Just browsing around in here (mac). And want to reply to this with my pocketchange.
If you are in desire of padlocks, then run, don't walk to your padlock view games.
Aces High and pre-2.7 Warbirds was written by Hitech for realism towards acm in mind. Such things as "otto" have been implimented because there could be a lack of positions on the plane filled by "real" pilots. Most serious acm simmers don't like it, but put up with it because of this obvious shortcoming.
I am a serious flight'simmer and as with most and if not all of them, padlock views are out. O-U-T out! As soon as any sim goes with a padlock or external view, then it throws immerision right out the door.
There's two kind of flight simmers out there, one being the one that likes to watch the airplanes fly, and one that likes to fly them.
Padlock view is not realistic for these reasons:
In reality, when your eye moves off to look at another external cue as to what your planes situation is in, taking your eye off the target, then coming back to the target, your eye DOES NOT attain it instantly. Your eye will wander a split second before the acquire, the time and distance of acquisition will vary according to how well the pilots logical thinking interpolates where the object will be. If the object of focus is moving too fast, he probably will never acquire focus on it again, but seeing it as a blur in peripheral vision as it zips by. And there are times when he just plain loses it. But with Padlock, this is never a problem.
Got it? good.
With padlock, you attain instantly, center of attention, smack dab in the middle of your screen. No need to look in the slightest. In real life, you have to look.
Pro-padlockers that it would be more real vision-like, moving the head on a swivel so to speak, because he doesn't have to press keys to change views, that the eye follows a target in the center of his focus.
Well, my argument to that is thats wrong. And my previous argument is explains a lot why it is wrong. But also I want to add that the main point of that being wrong is this, and here for example minotaur he states:
"When I look at something, I look right at it. I turn my head and move both my eyeballs. Whatever it is, it is smack dab in the middle of my vision. I don't look at half of it or turn my head and strain my eyes so that it is the left quarter of my vision."
When do you look at half of it?
When looking at your monitor, do you stare at the center of the screen so that the target is in left quarter? Your monitor is your field of vision, like it or not, this isn't the dream room in one of Ray Bradbury's stories where the lions eat the children. No this is the year 1999, and we have a periscope in our virtual reality, it being your monitor, no?
Okay, so we have to shift this 'periscope' to view this reality. The target object is at the place on your monitor where this FOV is occupying, always the same relative to your POV. So if the target is, say, 5 inches above, and 2 inches left of a given cue in your field of view, such as a gunsight or headrest, then your eyes, as in reality, will focus, on the object, NOT the gunsight or center of the headrest, goofy.
Why is that different from reality? You act as if it is. Your eyeballs shift to the object on your screen. Just because its in the left quadrant of your screen doesn't mean your eyes don't look directly at it.
The problem with padlock is the fact that the computer is doing the headturning for you. Like it or not, serious flight simmers in the course to find better immersion, prefer to keep as many computer-aided aspects to a minimum. Having the computer track a target is computerized acm. Get that? COMPUTERIZED ACM! That may be possible in computerized planes that we have now in this day and age, so maybe that is why you flew all the Falcons. Because you like the computerized stuff. We are talking WWII, where the Enigma was state of the art computer. And it didn't have a monitor.
Believe me, the computer can track a target much better than a human in a real plane can track a target. Snap views, or even pan views (which is unrealistic because of the speed of the pans, and another subject), are the rawest and most basic way to view your surroundings. That is what the serious ACM simmer wants. The rawest, simplest way to view his surroundings.
If you want computerized tracking, go play Falcon. Leave us propellor heads with our basic flying machines.
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MG
Major
Rogue Gryffons
