Not to toot my own horn, but <toooot>!

http://www.simhq.com/_air14/air_514a.html

Nice review, man.

I just purchased ToH last night and basically had just enough time to map my controls and do some free flight. Funny thing is, I thought there was something seriously wrong with my G940. I had a massive dead zone in the center of the stick. Turns out that was a default setting in the games options. Once I turned the dead zone down to 0% I had a much easier time.

The flight model is so quirky it actually makes it much more of a challenge to keep the bird in the air. Left pedal all the time, buggy feeling ground effect and some surprising applications of torque makes things feel kinda hairy sometimes. The pinnacle landing got me a little frustrated I have to admit. I'm doing donuts around this thing thinking, "You're telling me I can land on a moving frigate at night with poor visibility in Black Shark, but I can't land a Little Bird on a massive stationary pad in ToH. You gotta be kidding!"

Thanks, Jaximus!

Left pedal input with power applied is actually accurate: use trim to trim in the required pedal input for a given torque setting. Be cautious comparing the Black Shark and the light helo too closely: the Black Shark has a lot more inertia, coaxial rotors, and an autopilot helping out which makes for a much more stable feel than the light helos.

I hope I didn't come across as too harsh in my critique of the physics models: they are MUCH better than Arma2 and I'm very pleased with the direction BIS is headed. I admit my expectations are very high, but I still enjoy flying this sim!

Right, but once you reach the point of effective translational lift your rotors don't exert as much torque on the on the airframe and your tail rotor becomes more efficient, requiring right pedal to compensate. In ToH no matter my airspeed I only ever have to apply left pedal.

And you're absolutely right about the KA-50. As long as you know its systems it practically flies itself.

Thanks for the detailed review.

BS kindled an interest in helicopters (previously non-existent), but it seems like everything else is a long way behind, and the review confirmed my doubts on ToH, at least in its current state.

Meanwhile, I bought BS2 this week and will continue to explode and die from the helicopter dynamics you've listed on p. 4

BTW, what are you throwing out of the window at 1.57 in the first video?

This is just my opinion...

While BIS did make the flight model more realistic compared to ARMA2, the flight model of the helos in TOH is too quirky for my taste, to include the light helo. I've flown an ex-military OH-6 before, and it was a lot more stable than the TOH light helo when in expert mode. Admittedly, it is magnitudes easier to fly helos at low speeds when you have that seat-of-the-pants feeling in real life from the inertial forces on your body, so that my lend some accuracy to TOH's difficulty.

Even so, it's still an interesting game to fly, I just keep it on Beginner mode with as many of the other "cheats"/helpers disabled.

Advertisements for the SimHQ review..

No..it was some sort of leaflet dropping mission..

Last time I checked, the demo was still version 1.02, which had quite horrible flight dynamics. Did or will they upgrade the demo?

1.02 does not have the physics package updates.

Beta patches are available from the Take On Helicopters forums and I just saw that a 1.04 release candidate patch is now available.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet

Ok. found a post from Dwarden suggesting in 12/2011 that there might be an update to the demo with version 1.04

see

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?129404-Updated-Demo-or-Demo-patch

I too really enjoyed the review. I love helicopters. I even own a couple. One is sitting on the desk next to my PC as we speak. My one hour of (non-RC) helicopter time and 15000 hrs of fixed wing equip me with just about zero credibility to opine about ToH. But despite my reservations after reading the review I bought it anyway hoping that 1.04 would at least be playable. To my surprise its much more than that. It, the light helicopter, actually flies somewhat close to what I would expect it to fly like. No its not x-plane or DCS. But its good enough to enjoy. In a sense, my observations are a little inverted to those in the review. I really enjoy the visuals and the moderately convincing flight model. But I find the campaign a little frustrating. Its often hard to figure out what the triggers are for success. With enough replays, you figure it out. But as enjoyable as the missions and the story are, I sometimes feel like I am wasting a huge amount of time before, for instance, I figure out that the a$$ giving me orders to land actually wants a running landing. That's never stated, you just sorta figure it out. This game is like a classic xbox/ps game. Its exciting, polished and looks great. You play it intensely for a month or two and probably don't come back too often after that--but you are happy for the experience nonetheless. BTW, in the review the beta version of 1.04 is used. But its pretty obvious from the videos that the player is stuggling with the pre-1.04 grossly exagerated ground effect. Just an observation that perhaps the release version of 1.04 actually was further improved over the beta.

So I was only able to grab a half hour or so with the new patch, but the improvements are there. Autorotation feels a lot better, although I need to look up the autorotation airspeeds for light helos - it felt like I had to keep way too much airspeed to keep the rotors going. Translation lift is there (yay!) but the ETL burble still seems to come and go at very odd times. No VRS - which may please some of the student helo pilots, but I'm missing the "Death Dance". As for ground effect, it still feels like I've suddenly become a hockey puck on an air hockey table - the lateral accelerations are way out of proportion to the control inputs. I wasn't able to test the retreating blade stall, but I did stall the rotor disk and plummet to my death.

Things I'm still missing:

- Slip and turn indicator. A must have instrument to be able to accurately gauge flight.
- TrackIR "staging". Take On Helo steps the camera in two distinct steps back and forth. This is disconcerting when all I need is a little lean forward to better read the gauges and I keep leaning and leaning and then POP! I'm on top of the dash (although still too far away to read anything). I'm using the zoom key for now, but I'd really like true 6DOF and not 3DOF with two depth settings.

All in all, well done BIS! Well done!

Hi EinsteinEP, which Joystick/HOTAS do you using?
I still have the problem that all my very small inputs are exaggerated in the helos. I have linear curves for all axes and deadzone is 0. I still can`t properly control these helis in ToH...

I know that wasn't directed at me but I did the following with my G940: I set a curve at about 20 for pitch and 30 for roll. I also set a 50 curve for yaw because the medium and large helicopters are easy to break. Here's the weird thing: I didn't want a dead zone but a set a small one anyway. It really helped! The weird part is that if I watch the in-game cyclic there is no dead zone pause at the center. So I'm not sure what's going on there but I'm happy with the results.

Oh and EagleEye, congratulations on the solo!

Thanks mate! And it`s absolutely ok that you have answered to my question. Unfortunately you don`t have a TM:W. Don`t know if youre settings will work for me. Could you pls post a screenshot with youre settings?
Does youre throttle (collective) settings goes from -100 (in full forward position) to 0 (middle) and to 100 (full back position)? I find it a little bit weird.

I have a TM Warthog but I hate it for use on almost every game other than A-10C. I fly ToH (and Black Shark) with my X52 Pro.

I found that after I installed 1.04 the sensitivty bars for all the joystick axes were set to max. A click of the "default" button cleared the problem. I haven't further tuned my joystick curves, but then, I never do - I'm not patient/smart enough to figure out what I really want so I just work with the system defaults, if I can.

With my X52 Pro and the ToH defaults, I can fly just fine.

will you guys do a review on the dlc that comes out today?