[Light]

I tried flying with my TrackIR 5 turned on recently and noticed a problem. The head tracking worked perfectly but I found that I became lost as to the relationship of my POV to my ships heading. In games like Strike Fighters 2 and IL2 you have the cockpit and aircraft fuselage/wings visible to help maintain your awareness of where you are looking in relation to your plane. In FS2 with its no cockpit view style once the gun sight is no longer in view as you track a target it can get confusing as to how to maneuver your craft. I was wondering if it would be practical for a series of lines to be added to the top, bottom, left, right and rear sides? A sort of globe if you will, maybe with degree markers and color coding, so that a pilot using TrackIR could get a better understanding of where the target he is looking at is in relation to his craft.               

[lostllama]

Yeah, it is a bit awkward trying to work out which direction you're flying in when using TrackIR.

You can enable rendering of the ship (and also cockpits, on certain ships) by opening the Ships.tbl file (found in the root_fs2.vp file in your FreeSpace2 folder) and adding the "show ship" flag to the ships you would like to enable it on. This way you will see parts of the exterior of the ship (and perhaps a cockpit, depending if the ship in question has a cockpit model), which might go some way to helping you orient yourself. You might want to back up the .tbl file first though if you later want to revert back to the original.

Erm....At least I think that's the correct method. I'm sure someone with more knowledge than me will point out if I'm wrong on this and help you.

EDIT: Should've added this: if you put the edited .tbl file in FreeSpace2/data/tables, that should override the original one in the root_fs2 file - so there's no need to back it up like I said above.

[MatthTheGeek]

It's probably easier to use tbm's for that.

[Cobra]

There's an arrow that pops up in the HUD that points you back to the center. It's white, I think.