Stick Stirring woes

[Granger]

Ok, first of all..im not a stick stirring dweeb..just fly nice and smooth. And second of all..Im not talkint about evasive maneuvers, but offensive ones.

After getting the .26 patch..I enjoyed flying the NIK2 for the first time..killer guns btw..but then i went bak to my ol standby..the p51.

On takeoff..i apply right rudder..not a ham fisted slam..but enuf to "step on the ball"..my plane locked up all controlls and I crashed 3 or 4 times
hmm...
Next flight i used full flaps n was able to takeoff without any problems.

Once airborne..i climbed to around 10k, and saw a low la5 at my 1200..i turned the plane inverted and pulled strait back on the stick to come in on his 6 cutting throttle as I did so..coming in fast, looking thru the little blackout hole lining him up and boom...locked up again.Not doing anything mind you but pulling straight back on the stick..no rudder input..no nothin..just backpressure on stick..wham..i crash into the dirt.

Now getting curious..i take off and start once again doing maneuvers.with nobody around this time..and find out i cant do a rudder turn anymore..
you know..get goin bout 300..pull back..straight up and rudder the nose down to reverse direction..locks up EVERY single time doing this...and this is one of my maneuvers to get on a spit that just HO'd me..no other way to get a 51 over that quick..hmm.
seems like any rudder input while pulling the stick back causes it to lock.
did this for bout an hour..and crashed many..many times..got shot down for no reason and just had a miserable time all in all.

Anyone else have this problem??
My greatest expectations with this sim have just been shattered..I cannot fly this way, and WILL NOT PAY to do so.Im not a stick stirring dweeb..just someone that uses rudder alot..and likes to pull blackout turns lining someone up for a shot..
someone please tell me this is just some test thing they are doing.
Hi-Tech said he was gonna put in a damper next version..Man I hope it fixes this!!
Till then..its unplayable, unflyable and made the greatest sim Ive ever flown turn into crap.

Anyone else havin trouble..I cant be the only one..

Thanks in advance..

Granger

[Swoosh]

The only time I ran into a problem with the stick stirring preventative was at the top of a tail slide.  I was trying to keep control of my bird and whammo.  Its a good feature and I can understand its necessity,  but I hate to be punished for other's transgressions.  Funny thing is, I never even heard of stick stirring until now.   I always thought that the bandit twisting around like a top was due to packet loss.  Is there some way to alleviate its effects during extreme maneuvers such as the tail slide when fast and furious stick input often is the only way to recover?

[leonid]

Granger,
Do you use a Sidewinder Pre Pro?  Look over on the general forum, theres a post by chisel about stick stirring preventive.  There's a lot of replies by other MS SW users who are experiencing the same thing you did.  Which worries me, since I haven't tries 0.36 yet, but use a Sidewinder too.

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129 IAP

[leonid]

Hitech:

I saw your post in Fester's thread about stick scaling.  You said to go into your stick.cfg file and
 

The top line of the file would normaly read
0,32767,65535 or very close to that
change the 0 to somthing like -5000 and the
65535 number to somthing like 70000

This should limit your stick travel range.

You need to do the same thing for all the axies you wish to limit.

Would this help with this problem?  I do snap rolls and was just starting to work on rudder turns and hammerheads last night in ver.0.35.  And, as you know, I own a MS Sidewinder.


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129 IAP

[Vermillion]

Granger, Swoosh:

I can feel your frustration guys, but give it time. Like anything else I'm sure it needs to be tuned. Yep here it comes.... It's a beta  

However, have you ever seen anyone that admitted to being a stick stirrer ?? Not me. I have flown in AW since AW4W, and WB's since 0.99, and I haven't seen one guys say "yep I do it". But it sure happened alot, even sometimes intentionally.

I remember one fight I had in WB's. Yak-3 (me) vs a fairly well known pilot in a Fw190A8, one on one at 25k alt. Beautiful fight, and I admittedly had the advantage in aircraft for the 1 v 1 type of fight.

We fought for what felt like 10 minutes, back and forth all the way down to the deck with not a single warp or stick stir. And he had several excellent defensive manuevers, that were superbly timed, that never caused a warp.

Then I finally drained him of his E, and pinned him to the deck. All of a sudden that 190 was warp rolling like a SOB, with a few negative G rapid kicking rudder back and forth manuevers, designed specifically to cause warping. Since the Yak-3 doesn't have much in the way of ammo, I wounded him, and had to call a squaddie to come and finish him off.

Unfortunately, I lost my temper and told him over the common channel, "Great Fight XXXpilot, right up until you started stick stirring" and of course he defended his honor telling me I was full of toejam and he didn't do any such thing. It caused a big stink, and embarressment for all.

The really ironic part? He happened to be at work flying with a co-worker, another well known pilot. His co-worker private messaged me just after all that, telling me that I was right. He had flown it straight right up until the part where he thought his precious streak was in trouble then he started, yanking the stick as hard as he could.

My Point? No one is gonna admitt to being a stickstirrer, but it is a fairly common occurence, even among "good" pilots.

<S> HiTech and Pyro, its definitely an issue that has to be addressed.

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Vermillion
WB's: (verm--), **MOL**, Men of Leisure,

[Swoosh]

It happened to me again today, twice, during maneuvers at the edge of the envelope.  This time it wasn't a tail slide, it was at the bottom of a shallow turning dive on somebodies six.  The wings started dipping and she woulnd't fly in a nice gracefdul arc.  At this time, I was just trying to regain control.  Maybe at such times when the plane is slow and twitchy, and any second I sense its about to twist off into an uncontrolled spin, maybe at such times I become ever so slightly erratic with the stick.  In fact, I'd say its likely.  Whatever the case, usually I can recover.  I only input as much stick and rudder deflection as I deem necessary, for anything else is wasting energy, yes?  Well, this time the dreaded "don't move the stick so fast" message came up and my controls locked.  Luckily, I had just enough of an altitude to recover, although I definately lost my edge in the fight.

Yes, its a beta.  Yes, I despise cheaters with all my heart and soul.  I know that sometimes preventative measurses are necessary.  This isn't a complaint, its just feedback.    The Hitech crew gots ta know!

[Bullethead]

While I appreciate the attempt to eliminate the baneful stick stirring, I have to agree with those who say the present implementation of the stick locking system leaves much to be desired.  It's WAY too sensitive and unduly interferes with legit ACM and even taking off.

The stick locking system has 3 main problems as I see it.  The 1st 2 can be discussed together because they seem to be related:

1.  It says "don't move your stick so fast" but IMHO it's actually triggered by the SIZE of the stick DEFLECTION at an instant in time, NOT the speed of stick movement nor even how much you move it.

2.  The critical size of the stick deflection that locks your controls seems to get smaller as your speed gets lower.

I believe the above because of the following observations:

     A.  If you gently build up to 4 Gs at say 300 IAS and then hold it there, not moving the stick at all, your controls lock up after a couple of seconds as your speed bleeds down.  You still get the "too fast" message but you haven't move the stick, it's just pulled back a certain amount.

     B.  Your rudders lock up on takeoff EXTREMELY easily when you first start rolling, even with minute amounts of rudder deflection applied very slowly.  However, this same amount of rudder applied at the same rate while at higher speeds doesn't lock you up.

As you can see, these problems really penalize legit ACM.  Perhaps the most annoying part is that when you're doing a legit constant G nose-low turn at fairly low alt and your controls lock, you frequently only regain control at a point where you MUST yank the stick to avoid augering--but you lock up again and die.

So now the 3rd problem:

3.  IMHO, locking the controls is not the proper way to deal with stick stirring.  What makes stick stirring a problem, IMHO, is that your FE draws the nme plane with WAY too much pitch and yaw angle.  IOW, the pilot stirring his stick doesn't see himself as having anywhere near the amount of attitude change as the guy chasing him.  So to me the proper solution is to fix the way the FE draws nme planes instead of introducing another problem.

If you can't fix the FE's drawing, then something less drastic than the control lock should be considered.  I mean, AH is striving for realism and something as blatantly artificial as arbitrary stick lock-ups kinda ruins that effect <G>.  Why not just limit the rate of application of G and/or control forces?  Don't tie plane attitude directly to stick movement for all regimes.  Surely there's got to be an upper limit as to how fast a real human running on pure adrenaline can pull an un-boosted stick back or sideways against a given amount of slipstream.  If you move the stick this fast or slower, the plane moves with the stick.  But if you move the stick faster than this, the plane's attitude only changes at that upper limit rate, slower than the stick is moved.

-Bullethead <CAF>

[Granger]

You said it well bullethead!
sounds like that is exactly what needs to be done!

Granger

[Vermillion]

Bullethead:

We finally got our dear old Curious George !! And isn't it sweet      

Back to the issue at hand tho, I don't know how much you have been keeping up with WB's, but your proposed solution to stick stirring (item #3) is basically what they have done there.

I think it goes back to the old saying "Damned if you do, Damned if you don't". Because if you go check out AGW, you will see quite a few pilots venting loudly about that very method.

With complaints of "mushy response", "it doesn't feel realistic", and many many other complaints. Because the aircrafts response times have been artifically slowed or limited to prevent induced warps.

Personally for me, I haven't gotten a single "Don't move the stick so fast" message. But that is probably due to my conservative E-fighter vertical flying style (No not BnZ), and my fairly high end control equipment not spiking like some other brands have been reported too do, namely Sidewinders of different flavors. (CH Fighterstick, Pro Throttle, and rudders).

To me this is a better solution than artifical limits, so long as the technical problems of the spiking equipment can be worked out. I will wait to see how HT's damper patch works out later this week.

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Vermillion
WB's: (verm--), **MOL**, Men of Leisure,

[TT]

  My problem is that the other guy dosent have a problem. Im seeing more stick stirring now than ever before. It didnt take long for people with brands other than sidewinder to figure out that all they have to do is yank the stick around to lose a con on there 6.

[jedi]

Hehe instead of artificially limiting the aircraft's movement, whenever the FE senses rapid, cyclic stick motion, it should simply DOUBLE the SIZE of the aircraft (the "virtual" aircraft, not the picture your enemy sees).  That way, all those shots that stick-stirring makes into misses, the anti-stick-stir code will make into hits.  Stick-stirring will vanish overnight  

Alternatively, do nothing to the offending plane; just make everybody's bullets bigger.

Of course the REAL solution, if it can be done, is to accurately model the rate at which the airplane's attitude can change.  If you moved a real plane's stick rapidly from stop to stop, along with the rudder, the plane would appear to gently wobble, and change its flight path almost negligibly, making you only a very slightly more difficult target than if you just flew straight and level.  A stick-stirring target SHOULD be about the easiest target to hit, because not only is your plane NOT changing its flight path, you're repeatedly presenting the side and plan views to shoot at!

Of course, this is not what's modeled, and that's the root of the problem.  Rapid stick movement produces rapid directional changes, instead of just cyclic wobbling.  The culprit is the lack of delay in the effect of control movement, or too much ease in achieving full control deflection, if you want to look at it that way instead.

Apparently, AH is choosing to "freeze" the controls.  That's a viable alternative, since the effect is to make your aircraft fly in a more or less straight line, like the real thing would if you stick-stirred it.  But obviously it needs some adjusting to make it SEEM realistic to the pilot.  In particular, if you slowed down your "stick-stirring" to a moderate rate, you would indeed be able to make your plane bounce around a bit, perhaps foiling your opponent's aim.

But it IS a beta; I bet this gets tweaked into workable form.

--jedi

[Bullethead]

Verm said:
>>>>>>>>> We finally got our dear old Curious George !! And isn't it sweet <<<<<<<<<<<

Yeah, but it ain't nearly as much of an eccentric beast as it is in AW.  Seems to turn much better, for one thing.  OTOH, it seems way flimsier, but I could just be having a bad run of luck there.  However, the vertical aspects are quite nice  .

>>>>>>>>>>>> Back to the issue at hand tho, I don't know how much you have been keeping up with WB's, but your proposed solution to stick stirring (item #3) is basically what they have done there. <<<<<<<<<<<<<

No, I've been out of WB the last few months.  I can see, though, how putting a limit on G and control force application rates would cause Hate and Discontent.  And the more I think about it, I wouldn't like that solution, either....

Think about stick stirring for a minute.  We've all seen it, the nme plane appearing to be flying sideways, or fully belly- or top-on to the direction of travel, and alternating between these conditions very rapidly.  Obviously, there is NO WAY any real airplane could assume these attitudes, at least at the speeds and rates at which we see them in WB and AH.  And if it could, the pilot would be totally blacked out, if not reduced to a greasy smear on the side of the cockpit.

I've been accused of stick stirring many times in WB.  In such situations, I've been jinking, wobbling around at high but non-blackout G levels along my base course.  From my POV, my nose only moves +/- 10 or 15^ tops from base course.  Or I've been just holding a -1 G barrel roll with opposite rudder, not moving the stick at all.  IOW, in neither case was I "stirring the stick" as that term is generally, and IMHO erroneously, defined.

Now, both of these moves I was doing were perfectly legit and within realistic flight limits.  The flight model agrees or it wouldn't let me do this w/out stalling or blacking out, and the FE on my end draws my ride's attitude changes correctly.  I can GUARANTEE that the flight model is accurate enough that nobody "stick stirring" EVER sees anywhere near the attitude changes that the guy chasing him does.  Spend some time trying to flick between +90^ and -90^ AoA twice a second w/out blacking out or stalling if you don't believe me  .

So as I see it, "stick stirring" is NOT induced by rapid, extreme stick movements.  If the stick movements are rapid, they must be small or the pilot would black or and/or stall.  If they are small, then they are legit because they don't exceed the capabilities of either the control system or the pilot.  Therefore, the problem must be an FE error in the amount of AoA and yaw drawn on other people's planes.

If we accept this as the situation, then the only correct response is to fix the FE's drawing routines.

If we don't accept this, then we must admit that the flight model is porked in having blackout and stall thresholds way too high, AND in giving us way too much control authority.  These must all go together because if blackouts and stalls were correct but we had too much authority, using that authority wouldn't be possible due to being interrupted by stalls and blackouts.  And only excessive control authority could create the kind of AoA and yaw we see when somebody is "stick stirring."  But because the guy doing the "stirring" doesn't see anything approaching this, I'd say we don't have excess control authority.  Therefore, my suggestion in my previous post about limiting control authority was in error and I withdraw it.  

In any case, causing the controls to lock up, no matter what triggers this, is also in error.  The problem isn't moving the stick quickly, or moving it a lot, or even how much you happen to have the stick held over when the system decides to look at it.  It's how the other guy's FE interprets what you're doing.  Thus, the current attempted solution doesn't affect the root cause at all and results in undue penalties to legit moves.  Not to mention, as you brought up, the problem of teaching the system to discriminate between stick spikes and the pilot's control inputs.  

But anyway, the stick locker is barking up the wrong tree IMHO.  If the FE's drawing isn't fixable, I'd MUCH rather deal with "stick stirring" than the control locker.  "Stick stirring" is only a real problem in direct stern chases, where pulling lead isn't really an issue.  I learned long ago in WB to ignore the nme's apparent attitude and direction and just aim for his essentially stationary center of mass.  

-Bullethead <CAF>

[Fishu]

To prevent stick stirring, there should be simply just a delay for moving control surfaces.. I guess real ones doesn't go from up position to down position within 0.01 seconds. (not to mention about that these planes didnt even have hydraulics generally)

I get sometimes bad bad control lockup when I use rudder (key rudder, dont own pedals, just to do some basic & simple evansive maneuver.

IMO, this anti-stick stir thing is worst yet I've seen done against stick stirring.
Simple delay on control surfaces should do it. (though, not some general delay, isn't hard to move controls back to default position from full up or down  

*EOW* (end of whine)

[Gritz]

Hey uh...what's stick stirring?
I assume it's bad.  Like spin' dweebin'?



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Gritz
33rd Strike Group
 

[PapaFox]

Stick-stirring remedy is THE issue in AH now. I very much want to see the current solution changed.
     It is one thing to miss a shot because your opponent is stick stirring. It is much worse to have your controls freeze. The whole reason we are here is because we can lose track of the fact that we're manipulating computers and we can become immersed in a flight-combat experience. The moment your stick freezes, you are painfully removed from the combat frame of mind and instead are sitting in front of a computer that isn't working right. The computer might as well freeze the screen and say "Please insert another quarter to continue".
     I believe Jedi has the best suggestion so far: Make the offending plane more vulnerable to bullets when stick-stirring is suspected. You may get shot down, but that is far better than losing the reality of combat simulation.