BoB and Freetrack

[brando]

Honestly, this is like like getting snotty at Microsoft because you can't play a game on Linux. And as for competition, what's the competition between priced and free? If a company has been making a successful product for many years, and constantly ploughing profits into improved versions then they deserve the protection that copyright and financial clout brings.

B

[julian265]

Nearmiss, according to an ED representative on the DCS:BS forum, ED are negotiating an agreement with NP, to include TIR support, and allow 3DoF support for freetrack and others. Stated without euphemism, non NP head trackers are being limited to 3DoF.

Discussion of freetrack is also suppressed on that forum.

If you didn't already know, the current head movement communications between TIR and games have become encrypted, which excludes other trackers. It appears that if the game programmers allow the usual open protocols to be used, NP will not allow TIR to be used with the game. If you or 1C can show me otherwise, please do.

Brando, your comparison is incorrect. Each joystick manufacturer doesn't and shouldn't use different communication protocols (that's the beauty of the USB interface). Head tracking should be the same, and we would be closer to this situation if NP wasn't making deals with game makers to exclude other trackers. You know how your joystick communicates each axis's information to a sim? That's how it was* (pre NP encryption), and should be with head tracking, just with 6 axes. So it's not as if it takes extra work to make other trackers compatible, but they're working to keep other trackers out. That's my gripe, and that's why your comparison is wrong.

*The Freetrack programmers were wrong to program their software to communicate with games using NP's protocol. The above is why they did it.

Calculating pose from 3 points is not new, and was not NP's invention, by the way. As far as I know, the freetrack developers used their own math to work out head pose.

[nearmiss]

Originally Posted by julian265

Nearmiss, according to an ED representative on the DCS:BS forum, ED are negotiating an agreement with NP, to include TIR support, and allow 3DoF support for freetrack and others. Stated without euphemism, non NP head trackers are being limited to 3DoF.

Discussion of freetrack is also suppressed on that forum.

If you didn't already know, the current head movement communications between TIR and games have become encrypted, which excludes other trackers. It appears that if the game programmers allow the usual open protocols to be used, NP will not allow TIR to be used with the game. If you or 1C can show me otherwise, please do.

Brando, your comparison is incorrect. Each joystick manufacturer doesn't and shouldn't use different communication protocols (that's the beauty of the USB interface). Head tracking should be the same, and we would be closer to this situation if NP wasn't making deals with game makers to exclude other trackers. You know how your joystick communicates each axis's information to a sim? That's how it was* (pre NP encryption), and should be with head tracking, just with 6 axes. So it's not as if it takes extra work to make other trackers compatible, but they're working to keep other trackers out. That's my gripe, and that's why your comparison is wrong.

*The Freetrack programmers were wrong to program their software to communicate with games using NP's protocol. The above is why they did it.

Calculating pose from 3 points is not new, and was not NP's invention, by the way. As far as I know, the freetrack developers used their own math to work out head pose.

Sorry, but ED is nothing compared to IL2 and never will be. I gave up on that sim after LockON. I refuse to install their spyware or so-called piracy protected software on my system. No way Jose'.

You may love it, and thats your prerogative. I think you'll find things are less paranoid with the IL2, and it's developer.

Nothing you could say that ED was going to do would surprise me.

[julian265]

Originally Posted by nearmiss

snip... You may love it, and thats your prerogative. I think you'll find things are less paranoid with the IL2, and it's developer.

I'm more an IL2 fan than BS fan, but that's another matter. I really hope that you're right.

Originally Posted by nearmiss

Nothing you could say that ED was going to do would surprise me.

Hehe, fair enough.

Discussion of freetrack is also suppressed on the Ubi forums, and IIRC there are others too. This happens because Natural Point asks for it. I can only hope that they don't have the same influence on 1C. Should BoB be closed to non-Natural Point head trackers, I doubt I'd buy it.

[csThor]

The reason that NP encrypted the communication between device and program is that Freetrack used NP's interface and "masked" itself as TIR. Wouldn't you be p*ssed if you wrote a specialized API for your product, invested loads of money into it only to see another competitor use it (without asking, if that is the gist of the stuff I found on the Web) for its own product? I mean, really ... NP's tactics may be questionable, but Freetrack isn't without fault here, either. Had they written their own interface/API for their product I'd have agreed with you but right now, with the information I have (and I avoided both FT's site and NP's site - wouldn't get the right answers there anyway) I must say that FT's tactics aren't sacrosanct, either.

[julian265]

I agree. Which is why I'd like to see games accepting generic head position and angle as axis inputs, just like mouses, joysticks, and wheels.

Freetrack includes a free and open source SDK, but Natural Point appears to be pressuring game developers into not using it, or limiting it to 3DoF.

[fuzzychickens]

Originally Posted by julian265

I agree. Which is why I'd like to see games accepting generic head position and angle as axis inputs, just like mouses, joysticks, and wheels.

Freetrack includes a free and open source SDK, but Natural Point appears to be pressuring game developers into not using it, or limiting it to 3DoF.

Exactly, the only thing NP will accomplish if they get widespread support from flightsim games is to cripple technology advancement in headtracking , except any advancement they themselves accomplish.

If history tells us anything, companies that have monopolies in their respective fields have little incentive to innovate.

[fuzzychickens]

Originally Posted by brando

Honestly, this is like like getting snotty at Microsoft because you can't play a game on Linux. And as for competition, what's the competition between priced and free? If a company has been making a successful product for many years, and constantly ploughing profits into improved versions then they deserve the protection that copyright and financial clout brings.

B

Sorry, that comparision doesn't hold.

It's more like Microsoft shipping a browser with windows and making it so that all other browsers will run poorly or not at all on windows.

What they are doing is anti-competitive.

You think the flight sim market would survive if joystick makers were in the business of securing agreements to make certain flight sims only work with their controllers?

Natural point is way out of line. If they are afraid of competition, they should be better than the competition - not by forcing licensees to dump support for other ways of tracking head movement.