Bad collision detection on the spray-tank-truck helipad

ISSUE DESCRIPTION

When landing on the agriculture mission truck helipad, the already too small pad, it seems, is not a solid plane for the entire surface area.
Admittedly, it wasn’t my best landing in the H125 screenshots, but the skids were overlapping the pad sufficiently so in real life the aircraft would have stayed on the helipad. For the R66 pic I was on the pad entirely.
However, due to lacking collision detection the edge of the pad is not a solid object for the H125 skids, so the center of gravity is then just over a tipping point. During the fill-up cutscene, where controls are locked, the aircraft starts to clip inside the pad on the edge and tilt slowly. By the end of the scene the entire helicopter has fallen of the pad, yet, no crash is detected.

If I may suggest solutions besides fixing the collision detection:

  1. Make the helipad !!larger!! Yes, there are agriculture missions in real life that use this size of pad, but this is not the only way to do it, nor the only size. Or at least make a bigger pad a selectable option!
  2. Add the option to land next to the truck to fill up
  3. Make MSFS don’t lock the controls during the cutscene, remove the cutscene or add auto stabilization, so one has the opportunity to take over where left off.

Crossover to my other bug report: For the small pad to be a fun challenge, the ground effect simulation needs to be improved further with structures smaller in foot print as the rotor disc not being recognized as a wide open flat surface. The airflow should be simulated in for example discrete sectors, so a small pad on the front only leads to a small portion of ground effect, just enough so it can be “felt”. When hovering above the truck much of the fuselage is overlapping it, so actually most of the rotor disc “sees” a hover just out of ground effect. This will make the handling much more stable and the landing more easy and true to real life!

If applicable, which aircraft is experiencing this issue:
Tested here with H125. Happened with the R66 as well before SU1 Beta.

[PC Only] Did you remove all your community mods/add-ons? If yes, are you still experiencing the issue?
Not relevant.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

This depends on an unknown factor of collision detection. From user perspective I cannot say exactly. But given the center of gravity of the helicopter being located off the center of the helipad it seems to happen more likely.

REPRODUCTION STEPS

Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:

  1. Take an agriculture mission
  2. Approach the truck
  3. Land on the truck with either the front or back end of the skids near the pad edge
  4. Notice how in the fill-up cutscene the helicopter starts to tilt off the pad while clipping inside the pad

YOUR SETTINGS

Not relevant, this is a vanilla MSFS 2024 (SU1 Beta) issue.

What peripherals are you using, if relevant:
Stick, Collective & Pedals

[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
No

[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?
Not relevant

[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?
Not relevant

MEDIA

See screenshots below.

[END OF FIRST USER REPORT]


:loudspeaker: For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:

Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:

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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
• Yes

Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
• Have the same problem, the ground effect issue is resolved but now the truck hitbox has a problem, helicopter goes through it, and sometimes it’s 30° inclinated so the aircraft slowy slide down…

Do you thinks the AG helicopter mission will be solved in SU4 or 5 ? What’s left to do next: solving the parking break issue at the end of the mission, solving the spray issue on R66, and finally no big tree in the middle of the field ? When It’s not the truck

If relevant, provide additional screenshots/video:
• My landing was horrible but I was upset after 7 try and 3 crash for a 60k mission…

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  1. Let me tell the crew when I’m ready so I can correct my position instead of the Sim deciding when I’m landed and safe.
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Thats the worse one I have seen yet :open_mouth:
Thanks for sharing!

SU4 or 5? Are we helicopter folk that low in the dev food chain? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Vote guys, still unplayable for me :cry:

Hey madeinblue,
I flew another spray mission today and tried to land in a 45° angle orientation. I mean skids not parallel to the landing pad edge but 45° rotated viewed from above. There was no visible clipping to be seen. I’ll try that again to see if it makes landing more consistent as a workaround…

I flew quite a few missions in the last few days too, I think it is ok, and yes, the collision detection should be fixed, but the size is ok, it isn’t easy, but doable.

I figured I have to make sure the spray boom is at least foot or so forward of the edge of the platform when I land and then the helicopter will be stable.

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I’ll try tomorrow, thanks you guys

I managed to land, but there is definitely a problem with the platform or helicopter hitbox…For me
it goes through half the platform with both R66 or H125
And if you anyway manage to finish the mission correctly with the Robinson, it will ask you to put on an inexistent parking brake :innocent:

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Same experiences here. H125 sometimes sinks through the wood of the landing pad and tips over during cut-scene (when it’s squarely positioned on the pad).

I only tried R66 for the first time today and discovered the parking brake glitch. I first had a moving parking spot. I landed and shut down on the parking spot and the mission didn’t end. The mission steps still said land on parking spot. I started it up again, announced “Taxi to parking” and it illuminated a different parking spot at a fuel box. I went there and discovered the parking brake issue. What a disappointing waste of time.

I also had a refill truck parked under trees in another mission. I literally couldn’t fit onto the landing pad because of a low overhanging tree branch. Meanwhile, right next to the tree line was a perfect open space with a dirt road and side clearing - a very good and sensible place to park a truck for a heli to land on. I landed next to the truck but that wasn’t any use.

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Yeah, it would be great to have a list of open issues in order of probability of occurring per aircraft or kind of aircraft. You hit a spot with me when saying “after all of this, what a waste of time” -couldn’t be more true if you try out the entire license tree of MSFS 2024.

Helicopters are just one of the iceberg’s tips.
And the R66 parking brake bug is the most time-wasting culprit I know of.

Take the air ambulance missions: these last 2-4h real time and there are many absolute showstoppers :sweat_smile:. If you just follow the pre-set flight plan and ascend to 30000ft in one of the Pilatuses the mission will at some point abruptly end because the sim thinks you ran out of oxygen. Doesn’t matter if you switched on the oxygen system or not, it still happens. Even if you stay alert the whole flight, if the warning of mission failure is displayed there is not enough time to react. It’s like a suicide flight as soon as you pass 20000ft or so.
So you might just look a minute on your phone, meeeep, mission failed!
You can work around this and change the flight plan to only 16000-18000ft cruise, but then you need to be extra careful to make it to the destination because you cannot add extra fuel (at least I don’t know how), so you think you found a (stupid) way around this that takes even more time, only to discover you might run dry 100NM before the destination :sweat_smile:

Another time I made it to the destination in the KingAir where literally the entire avionic system bugged out on me. I had to handfly it :rofl: only to be rewarded with a sudden mission failure because reasons. I actually don’t know. It said I was putting my crew into danger. The only thing that was out of the ordinary was I banked harder than usual to make a tight turn to final (yes, final, I was seconds away from landing)

What I am trying to say in a (usual with me) tldr way:
One of the biggest sins MSFS 2024 career mode commits is, that it takes something that casuals would consider drop dead boring to begin with, like a 3h flight from Sweden to the UK, does a bad job to simulate the actual workload you’d be doing on such a flight only to either drop out sudden death at some point or even right at the end with no good reason. In short: it wastes your time -big time! In this case just because they let a 3rd party dev like Corenado do the model and because nobody had time in this rushed release to actually test if all the missions work. Otherwise a bug fix would already exist. And the funniest part to me: this isn’t even a complex bug. Just either lift the whole oxygen and banking or whatever being a reason for failure for the time being or at least find the reason why it doesn’t read the oxygen and make it infinite quantity for the time being.

A lot of issues seem temporary fixable to me in a matter of hours! Sure, solving it elegantly and completely might take longer, but this is time users are waisting and making them more angry.

To me the whole approach of MS and Asobo wreaks of management blocking efficiency for control and resource conservation and demotivating slavery to processes and outsourcing topics and issues to programmers who have no clue or interest in aviation.
There are key engineers, I am sure, but they are overwhelmed by the list of bugs. This is why the first “service update” feels actually more like the change from an alpha to a beta version….

Sorry, had to blow of that steam :zipper_mouth_face:

2 Likes

You’ve probably exhausted most of your patience by now but a hack for the fuel deficit in missions - search the key commands for “add fuel” or something along those lines and assign it to one of your keys. It adds about 1/4 fuel load with every press. Only way to work around the non-functioning cabin pressure issue.

Another hack is to assign some keys to “increase sim rate” and “decrease sim rate” for those long missions. You can then get in the cruise (at a survivable, non hypoxic, altitude) with autopilot on and speed the thing up 2x 4x 8x. I can even get away with 16x in some missions. There are some youtube videos on these kinds of career hacks. Hope this helps.

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