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The Art of the Rotor Blade - Altis Helicopter Practice

The Art of the Rotor Blade is solidly focused on providing practice in the the core helicopter piloting competencies: Pickups and Insertions into LZ's, Close Air Support on an objective, and landing on buildings. Additionally, many "quality of life" features were added to make the practice session much more productive and enjoyable for the player. Be advised, this mission may not be "kid friendly" due to language.

• AO Insertion Mission - Select one of the available AO's, pick your side, and fly friendly forces from your base into the AO. Rinse and repeat until you are an ace!
  
  
• Freeplay Insertion Mission - Not everyone plays King of the Hill and those who do often want a change of scenery. I wanted to make this mission useful for any aspiring helicopter pilot. As such, random pickup and insertion landing zones are generated a reasonable distance from the player. These missions will iterate indefinitely until you decide to abort the mission.
  
  
• Close Air Support Mission - Provide close air support to one of the King of the Hill AO's. AI will spawn until you are killed or abort the mission, you can modify the AI settings via the mission setup dialog menu. Tasks will be automatically generated if you are out of ammo or your aircraft is damaged.
  
  
• Landing Mission - Practice landing on buildings that you select. Buildings spawn dynamically in the world up to the maximum distance specified in the setup menu. The landing tasks will iterate indefinitely until you decide to abort the mission. This should give you plenty of options to practice your perfect landing!

• Respawn in Singleplayer system (with option to continue mission or abort and return to main base)
  
• Vehicle Spawner
  
• Earplugs (F1 Key)
  
• Vehicle Repair and Rearm (F2 Key)
  
• Move Stuck Vehicle (F3 Key)
  
• Virtual Arsenal - (Insert Key and available at Main Base weapon crate)
  
• Fast Travel System
  
• Easily modifiable weather conditions
  
• On demand engine or tail rotor failure
  
• Compatibility with other mods (ex. RHS, CUP, and Mission Enhanced Littlebird)
  
• Zeus enabled
  
• Dynamic LZ's - completely random within selected AO, based upon size of helicopter
  
• Dynamic pilot characters - randomly selected pilot models depending on types available to selected player side
  
• Dynamic passengers - tired of hauling the same 5 door kickers? Passenger quantity and type depends upon helicopter seating capacity and the types of troops available to the players side.
  
• Dynamic radio messages
  
• Toggleable Cheats (at laptops) - Fatigue, Infinite Ammo, Invincibility, and Map Teleport
  
• And more...

• CBA_A3 (1.8 MB)

Sequence/Broken Script Issues - Most issues can be fixed by scroll wheel selecting "Abort Mission" then reselecting the mission via one of the base laptops. I did allot time to bug testing and attempted to address potential issues, however I am not a coder by trade and there are bound to be issues. I would appreciate feedback on the issues you find.

Poor Framerates - If FPS issues are encountered, they are due to the AI, there is nothing I can do about that. In the AI setup dialog menus turn down the AI quantity until the mission is playable for your machine. My playtests showed ~ 90 frames without AI and as low as 30 frames with 120AI. I guess it depends on how powerful your toaster is.

AI Difficulty - Arma AI can be deadly shots. If you are having problems landing in the AO, I would suggest one or all of the following:

• Turning down AI difficulty settings specifically the aiming ability.
  
• Lowering the number of AI that can spawn in the AO
  
• Disabling the AA and AT infantry (I've been RPG'd a lot and they do not miss, haha!).