v0.7.0 — the wildfire release

There is a fire burning somewhere on the island, and putting it out is a flying problem.

The wildfire

It spreads on the fuel that is actually under it, up the slope and downwind. Measured on the headless harness rather than asserted: 10.2× faster uphill than down, 4.4× faster with the wind than against it, and open water stops it dead — of 434 cells burnt against a shoreline, none crossed. The same seed burns the same way twice.

You can see it: flame and embers, a smoke column that leans downwind and glows on its underside at night, and ground that goes black behind the front with the trees standing in it charred.

The fire's look is the least finished thing in this release. Every burning cell
currently draws the same flame regardless of whether it is standing in grass or
closed canopy, and the map does not mark the fire at all — you navigate to it on
the bearing and range in the banner. Both are the next thing being worked on.

The bucket

Land on a pad and press B. Hover until the bucket is in a lake or the sea — about 9 m on the altimeter, and the HUD shows you the bucket's own height on a tape as you come down, because your altimeter reads the skids and the bucket is eight metres of rope below them. Then fly to the fire and press G.

Nine hundred kilos, and you feel every one of them on the collective the moment they arrive. One drop will not kill a canopy fire — it lands about half of what it takes — so you will be shuttling, and the round trip to the nearest water is the decision the sortie is really about. Drop while you are moving and the water paints a longer, thinner stripe than a hover does.

Fly it on a controller

Any Xbox, PlayStation or generic pad is picked up at launch with nothing to configure. Left stick collective and pedals, right stick cyclic, triggers as an alternative yaw, the job on the face buttons.

This is the single biggest change to how the game feels. A helicopter is four continuous axes and a keyboard has none of them — every key is fully on or fully off, so on the arrow keys you are metering the cyclic by counting milliseconds. The sticks carry a dead band and an expo curve, so the middle of the travel, where a hover is actually flown, is far finer than the ends while the stops keep full authority.

On a Mac: hold the small pair button on the top edge of the controller until the logo flashes, then add it under System Settings → Bluetooth. Or just plug it in.

Fixed

• The water bucket could never be filled. The test asked for a value both at or above zero and at or below minus fifteen centimetres — no aircraft position satisfies that. It also read a height that is clamped at zero, so it could not have reported a submerged bucket in the first place.
• The sling was not attached to the helicopter. The hook was held bolt upright over the aircraft's centre no matter what the airframe did, so pitching forward to accelerate slid the belly out from over the rope.
• The sling still stretched, twice over — four cables of four different lengths that changed as the load swung, and a rope drawn taut across a shorter gap whenever the load rested on the ground, which is a rope visibly contracting.
• Nothing that refuses you is silent any more. Pressing B off a pad, or too high over water, or over a river too shallow to dip, used to do nothing and say nothing about why. A control that does nothing is indistinguishable from one that is broken — which is how that impossible fill test survived into v0.6.0.

Also

Freight looks like freight now — planks, battens, steel bands, a pallet — and the bucket's fabric shell swells as it fills, so how much water you have aboard is readable at a glance from any angle.

---

Platform	File	Notes
macOS	Rotorwash-macOS.zip	Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel. macOS 11+.
Windows	Rotorwash-Windows.zip	64-bit.

Neither build is code-signed, so your OS will complain the first time. On macOS,
double-click, click Done, then open System Settings → Privacy & Security
and click Open Anyway (right-click → Open no longer works). On Windows, choose
More info → Run anyway.

Controls, including the full controller layout, are in the
README.