CFS2 helicopters

[Hagar]

Excellent. I'm not going to argue with Martin Wright. I would point out that the rotors on my S-51 AI Only drone are fully animated. This was configured from the outset as a conventional fixed wing prop. It was exported from FSDS2 as a CFS2 model. It uses a light aircraft AIR file & Aircraft.cfg. Apart from the visual model it bears no relationship to a helo at all.



I think the same could be said for any CFS2 helo created with Gmax or FSDS2 & using fixed wing flight dynamics. The animation problem might be explained by the manual conversion from a FS2002 Gmax model for CFS2, nothing to do with the AIR file or Aircraft.cfg.

[Si]

Absolutely, Martin was only talking about converting player aircraft for use as drones some of which had  missing props , He created some payload objects using the prop library that comes with cfs, I noticed that there are some bell-206 props in the prop library and tryed to do for Helos what Martin did for Planes. It didnt work how ever and I asked Martin how his system worked as I didnt clearly understand what was going on .He put me right by explaining that my decompiler had made an error because the animation has a reverse call if you know what I mean to a variable table.Theres more to it but I doubt you want all the details.
 I dont doubt that drone choppers created specifcally for cfs2 would be best. Your fine S-51 is however the only one Ive seen ,If there are more out there please let me know. Ive just discovered the payload workaround that Ive been working on dosn't work in quick combat, it is for missions only.

[Hagar]

Right. I do appreciate the problems. There aren't too many Gmax or FSDS2 helos around designed specifically for CFS2. My knowledge goes back to the days of CFS1 when I created an AI Only helo for some campaigns. The rotors did not display at all but we considered this acceptable at the time. Theoretically, I could have fixed it by SCASM editing the MDL.

When someone suggested tweaking the FS2002 default Bell 206B for use as AI traffic I gave it the AIR file & CFG of the default Cessna 182 to prove that it would work. This proved much easier & far more successful than I expected. The animated rotors worked perfectly.

Coming almost full circle I used the same principle when creating the S-51 for the Fox Four campaigns. I never liked manually editing MDL files so decided to use my experience with FSDS2 to modify an existing FS5 source file, the only one I could find, with full CFS2 features. This was ideal as we much prefer using our own stuff where possible. I'm sure the same thing could be done in Gmax providing the source file is available & that the MDL is exported via MiddleMan using the CFS2 option. If it has retracting gear the gear animation of an existing Gmax source file would also need a small tweak.

PS. I just checked out Martin's AI Props tweak. If the Readme is correct this was originally intended for FSDS1 aircraft. In this case it would work just as well with FS2000 helos which don't need editing to work in CFS2.