Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Wishlist => Topic started by: Thepiratecaptainmorgan on November 10, 2009, 04:38:24 PM
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Ok, perhaps you've heard of them, They have been around for along time on aircraft, Cockpit Mounted REAR VIEW MIRRORS?
hehehe
"Check 6"
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you do realize the mirror does not help much, it works only when you have a guy directly on your six, In others words it's to late. :airplane:
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Ok, maybe this is a head of the times for everyone, but... CONVEX Mirrors?
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Mirrors were not successful in WWII. A Bf109 in firing range was the size of a - in a paperback book. In AH it would be more like the size of a . in said book.
It would significantly increase the work load on the computer for no significant gain.
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someone should have tried the SEARCH feature....... something else thats been standard equipment for a very long time
this topic has been discussed many times and always boils down to the same conclusion.......... mirrors were absolutely useless in WWII......... you couldnt see anything until they were close on your 6 and even if you did see something the vibrations made it nearly impossible to tell what it was...... you could just as easily mistake a bird flying by for a B17
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If real pilots could have looked directly behind them by flexing their thumb a nanometer, instead of twisting their torso to look over their shoulders, they wouldn't have needed or asked for rearview mirrors.
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Not to mention, every reference I've read by vets said those mirrors didn't help much anyway. They were too small, vibrated like mad, and if the enemy aircraft was close enough to be visualized it was already too late.
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An easy way to see why this would be useless, you'll need some sort of mirror for this project.
Now once you have a mirror, find a road with traffic on it and a clearing of 200 - 400yrds(2 to 4 football field lengths) beside it. While shaking the mirror some try to see how easily you can make out what kind of car is driving on the road at those distances, or even see the car at all. Now after seeing how difficult it is, imagine compressing this imagine even smaller to scale with the size of your monitor.
This is probably the main reason we don't have mirrors on our A/C.
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What do you want a mirror for when you've got Linda Blair all-round vision?
:t
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we had mirrors back in the AW days. they sucked big time, think of it as flying the f4u and trying to look behind you, just about the same view.
semp
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They were not standard on all planes, the 109 didn't have mirrors, neither does the Stearman. The S.E.5a didn't have mirrors. The B-17 didn't have rearview mirrors; at most, the navigator or radioman would have a small mirror for flashing Morse code. The Boeing 767 doesn't have any mirrors.
No, I don't think mirrors are standard equipment on all airplanes.
Ok, maybe this is ahead of the times for everyone, but there are such things as convex mirrors?
Yanno, if you are going get snippy and devolve into hyperbolic attacks, no one will take your points seriously.
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Well.
I would like to see references where every pilot says it wasn't useful.
You guys seem to think the mirror has to be in high def to be any value, a black spec where your not expecting to see it is all that the mirror is intended to provide. It is not a maneuver or gunnery device, it is purely a detection device. Somethings behind me!
Anyone in ww2 trying to get more out of it then that was misguided. We can see the pictures of aces ADDING these things to their aircraft..they did that for a reason.
The effort to track down Spit mirrors and put one or two of them on a pony says volumes about its utility.
In Il2 they provide that capability, it works great.
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Its not that they would be useless in the real world, its that they would add nothing to the visibility we already enjoy in AHII but would add alot of graphics load.
Well.
I would like to see references where every pilot says it wasn't useful.
You guys seem to think the mirror has to be in high def to be any value, a black spec where your not expecting to see it is all that the mirror is intended to provide. It is not a maneuver or gunnery device, it is purely a detection device. Somethings behind me!
Anyone in ww2 trying to get more out of it then that was misguided. We can see the pictures of aces ADDING these things to their aircraft..they did that for a reason.
The effort to track down Spit mirrors and put one or two of them on a pony says volumes about its utility.
In Il2 they provide that capability, it works great.
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"In Il2 they provide that capability, it works great."
It does - and it has to, because IL-2 has no 'Linda Blair' direct view behind.
:cool:
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"In Il2 they provide that capability, it works great."
It does - and it has to, because IL-2 has no 'Linda Blair' direct view behind.
:cool:
I can leave my right hand on the steering wheel and look *almost* 90degrees behind me, by twisting torso and neck to the right. Takes longer to describe than to do. Not comfortable, not a position I'd hold for a long time. But you can see behind you alot better than Il2 lets on.
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The movie Topgun shows them looking backwards in a similar manner....one of the few parts they did get right.
Strip
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The movie Topgun shows them looking backwards in a similar manner....one of the few parts they did get right.
Strip
u mean goose was the mirror?
semp
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I can leave my right hand on the steering wheel and look *almost* 90degrees behind me, by twisting torso and neck to the right. Takes longer to describe than to do. Not comfortable, not a position I'd hold for a long time. But you can see behind you alot better than Il2 lets on.
That is because il2 has a fixed head position with frozen eyes. I hated this so much that this feature single handedly killed IL2 for me.
Sitting on a chair, rotating your head to the side (normally you get a little more than 90 degrees) and on top of that you look backwards with your eyes (they are not fixed in the sockets) you can easily see directly behind you and cover even more than that with peripheral vision. If your shoulders are not strapped like they often do in planes, you can add leaning to the side and cover 200+ degrees backward. Pilots checking 6 do this twist with the neck so the head is not just rotated, it is also tilted. It gets a few more degrees and move the eyes a few more cm to peak behind the obstacle. Navigators often bang their heads against the canopy if they check 6 when the pilot suddenly rolls the other way. The actual limit is often how far do you have to stretch to look behind the chair/armor/cockpit wall and what limits your sideways head movement (like canopy). In that respect, AH "owl head" and free cockpit movement gives an end result that is the closest to the real thing.
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Its not that they would be useless in the real world, its that they would add nothing to the visibility we already enjoy in AHII but would add alot of graphics load.
Well if you really feel that way, you should have corrected all the people that posted that it was useless in the real world.
It would absolutely be useful to be looking forward and have a chance to see someone is on your 6 that you didnt know about. And that is its purpose as I described.
Why would it add so much to the graphics load? Where did that come from. Has a dev stated that or did you make it up? I hope with the level of graphics in the game, and the what you can buy in a graphics card for 80 dollars, that we are not too worried about optionally adding a little extra view window above the view screen.
No matter its eye candy advantage, the head on a stick view system in IL2 was always a fundamental and serious weakness vs AH in all of its versions.
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Well if you really feel that way, you should have corrected all the people that posted that it was useless in the real world.
It was pretty much useless and pilots didn't rely on them as much as you seem to think they did. I recall reading one Spitfire comments about the mirrors and it was basically, if you see him in your mirror, it's already too late. Pretty much sums up their usefulness.
ack-ack
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Found the following on page 59 of "To Fly & To Fight" by Bud Anderson and Joseph Hamelin.
I had my own system of scanning the sky, a section at a time, upper left and right, lower left and right, and the rear quadrants, too. The rear was your wingman's responsibility, but I always wanted to know myself. By the time you saw planes in your rearview mirror, where they were the size of a fly-speck, they would be within firing range. I didn't trust my backside to anyone. I was pretty attached to it.
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I don't really know how useful it would be in the real world. I've never flown a WWII fighter and accessed the mirrors. Maybe it was more useful for the lead man in the formation than for actually spotting bandits. What I do know is that AHII gives you almost exactly what a RV mirror would give with a flick of a hatswitch. And I know that in Il2 you can toggle the mirrors on and off, and it does make a dramatic difference in graphics loading.
Well if you really feel that way, you should have corrected all the people that posted that it was useless in the real world.
It would absolutely be useful to be looking forward and have a chance to see someone is on your 6 that you didnt know about. And that is its purpose as I described.
Why would it add so much to the graphics load? Where did that come from. Has a dev stated that or did you make it up? I hope with the level of graphics in the game, and the what you can buy in a graphics card for 80 dollars, that we are not too worried about optionally adding a little extra view window above the view screen.
No matter its eye candy advantage, the head on a stick view system in IL2 was always a fundamental and serious weakness vs AH in all of its versions.
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The reason it wouldn't be useful in Aces High (regardless of whether it worked in the real world or not) would be it's size; to be is scale, it'd have to be absolutely tiny. And you're fitting an image the size of your screen onto it. Double the video processing for something in which you couldn't tell a tree from an airplane.
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well, if we're to have mirrors then we most certainly need turn signals to help us tell which way a plane is going to break. :rofl maybe they could be automatically linked to stick direction??
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Why would it add so much to the graphics load? Where did that come from. Has a dev stated that or did you make it up? I hope with the level of graphics in the game, and the what you can buy in a graphics card for 80 dollars, that we are not too worried about optionally adding a little extra view window above the view screen.
Actually, yes, the developer in fact did say that:
BigCrate if you are envision mirrors that you could see while looking forward there are 2 huge problems with them.
1. Think of the size that the mirror would be on your screen, Then envision how what you see now looking forward has to be compressed into that small area, and then how small the objects would be,or more precisly how most planes could not be seen.
2. To make a mirror is realy displaying 2 different views at once, hence you almost 1/2 frame rate.
A better description.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/Viewports_and_Clipping.asp (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/directx9_c/Viewports_and_Clipping.asp)
Also I do not believe AW ever had a mirror, it had a mirror view on some planes.
Republic: I never said it was very difficult to make a mirror. Reread my quote, I said it would have a sever FPS impact. It really is equivalently to drawing the entire world twice per frame.
HiTech
I love that search button up there (http://www.dreamstime.com/number-1---finger-pointing-up-(with-clipping-path)-thumb872005.jpg)
Try it yourself :headscratch:
wrongway
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Hitech is right in aw there was a mirror view in some planes (hurricane?) which u could view by using your look back key. you could actually see the mirror while flying but it didnt show any reflection. it was too small. Please remember that we played aw on the big screens which at the time were like 11 or 12 inch or something like that.
but if you guys think that mirrors will improve you sa, then I think you are wrong. it will make it easier sometimes to avoid getting shot down, but most of the time he'll come in high or low and in those situations mirrors are pretty much useless. better idea would be to actually scan the sky around you, it only takes about 1 to 2 seconds to view and identify bogies on your six, the more you use it the easier it gets. specially while you are chasing somebody.
semp