Lady and Gentleman,
Padlock is the topic that is raised from time to time by people who missed the previous discussions. I just wante to refresh it for those people and maybe get some ideas.
Some argue that the padlock feature simulates smooth tracking of the target by a pilot. If the pilot glances at his instrunents or checks his 6 momentarily, he does not usually loose the target. Padlock simulates it all beautifully.
Other's argue that the padlock gives people completely unrealistic SA advantage, since it can trach the target while it is out of sight - covered by an aircraft for example. Or when a pilot looks in another direction for a long time and the target is not even close to where it was seen last - the padlock still keeps track of it. That is completely unacceptable in a HiFi sim like AH or WB.
So what, say the padlock proponents, modify it to account for those features. Well, as a programmer I could tell you that it is an extremely difficult task, if at all possible.
Here are some difficulties, as an example:
1. When you glance away from a target, what time should pass before the padlock looses it? There will never be concensus on this and the actual number is variable in real life. If a plane crosses your wing while slowly overtaking you and flying straight, you will have no trouble reaquiring it when it emerges because you will predict it's path and watch for it at the point where it should emerge - the padlock is locked on that point. If at any point you decide to roll and make it visible, you should already be looking in the proper direction.
If the same plane is not flying straight before being covered by a piece of your plane, you would not even expect to reaquire it and start looking elsewhere immediately.
2. You could lose visibility of a plane over terrain and over or behind the clouds. The distance of that varies based on the shape of the plane, the color scheme of a plane, it's orientation towards you, the colouring of that particular piece of a terrain it is flying over, any kind of smoke/dust present, sun/water glare and a few other factors.
The padlock would have to simulate human visual mechanism to reproduce that. Guess what - we are not even close to reliable speech recongition systems, let alone visual recongition systems nearing the human vision in extreme conditions.
If anyone came up with that kind of software, it would be first used in self-flying planes and self-driving cars, not in a game. Of course you would need a supercomputer for that now.
3. We have different receptors in our eye - some are located in the center and react to detail, others are located in the periphery and react to the motion. You see the pane on the screen if you look at it, but you loose it from sight if you glance away and it is not moving much relative to the rest of a picure. That should also be similated.
So we would have to wait a few years/decades for a realistic padlock. Once it is possible, I am sure the good folks of HTC would consider it.
miko--
