Standard Equip on ALL PLANES?

[Strip]

The movie Topgun shows them looking backwards in a similar manner....one of the few parts they did get right.

Strip

[guncrasher]

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

[bozon]

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.

[Pongo]

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.

[Ack-Ack]

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

[Soulyss]

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.

[BnZs]

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.

[OOZ662]

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.

[ZZee]

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. maybe they could be automatically linked to stick direction??

[AWwrgwy]

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

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 

Try it yourself   


wrongway

[guncrasher]

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