4.11 - 6DoF debugging

[MOH_Hirth]

Lets 5DOF like a optional choise, and let friendly for 6DOF MOD, is a old revised mod working perfect. i like linear "oneone" profile, and with 4.11 the 5dof dont respect trackir4 settings...

[Herra Tohtori]

I'm not really sure whether you guys count this as a "bug" but I'll report it nevertheless.

In the Me-262 cockpit, it is now impossible to look through the Revi gunsight by moving your head in normal cockpit view. Instead you have to select the "Gunsight view".

This seems to be caused by the limits of X/Y/Z translation movement being set too low; the gunsight is simply too far low, and you hit a "limiter" before the viewpoint is aligned with the gunsight.

Whether or not this is intentional or not, I could not say; however in my opinion, the Gunsight view is distracting, limiting, and immersion-breaking. The fluid transition to gunsight view is much better than the snap-change before, but it's still an action that requires a button press, while you could smply LOOK through the gunsight instead by intuitive head movements; it is much better if you have the ability to freely move your viewpoint in the game to align with the gunsight.

Moreover, obviously pilots would have been able to do this in reality... otherwise they would not have been able to aim at all.


It is also my opinion that the translation limits in general are too low in the game, especially on vertical axis. Moving the head slightly upwards so that the centre of gunsight reticle is visible at the top of the reflector glass offers slightly better visibility, as the gunsight itself is not blocking the view at the bottom. Not being able to do so feels slightly restrictive and unnatural.

Also, it would seem like a logical assumption that in reality, pilots would have been seated high enough that when they lean forward toward the gunsight, their eye level would drop on the level of the gunsight itself; if you consider the biomechanics of leaning forward from the hip or neck, in both cases the view point descends.

With the old 6DOF mod, it was pretty much trivial to move your head the required distance to look through the sight - as it should be. In this aspect, the new native 6DOF implementation is actually inferior to the old mod.

Finally: I can understand if these restrictions are in place due to technical limitations such as being unable to fix the cockpit models beyond these viewpoint restrictions. However, in many cases this does not seem to be the case, and if the movement restrictions are there for gameplay reasons, then I think they are slightly too small in general.

The Me-262 highlights a case where the range of motion is simply set too small, yet the pilot can still move their head down enough to look through gunsight - by pressing a button, instead of using the 6DOF directly. Logically, this does not compute... if the pilot is able to look through the gunsight, it should work with 6DOF only as well, yes?


I would be thankful for a reply on this matter at some point.

[stovak]

Originally Posted by Herra Tohtori

In the Me-262 cockpit, it is now impossible to look through the Revi gunsight by moving your head in normal cockpit view.

Could this be a problem with your TIR set-up, assuming you use it? I'm using a hat-switch for head movement and have no trouble using the sight, so it doesn't seem to be a limitation on the range of movement.

[[URU]BlackFox]

The multiplier factor for head movement is adjustable. The readme has some details about it.

[Herra Tohtori]

Originally Posted by stovak

Could this be a problem with your TIR set-up, assuming you use it? I'm using a hat-switch for head movement and have no trouble using the sight, so it doesn't seem to be a limitation on the range of movement.

I use FreeTrack with spectrum modified Microsoft VX-1000 webcam. It's not a field of view issue, as I retain full control over rotation (which means all the reflective dots are visible) - the movement range just stops in the game, not letting the camera move further up, down, left, right, front or back. There are no translation limits in place in the software itself, beyond the camera's field of view, so it doesn't seem like I'm hitting any fence there.

I interpreted the issue as the camera "bounding box" kicking in, preventing the movement of the camera to areas that are deemed "inaccessible", either for gameplay purposes, or for preventing the camera from going into places where the cockpit mesh has transparent or otherwise glitchy spots.

Originally Posted by [URU]BlackFox

The multiplier factor for head movement is adjustable. The readme has some details about it.

If I'm not mistaken, multipliers usually affect the speed at which the movement of your head is translated to the viewpoint's movement in the game; I would expect increasing them would simply mean that you reach the hard limits of the movement range with lesser movement of your head... but I could be completely wrong about this.

I will experiment with them as soon as I find them, but I am unsure whether it is easily possible to extend the range of translation on X/Y/Z axis, especially on plane-specific level.

[stovak]

Originally Posted by Herra Tohtori

If I'm not mistaken, ...

No, you are correct as far as I know. The relevant settings in the conf.ini are:

[HookView Config]

Speed=2
LeanF=0.1
LeanS=0.05
Raise=0.05
RubberBand=0.5

They affect the speed and smoothness of movement, but not range.

I can't help with FreeTrack though, sorry.

[Treetop64]

- Deleted -

[Spudkopf]

Just in case this is actually a 6DOf related issue:

Was flying the Ju88 yesterday evening testing out 6dof (5dof) mouse and keyboard when I noticed some visual glitches I'd not noticed until now regarding the pilots side front sliding quater window forward pillar in that there are several tears and holes on this pillar as can been seen the image below within the dashed area:



I've searched Google high and low for past images of the Ju88 cockpit. And it would appear that the pillar issue was not present when the Ju88 was first ported into the sim as can be seen in these reference images which are from the original Ubi news pages that announced the Ju88 implementation back in 2004ish.





Could some kind person from TD possibly take a look at the issue and maybe even try and fix the it before the release of 4.12 (pretty please).

[Herra Tohtori]

After some looking into the new features, I discovered that there are now controls to manually adjust the viewpoint location in addition to just the 6DOF movement from head tracking.

With that, I am indeed able to shift the viewpoint in Me-262 down enough to look through the gun sight in normal view.

This is a good feature.

[zxwings]

Please look at the screenshots, illustrating what happens after a switch to gunsight view.

-


1 - The head is rotated to the left (traditional 2DoF feature), and also leaned as much as possible to the left (new 6DoF feature).

-


2 - Now switch to gunsight view via the "Toggle Gunsight" key (Shift+F1 by default).

-


3 - Switch back by tapping the "Toggle Gunsight" key again. Now the view is clealy different from that in screenshot 1, despite the fact that there has been no change whatever to the 6DoF coordinates. As is easily seen, the head rotation (or the direction of the "camera") remains, but the position of the head due to leaning is clearly lost.


In fact, the newer 4DoF coordinates are reset to zero when the "Toggle Gunsight" key is pressed.

This is a bug, I think. All the 6DoF axes should be treated on an equal footing. There is no reason to let the coordinates of the traditional 2DoF rotation axes be kept intact between 'toggle gunsight' switches whereas the other 4DoF coordinates of your current view are all reset to zero whenever you touch the 'Toggle Gunsight' key.

All the 6DoF coordinates - not just two of them - of the head should remain unchanged after pure switches between normal view and gunsight view.

Thanks for your patience.

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