Cockpits are ugly......

[motoadve]

Warbirds cockpits looks much better and gives better atmosphere.
Apart from this everything looks way better

Hope cockpits get fixed

[madmax]

Ahem...

Did you happen to read before you looked at the pictures? Or after for that matter?

"Please note:  All screenshots on this website are untouched and taken from an incomplete product.  The screenshots are only intended to portray a development in progress and not a finished, polished product."

Methinks they just trying to show us how far along the project is (it flys) and will polish up the eye candy later.

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Madmax
"Tempest" Squadron
71st FS 1st FG 15th USAAF (Virtual)
 tempest.warbirds.org

[Pyro]

Fix it?  We haven't finished it yet.  Really, the P-51 only has about half its instruments.  We just made a few instruments to test the gauge system and make sure the instrument faces would be legible.  

As to the look of 3D vs 2D, I won't argue against the fact that you can really put in a lot of detail into a 2D system that you can't in a 3D system.  But I think you'll change your mind about which gives a better atmosphere once you see it.  There's a lot more advantages that the 3D system has over the 2D masks.  The 2D system just gives you a flat overlay.  With the 3D system, you really feel like you're sitting in the plane, not like you're looking at a picture of one.  

With the 3D system, you can change resolution without needing to download separate art, move your viewpoint around in the cockpit so you can see around obstructions, use snap views and pans, change your field of view, have dynamic shading, get banged around the cockpit in hard maneuvers, or even have the gunsight reticle fade out if you're not lined up with it.    

In this case, you really can't judge the atmosphere it conducts from a screenshot, even if the cockpit was completed.  The atmosphere will be how much it makes you feel like you're flying in the plane.  In my extremely biased opinion, it's no contest between a good 3D system and a 2D one.



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Doug "Pyro" Balmos
HiTech Creations

[Yak]

"or even have the gunsight reticle fade out if you're not lined up with it. "

Waaay cool, Pyro  

Yak  <--- Mac  user, but lurking around.

[chisel]

Pyro  STOP!, your gettin me hard.

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Chisel
5./JG5 'Ice Bears'

[Batmann]

I'm not satisfied with WarBirds cockpit artwork. Because, Arrangement of gauges isn't right always. Some planes gauges laying-out isn't delivered to one sheet of screens. WarBirds gauge panel is not alowed be a vertical length.

WarBirds doesn't have some gauges about engine. It is because the simulation of the engine relation is very simple. So, some gauges are often changed to the other one.

I expect "Aces higH" will be more good simulation.

[clipper]

Well, if I understood what Pyro was saying, I think there's the possibility of getting more instruments on the panel in AH.

Remember, in Warbirds, you just have a 2D overlay of the cockpit, so you're limited by what you can fit onto the available dashboard real estate.  With a 3D cockpit, the ability of the player to move his "head" around means that you can model more of the intrument panel by putting some stuff down lower, in the area which would be out of sight in a 2D fixed overlay.

[fats]

Could cockpits retain their original instrument layout as much as possible? Even if there are some extra instrumens like a clock there.

The time it takes to switch to a gage view and back is minimal for it to make a really big difference I would think. Hmm since you can record ( or so I recall ) the snap views your self will it save the whole view frustrum or just position&direction and apply the current acive FOV to it?

I think I would prefer it to save the FOV as well. Hopefully in a cool .cfg file editable with your average text editor and for distributing your cool view.cfg file for others. Ought to be plane specific also, or at least that you can execute different config files for specific planes.

The good old Quake mod, Team Fortress, is a very good example. Basically you need to have a separate .cfg file for the different character classes to compete. Some of the top people go even so far as to have different .cfg's for different levels for each character class, and that's in addition to just the communications stuff.


~/fats

[Rebel]

-This sounds cool  

One question though:

I'm usually playin Janes WWII and EAW lately, and I realized somethin.

A quick comparision:

Jane's feels like you're in the cockpit.(the instrument panel is AWESOME) And that's cool, because you FEEL like you are really flyin the damn thing. The flight model tho, is kinda lightweight, but the eye candy and immersion is to die for.

EAW, on the other hand, feels like you're in the WAR.  The sheer nostalgia of it all gets ya droppin you're chin.  My brother (-divan) sat and oggled at a 75-100 buff formation raid to Berlin, while I flew around it in my Mustang (no blue nose tho, just the black and white checkers of the 78th FG   )

Sounds like you have a great thing goin, but trust me....go with the Jane's style instrument panel.  Eaw's is okay, if ya could just READ the damn things.  I'm always using that lil' green text in the left corner!

You also mentioned about snap views.  Can we program these to our liking?


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-Rebel 487th Lil' Bastards
"You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane, and men who love them are faithful to them even though they leave them for others. Man has one virginity to lose in fighters, and if it is a lovely airplane he loses it to, there is where his heart will forever be."
--Ernest Hemingway