searching the western area we come across the wreck that features heavily in the storyline. Vrana Corporation owns the freighter and it is apparently leaking toxic chemicals into the sound…

The search takes quite awhile and I find my shoulders starting to ache from the constant attention required to the controls. Yep - it’s a helicopter simulator!

Soon we find and record both pods and we are given a mission success and ordered back to the heliport…

On the way back - I just happen to spot a smudge of smoke off to the side of our flight path. I actually don’t think I saw this when I first played through the campaign/story years ago. As we get closer we get a side mission to hover near the smoking boat to allow Paul to direct the Coast Guard to render assistance…

Then it is a short flight back to our heliport; always a tense moment landing on the small pad after investing so much time in the mission.

The mission is a success and we chalk up another rung in the ladder of trying to pull Larkin Aviation out of the gutter…

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