01 / The story so far
Learning the hard way.
By day, I write software for a living — just not games. Arma 3 is where that stubborn instinct to tinker and build things goes once the day job winds down. I’m Irish, I fly helicopters badly in Arma 3(slowly progressing to slightly less badly), and in-game I go by Chisel.
Most of my Arma time is spent playing Antistasi on the YLS servers (great bunch of lads, join in some time). If you’ve ever flown transport in Antistasi, you already know the distinct terror: you spend ten minutes navigating low across Altis only to misjudge your flare by two seconds, clip a lamppost, and wipe out your entire squad before anyone can fire a shot. After enough fiery reunions with the respawn screen, I got fascinated by deliberate practice. How do you actually learn to set a chopper down under fire? How do you see what went wrong instead of just guessing?
Like most of my projects, what started as a small, sensible idea snowballed in a hurry. It turned into Chisel’s LZ Trainer — a repeatable landing scenario with tactical scoring and an 11-camera action replay — followed by two standalone companion mods: a live stick-and-rudder flight HUD and a replay camera that tracks where your head was actually pointed mid-flight. That in turn spawned Kavala Heli Time Trial, too many landings went wrong due to a painful inability to manouver well in tight low spaces at the end of a landing, so I built the mission to build the skills.
This site is the workshop bench for that work: the design choices, the battles with SQF scripting, what worked, and the plenty of things that broke along the way. If you just want the missions and mods to fly yourself, they’re all over on the Missions & Mods page. If you want to see them in action (crashes included), there’s footage over on YouTube.