The single feature that makes the LZ Trainer worth using isn’t the scoring. Its the replay.
You can tell yourself — or tell a squadmate you’re training — that you came in way too hot, flared too late, and nearly sheared the tail rotor off on a telephone pole. In the cockpit, in the heat of the moment, you will swear blind you were buttery smooth. But when you sit back and watch the run from an outside camera in slow motion, reality catches up with you in a hurry.
When I started building the trainer, I had no grand intention of creating an eleven-camera cinematic spectacle. Like most of my projects, I set out to build something relatively simple and sane: record the helicopter’s coordinates, replay the flight path, and let me see how far I landed from the smoke.
Naturally, that plan didn’t survive first contact with reality.
One camera lies to you
My first prototype just put a chase camera behind the helicopter. It looked neat, but as a teaching tool, it was surprisingly useless. You couldn’t see the pilot’s inputs, you couldn’t tell if the skids were actually level when they touched the dirt, and you had no idea why an RPG suddenly took your tail off on short final.
That’s why the trainer ended up with eleven distinct camera views:
- Pilot view: Shows what you were actually looking at (and usually, where you panicked).
- Ground & LZ views: Shows the touchdown itself — whether you drifted sideways, bounced, or settled gently onto the marker.
- Overhead & Bird’s Eye: Shows your approach line, energy management, and whether your turn into the street was tidy or a sweeping, exposed mess.
- Enemy Fire & Closest Enemy: Shows the tactical reality. You might feel like you nailed a quick landing, right up until the camera reveals you hovered directly in front of an enemy for six straight seconds.
What actually went wrong only becomes obvious once you can put the camera right where the mistake happened.
Watching once is vanity; comparison is learning
Watching a single run back is entertaining once or twice. But if you want to actually improve your flying, you need to compare runs against each other.
I built a flight-path ribbon that traces your route through the air, colour-coded by ground speed: green for slow and controlled, yellow for medium, and bright red for fast. When you overlay your latest attempt against a clean, saved reference run, patterns you were totally blind to in the cockpit jump out instantly. You realise you aren’t messing up the touchdown — you’re consistently carrying 40 knots too much speed into the last hundred metres, every single time. Fix the deceleration point, and the landing fixes itself.
The trap of naive scoring
My early attempts at scoring were embarrassingly naive. I basically just measured distance to the landing pin and stopped a stopwatch.
That was a mistake.
Straight distance-to-pin completely ignores how you arrived. It rewarded coming in like a screaming lunatic, slamming the collective down, bouncing off three buildings, and coming to rest two feet from the smoke with half your passengers unconscious. That’s the exact opposite of what a tactical landing trainer should teach.
To fix that, the scoring had to balance four competing priorities:
- Time: Because loitering over a hot city gets people killed.
- Accuracy: Because missing a rooftop LZ by five metres means landing on the street below.
- Approach profile: A bonus for staying low and masking behind terrain and buildings on ingress.
- Safety: Penalise helicopter damage and passenger deaths. A fast, accurate landing is no success if the helicopter is shot up or its passengers are killed.
If you shave five seconds off your time but come away with a shot-up helicopter or dead passengers, your score tanks. Safety pushes you toward the kind of flying that actually survives under pressure, not just the fastest time at any cost.
Where that left us
Getting all of this running smoothly in Arma’s engine without hitching or devouring RAM was quite the exercise in SQF optimization. I might dig into that here another time.
More importantly, building the replay system exposed gaps I hadn’t anticipated. Once I started watching my own pilot-view replays, I realised two big things were missing. First, the camera stared rigidly straight ahead, completely missing where I was actually looking out the side window during a flare. Second, there was no way to see what my hands and feet were doing on the controls.
Those two problems turned into two new companion mods: CHS Replay Camera and CHS Flight HUD. More on building those another time.