Cockpits have never really been a priority for the FreeSpace Upgrade Project because retail FS2 didn't have them.
Well, I guess I don't understand that point of view at all. All of the more ambitious mods have tried to implement cockpits. The whole point of an UPGRADE is to improve on the Retail product. I mean, I understand that cockpits could be a bone of contention--one player's idea of what constitutes a workable cockpit might be very much at odds with another, so there might be a hesitancy to tackle the cockpits from a modder's point of view. Individuals apparently pursue their own ideas along those lines while nothing is done "officially" to make tolerable in-game cockpits for the upgraded versions of the retail game.
Last night, for the first time, I cracked open a POF file using the model viewer. Tonight I figured how to switch to the model editor. Milestones. Now I need to find a modeling tutorial and I will become yet another individual individually seeking his individual solution to what is, for many people, an absolutely must have feature of the game in terms of bringing FreeSpace into the present as a playable space sim--a cockpit. Name a single decent space sim produced in remotely recent history that doesn't have a 3d cockpit view? Hell, Tie Fighter had a cockpit view--without the cockpit view, Tie Fighter would have been hugely degraded. The idea of these games is to create the sensation (a la Yorkshire Peppermint Patties) of flying a fighter in space combat. Fighters have cockpits. The cockpit is absolutely essential to creating that feel. The lack of a cockpit makes a game feel like some kind of '80s arcade game. In FreeSpace, you spend, essentially the whole game staring out of your cockpit. As such, ideally, there 1) should be cockpits; 2) they should be distinct to the individual fighters reflecting the different styles of different ships; 3) they should be detailed and pleasant to look at; 4) they should be minimally funtional (gauges should correspond with panels); 5) they should be more than minimally functional, they should (ideally) be highly functional, interactive. There should be clickable buttons for things like radar range, weapon selection, engine thrust, etc., screens should be multi-functional, bringing up sub-menu's for things like sub-system targeting, detailed damage reports and so on.
And of course, they should be optional, perhaps enabled as a separate mod so that people who didn't want them could dis-include them, and people could make their own variations to suit their own tastes. So what is needed, I suppose, is a cockpit module which lays the basic groundwork for the cockpits of all the retail ships, but with built-in provisions for customization of the cockpits themselves and of the HUD gauge layout.
The "cockpit mod" is a first step in that direction, it seems to me.
But why stop with the fighters? What's to prevent the implementation of Bridge Control interface for taking control of capital ships? The UI used in the old Starshatter Game could be taken as an inspiration.
