The false realism of canopy frames

[lemur]

A few suggestions:

With the game 'as is':

I always setup a separate head position for each view, one that peers around the posts as much as possible.  And I have my 'move pov' keys accessable.

With a simple addition:

Have an option that would move your head from side to side / up-down automatically. And have the 'save head position' key remember if you were 'bobbing' or not.

So I'd set my front and back views to not bob, by my side views would always peer about a bit automatically.

Just a thought.

~Lemur

[loser]

Originally posted by Raubvogel
I agree, some of the planes are ridiculous to try to look out of. Transparent frames probably aren't the answer, but thinning them a bit might work. The 205 is like flying in a jail cell.

more like a coffin

[mrsid2]

I want a 3D stereovision headset with motion sensors.

[MANDOBLE]

Widewing, agree 500% with you. And. IMO, it could have an easy solution.

I'm sure several times all of us have noticed the following effect in 3D games:

You see a house and several trees. the trees are behind the house, but ,for seome reason (bug or whatever), all the trees are visible for you, rendered after rendering the house. It could be used to render any plane and icon after the cockpit polygons. So, the cockpit art will be the same, but any plane or vehicle will be rendered "after" it and will be visible.

[Apar]

I agree totally WideWing.

Even though you can setup all view directions with the arrow keys and pgup, pgdn and save em with F10 to get the best views around the canopy obstructions, they're still not perfect for every situation.
Adapting the view during combat itself using the keyboard is not an option because you don't have time for it. In a real plane you would move to get a better view, in AH you depend on view system setup and moving your plane (rolling it) to get the con out of the obstruction.
I think your suggestion is a good compromise until we can fly with VR Helmets with an attitude reference unit in it,

[CJ]

Widewing,
   Back in CK .91 or so, I argued for the same thing.

What about leaving the canopy opaque, and then just showing aircraft through it?  Maybe there could be a small  circle of transparency through the canopy frame, with the aircraft in the center?   Heck, we can sometimes see hit sprites through the gun sight parts, why not just make aircraft visible through them?  

Really, the severely view limiting canopy thing isn't realistic, but it might be kinda hard to implement this because they'd have to draw the aircraft over top of the canopy frame, and not over top of the instrument panel and airframe parts.  Maybe this opens a whole new can of worms that they don't want to deal with.

[CJ]

Oops.  I should read the whole thread before I post.  It looks like mandable beat me to that one.  Oh well, I said the same thing back in CK

[Kweassa]

So?

 Is this really so hard?

 Just put in there a neat 'alternative view head movements customize toggle' function.
 
 An alternative view on the same direction much like the example of the 'default: look front' and 'hat key forward: look front'.

  use  a certain key toggle and it takes u to alternative view. Any head position programmed under this key toggle and saved will be programmed as an 'alternative view' on that certain direction.

 program this toggle into the joystick, and next time with a slight touch of button you'd easily be able to access the 'bob head and look at a little different angle' effect.

 For instance, the 109s have this hideous horizontal bar placed across the cockpit when you look 'up, forward'.

 You'd press this 'certain toggle key for alt. view'. Now, you are under alternative view mode. Look "up, forward", and press the page down key a bit. This is like when you look up forward, see something but the bar gets in the way, so you lower your head a bit to get a view. Save the head position.

 ..

 Afterwards, when u look up, see that the cross bar gets in the way of your 'look up, forward' view, just press the 'alt view toggle' key, and the pre-programmed alternative head position would kick in. Simple to use just like the way someone would switch gun zoom on/off.

 Just a matter of one more key, or one more button. And one more alternative view mode to program.

[CJ]

Yeah, that's pretty cumbersome for me since I have a limited number of fingers, and in the real situation i'd just move my head  back or to the side without thinking about it, or my two eyes would let me see around it without any effort at all.  I'd rather focus on flying and SA rather than manipulating the views even more than we have to already.  Granted AH has the best view system i've seen yet, but still.  Why delibarately make it worse than it would be in real life?  Aren't we striving for accuracy and game play?  It seems like this, suprisingly, would help in both departments at once.

[Kweassa]

How cumbersome can pressing a single button be?

 

ps) at least I think my idea's a lot better than to putting in imaginary 'transparent' bars as a game play concession.

[CJ]

Stereoscopic vision is imaginary?  

And, pushing an extra button when I'm already manipulating flaps, throttle, stick rudder, and views, is just one too many.   Actually it's more like two too many since usually the time i need to move views is when im trying to set up a snap shot and some piece of the canopy rail is blocking the plane.  So lets see, less than a second, and the plane will pass through the front, as im maneuvering just above stall.  I've got to conciously push some other button instead of setting up the shot.  How is it a concession again to accurately model the image that your brain sees as you look through a close object with two eyes?  Sure, a cyclops would have more trouble with this, but I don't think too many cycloptic pilots were flying around in the war.

[Lephturn]

Originally posted by MANDOBLE
Widewing, agree 500% with you. And. IMO, it could have an easy solution.

I'm sure several times all of us have noticed the following effect in 3D games:

You see a house and several trees. the trees are behind the house, but ,for seome reason (bug or whatever), all the trees are visible for you, rendered after rendering the house. It could be used to render any plane and icon after the cockpit polygons. So, the cockpit art will be the same, but any plane or vehicle will be rendered "after" it and will be visible.

Yep, but how does HT program it so that things can be seen only through the cockpit frames, but not every other 3D object in the game?  An interesting idea, but again it may not be simple to implement.

That's providing HTC think it's a good idea.  I'm not sure that it is a good solution.  There should be some definate advantage to having a nice bubble canopy over a big metal birdcage.  Maybe having either the plane or the icon rendered "through" the framing might be a decent compromise.  Personally I don't think it's a big deal as is with the infinately adjustable views we have, I think it's a reasonable compromise as it is.

[MANDOBLE]

That idea has a "small" problem: the black dots of distant planes. Even if you render them after the canopy frames, they will not be clearly visible.

IMO, the process should start defining a blind area, where the pilot simply cant see anything even repositioning the head. Then, any cockpit polygon outside that are may be rendered:
1 - With transparency (IMO, ugly effect).
2 - Before rendering the planes and vehicles, so, these objects will be drawn "over" the cockpit polygons outside the blind area.
3 - Mostly desirable, rendering the "viewable" distant dots white if they are "blocked" by cockpit polygons.

[CJ]

What if HTC just implemented a type of padlock that only moved the position of the pilots head, and not the view direction?  This would allow a pilot to padlock his primary target, and then still scan for other targets.  If a piece of the canopy frame started getting in the way, it would automacally move the head to keep it in view.   Of course this would require a fair amount of AI.  Maybe it could just work in the forward view, and simply  adjust so that the plane that you were trying to turn with would stay visible instead of disappear behind the canopy frame all of the time.  I can't count the number of times i've been in lag persuit with a P-47D11 and lost sight of the target long enough to mess up the pass.  This simply wouldn't happen if I could move my head around a little, in the last couple of seconds of the pass.   A phase where I don't have time to push buttons to adjust my view.

  Could HTC even make the pilot head movements scriptable by the customers?  Then all they'd have to do is have a angular feedback from the padlock system that allows us to script head movements for angular position of the bandit.  We'd have to map out where the various cockpit parts are, and then code our own movements, movement speeds, etc for the bandits position.  Everyone could script it to our own preferences , if they wanted to, and HTC would be free of the job of scripting pilot head movements for every single plane.  No one would have to use this system, AND it would be fairly easy for HTC to do, compared to making parts of the 3D model of the airframe selectively invisible.  It still might be a pretty tough job though.

[MANDOBLE]

CJ, actually we have no padlock at all. The only thing that we have is an "automatic view switcher". A padlock implies that your eyes are tracking all the time (til blocked by some other object) the desired object, not just changing views.

That is, if the "padlocked" target is at your left, the system switch to your left view, nothing more. To have something like your proposal, the first step would be just to implement a padlock in the game, and then, to add some "AI" to the padlock.