I apologize in advance for inflicting this miserable travesty of a scenery project on the community.
This entirely fictional and outlandish scenery is intended to be used as a helicopter training ground and practice area of sorts for aspiring and seasoned MSFS helicopter pilots alike. Located on the picturesque but unpopulated coastline of Point Conception CA, KHLI features many custom Stoopid scenery objects aimed at developing or enhancing skills for hovering and maneuvering in place or at low speed, executing precision landings - including within confined areas and over obstacles - maintaining consistent altitude while hover-taxiing and managing transitional lift, practicing “nose-around” maneuvers orbiting sideways around objects and also practicing autorotations from altitude using a large bullseye conveniently painted in the middle of an ample runway area as a landing target. There are also numerous other challenging objects and scenes allowing free-form exploration encouraging general rotary-winged hooliganism. It also makes a great heliport to use for familiarization flights to “feel out” any new helicopters added to your growing stable.
Please note that in addition to the custom objects included, this scenery also uses the following free libraries which are available from either the In-Game Marketplace or from flightsim.to. You can of course use the scenery without them but you will be missing a very significant amount of eye candy and objects:
Dave’s 3D People Library:
Windy Things:
Vessels: Core library from Seafront Simulations
(Free content available within the in-game Marketplace)
There are 3 basic starting locations intended for beginner (1), intermediate (2) and “pro” (3) helicopter skill levels. There is a fake runway with starting locations at the Beginner and Intermediate courses. This is to accommodate helicopters and other aircraft which are not defined as type “Rotary” in MSFS such as the FlyInside Bell 47 and HPG H145 (as of this writing). Selecting the runway starts will put you on the start position for the desired course with the aircraft ready for flight. If you prefer to start from cold & dark, then selecting Parking spots 1, 2 or 3 will put you in the start positions for Beginner, Intermediate or Pro (respectively) with engines off. Finally, selecting Helipad 1, 2 or 3 (if available depending on aircraft type) will start you at either of the 3 positions with engines running and ready for flight. In addition to the practice courses, some exploring will also reveal a few objects scattered around that are fun to hover around or land on. Most objects except the large cranes should be landable.
Although I normally try to avoid doing so, I’m releasing this as a Beta 0.9 version for now simply because I’ve been working on it for so long, if I don’t put it out now I’m afraid it will languish and fester on my hard drive for many more months to come. Instead, I’ll welcome any feedback, suggestions within reason, constructive criticism and/or dirty limericks that may help in making this more useful and fun for the MSFS heli community.
Apologies but I forgot to mention one other scenery library in the above description that is required for some of the eye candy, specifically for the many different parked rotary-wing aircraft around the facility:
totof helicopter library V2
Too late to edit the original post but for those of you interested, I’d recommend you d/l and install the library if you haven’t done so already for other scenery addons.
Wow, I couldn’t have dreamed of anything better. Many thanks.
I was about to begin searching best places for training and write a post to invite people to train together.
Gonna try ASAP!
Interesting. This link for Dave’s 3D People Library is working for me right now in Microsoft Edge but oddly, does not work in Chrome:
Also, I was having many difficulties searching and using some of my account tools at flightsim.to in the last couple of days using Chrome, so I suspect something is not right over at flightsim.to.
Yes, very strange, I tried from Linux and Windows, different browsers inclusing Edge, VPN from Germany, US, Australia… No luck atm.
I’ll try to resist trying your nice creation until I have the complete set!
Not easy
Wow! This playground is really nice. Great fun, already 3 hours on there!
Many thanks @TheStoopy.
Lot of exercises and even an instructive visit which made me grow a mustache
Very good for training IMHO.
I didn’t have time to try everything and I didn’t achieve to land on the green tower. There must be a trick. Gotta come back!
Maybe one suggestion: It would perhaps be interesting to have a physical height limit above the hi black/yellow barriers we fly over. Just to add some salt.
How do you use the spiral stair? Just spiraling+climbing around it, facing the trunk and following the stair without to touch it or should the helicopter have it’s cockpit “on” the stair?
Asking because I saw the ascending air column and wandered if it was part of the exercise in some way, like near the Tour Eiffel.
Anyway, great and fun place to train. Thanks again for the work.
Thanks for the great feedback and questions, @Noobilot.
Regarding the spiral stairs, or the “Treehouse” as I’ve come to think of it (because of the bark on the large trunk and all the wood) - yes, you have the concept figured out. You orbit it while flying sideways, keeping your nose pointed toward the center at all times while keeping your helicopter lined up with the spiraling stairs, so you are flying sideways, while slowly changing heading, while slowly gaining altitude until you get to the middle landing tier, then when you get to the second spiral staircase you change direction to the left, while keeping the nose pointed at the center, while gaining altitude, until you get to the top. Then if you want more of a workout, you go back down in the reverse direction, again changing direction when you reach the middle. The black and yellow helicopter silhouette signs with the diagonal arrows on the “trunk” of the treehouse are meant to convey the idea of how the exercise is done.
This is a more complicated version of the basic “nose-around” exercise meant to be performed using the large globe, where the idea is to rotate around the globe sideways while keeping your nose pointed at the center of the globe, maintaining a constant altitude and distance (as much as possible) from the globe. You do the same with the Treehouse, but also ascend and descend while nosing-around.
Alternatively you can do whatever you like with it, it’s a playground after all!
Regarding a physical height limit over the the high black/yellow barriers, that’s a great idea and actually what I set out to do originally. Unfortunately I found that one limit of MSFS physics is that it doesn’t seem possible to make a hard, “collidable” (collision box) object that you can fly under… collision boxes seem to extend all the way to the ground regardless of design or placement. So a second wall above the height barrier, to make a gap that you would have to fly through, would result in making just one big wall that has a visible gap that you would bounce against. Too bad, because I had dreamed up some “limbo dance” type of exercises that would require flying under objects, but couldn’t get that to work no matter what I tried. Either I am doing something wrong, or maybe we’ll be able to have that in 2024.
Anyway, I’m stoked that you are liking it and wish you many happy hours of hovering around!
Hmmmm. What’s also strange is that if I search for “Dave’s 3D People LIbary”, or any subset of those words at flightsim.to, that library isn’t found although lots of other libraries from him and others come up.
What if you enter “flightsim.to/file/5452/dave-s-3d-people-library” (without the quotes) directly into your browser?
Hi,
I get the same result if I enter this address.
It’s nice to have people and other eye-candy. Maybe it’s woth waiting a bit before removing reference to these files…
Playground suggestion.
If it’s fun and if not too time consuming.
What would be great to have is a big mirror like building windows or so.
Indeed, IRL, I suppose the pilot knows/feels where the helicopter is. In the sim, it’s less evident.
The external camera is moving, making fine adjustments difficult, e.g. near the floor to adjust the collective in order to achieve a smooth landing. Also, L/R commands are inverted when looking from external front (which is rather good for RD training thow).
So, it would be excellent to have a way to see the exact position of the heli, and why not, adding some cubes or shapes to train touching only one skid.
I like this idea a lot and have been playing with it. Unfortunately, it looks as though mirrors in MSFS are pretty limited. Best I’ve got so far is a reflective window that shows blurred scenery and no helicopter (as if our helicopters are actually vampires!). The landing light from the helicopter shows up just fine, but nothing from the rest of the aircraft. It would be good to have some small objects to practice one-skid touchdowns etc.
I’ve been exploring around here too and it is really really good stuff! Great job with it!
Got totally lost in the maze building! I don’t know if there is something special to discover in the middle (don’t answer! No spoilers!) but I was first looking for another way out. Assumed there would be a door at the far end, but no!
I had a really weird issue flying the Lama here (in VR) which I am sure is down to the VR (and my PC) rather than this scenery, but VR is super-new to me (got it this weekend) so not really sure how or why this happened.
It seems like I was hitting into invisible walls. Sometimes NEAR an object (like going around the globe) but also just in the middle of empty area. Suddenly get knocked.
Also I was getting “you were not cleared to take off” from ATC several times in a row as if it thought I had landed and lifted, landed and lifted. I did not touch the ground, but also Sky4Sim tablet was giving me a ranking for touch down feet per second even though I was in the air - some rogue collisions going on. Very strange!
One other thing is with the raised landing pads, some helis are more prone to suddenly getting a lot more lift the moment your get above it. It is just the way MSFS works when there is suddenly a new ground collider - it’s all or nothing, but very annoying. Some helis are less affected by it so maybe developers could do something about it?
Yes, I noticed this partial reflection phenomenon too. Another solution in the meantime would be to set the sun low on the horizon, and work on one-skid touchdowns while looking at the shadow on a big flat wall.
I practice hover with this “technique”. Very instrucctive to have an external view on the heli small movements.
Yeah, this guy in his tower is anoying, he must be bored and lonely, that’s why. Gotta bring some beers or coffee up there once :–)
Yes, I noticed that too. Much more with the Lama than with the Cabri. Taog is talking about that in his Lama manual and recommends to arrive from more above the pad and go down once we are in the middle of it.
There is a nice slope too on the N-E of the hangar, which is nice to train slope touching. Perhaps would be cool to put some marks there?
This is really good feedback, @Baracus250, thank you!
The maze: OK I won’t give anything away other than to say there definitely is an exit, you just can’t see it from outside, but on the inside you’ll know it when you find it. Otherwise, your thinking is exactly on the right track so I’m sure you’ll solve it soon. If anyone wants a clue, PM me. But where’s the fun in that.
I’ll look for any misplaced collision boxes, I did find one back in the NE corner of the facility but not near the globe. And I think that was due to some interim work I was doing and isn’t in the release version. More on this topic below.
I’ll change the ATC settings so the airport is UNICOM and not controlled by a tower. I threw the frequency settings in at the last minute to get the airport into a completed state so I could upload it. Should have known better. Sorry for the inconvenience and will have a fixed version soon.
You’ve hit the nail on the head with MSFS collision box behavior. The effect seems to be amplified to a degree based on distance from ground level - the lower landing pads are very easy to land on but the higher ones tend to “push” you away and off of them as you get over them. As you observe, this seems to vary based on the helicopter - I used the Lama for almost all of the final design testing (since that thing is SO NICE!) and it seems to be effected the most. Conversely, I was using the CowanSim MD500 this last weekend after the 2.0 update came out (which is awesome now, and gives the Lama a run for its money IMHO) and it didn’t seem to be effected as much. Perhaps this is subjective. As for stock heli’s I seem to recall the Cabri is effected to a large extent and have not confirmed how the 407 behaves, but need to. What I’m interested in most is finding out if the FlyInside B47 or 206 are effected, since with their external flight models perhaps they wouldn’t be, but I haven’t tested with either of them since originally encountering this phenomenon. I do know that setting down FIRMLY on the helipads is one way to work around the issue but that’s suboptimal and lacks the finesse that we’re all trying to work towards.
What’s most interesting about the bizarre altitude-variable collision box behavior affecting landing pads is that it can also be observed in other effects such as lighting. When I added night lighting to the trunk of the “treehouse” (tall structure with the brown spiral staircase and orange/white top) I used the same lighting object added at different vertical positions from bottom to top, and noticed that as the lights get higher they also get brighter. Easy to observe when the lights come on at night. This seems to indicate there may be something awry with how MSFS calculates the strength of effects in general based on distance AGL. Sadly, it has been a limiting factor for some really cool ideas that I had for some more challenging helipad structures. The circular helipads at the end of the “pro” course are only about half as high as I originally intended them to be. I’m going to do a bit more investigation into the subject and post something in the bug reporting section when time permits, FWIW.
That is a good spot. I do have something in the works right now for toe-in landings (which I think may be the same as slope touching). But it may turn out to be more difficult than anticipated, so I’ll look to put some partial helipads over that way too.
Also I have some “toys” in mind to practice partial-skid landings and such, and will position them so your idea of using a shadow will work out.
First I’ll get an update out soon about the ATC thing since it’s annoying.
Aha! Then I DID find it I think. Assumed it was a “cheesy trap” (lol) so didn’t want to advance through it. But yeah, I get it now and very funny!!
I don’t think that is the issue. It’s something on my system. I was trying all sorts to get VR settings dialled in and was using this area as testing ground. I think some settings I did just confused the sim as I had a very similar “hitting nothing in the air multiple times” in another flight (not here) in a regular aircraft and nowhere near the ground at all! Never done it before I’ve tried VR, so I think just my PC was skipping physics calculation frames where I was trying to push it too much — and reacting in this way when it was “catching up” with itself?!
Yeah, good call!
Actually I did try the 47G and landed on the pads close by the Mini Eiffel Tower and it did not seem affected on a slow low approach to going over the yellow rims. Having said that, please check yourself to be sure coz my flying skills in that thing are very poor! It’s a real handful! I will try in the 206 next time I’m on and let you know.
That is truly bizarre! But then again, nothing the SDK does would surprise me in how stupid it can be
Very odd that light strength can even be considered an “effect” in that way. Distance from OBSERVER based, yes. But I don’t see how altitude should be something they’d tie into the visual of it lol.
It’s a shame there are so many limitations in the SDK for being creative. I’ve hit upon similar blockers to my ideas when making tracks for the Juice Goose. So many workarounds and hacks needed and even then it’s a bit jank!
Anyway keep doing what you’re doing. Great fun for the whirlybirds!!!
