[Scooby_Doo]

My hand at doing cockpits.  There's several bugs I still need to work out, look at the weapon load outs, I have no clue why it's clipping them like that.  Same thing happens with the damaged gauge either. 
I still need to do some detailing, especially on the side panels and the thottle joystick needs a lot of work.



for some reason the players eyes are just below the players neck below the shoulder LOL

[fightermedic]

+Cockpit Offset:  is you friend in the ship table to control the positioning of the eyes
i think it looks awesome, if blocking the view even more than mine, and obviously there are those clipping errors

[Dragon]

Could you swap positions of throttle and joystick? In most cases, right hand is used for the stick and left for the throttle. Otherwise, looks awesome.

[Herra Tohtori]

I'm pretty sure that if the controls can't be switched around, they would make it favourable to right-handed pilots - so the throttle would be on the left and stick on the right.

Other than that: Consider removing the pilot model from the internal cockpit model altogether, and only have it rendered on external view. Having legs and arms in the cockpit often surprisingly decreases immersion, which is the reason most modern flight sims don't have pilots in the cockpits. It also removes a lot of clipping issues.

Placing view point on slightly higher position should help with cockpit visibility forward. How is the visibility backward? Most ships insist on putting a massive bulkhead (or worse, massively wide headrest of the seat) right before pilot's head, restricting visibility with no reason... most ships in FreeSpace have simply horrible (read: nonexistent) rear/shoulder visibility which is one of my pet peeves in the series - there is zero reason for not making the cockpits have reasonable visibility in designs such as Apollo, Valkyrie, or Perseus.

I would love to see a cockpit design with similar layout as modern fast jets - bubble canopy, blended to the fuselage, no massive struts, and free view over shoulders, around the ejection seat's head rest. That's what would make the most sense in a FreeSpace 2 ship, especially after they came up with shields...

[Scooby_Doo]

I'm pretty sure that if the controls can't be switched around, they would make it favourable to right-handed pilots - so the throttle would be on the left and stick on the right.

Other than that: Consider removing the pilot model from the internal cockpit model altogether, and only have it rendered on external view. Having legs and arms in the cockpit often surprisingly decreases immersion, which is the reason most modern flight sims don't have pilots in the cockpits. It also removes a lot of clipping issues.

Placing view point on slightly higher position should help with cockpit visibility forward. How is the visibility backward? Most ships insist on putting a massive bulkhead (or worse, massively wide headrest of the seat) right before pilot's head, restricting visibility with no reason... most ships in FreeSpace have simply horrible (read: nonexistent) rear/shoulder visibility which is one of my pet peeves in the series - there is zero reason for not making the cockpits have reasonable visibility in designs such as Apollo, Valkyrie, or Perseus.

I would love to see a cockpit design with similar layout as modern fast jets - bubble canopy, blended to the fuselage, no massive struts, and free view over shoulders, around the ejection seat's head rest. That's what would make the most sense in a FreeSpace 2 ship, especially after they came up with shields...

I'll try moving the cockpit and the pilot down first, my other cockpit model doesn't seem to have the neck issue.  Probably because I'm using the default hud and now with things rearranged the center recticle seems to be lower. Otherwise if I have to get rid of the pilot that gets me a ton of extra polys to use.

As for the cockpit frame, it's kinda gotta match that of the real ship and allota the ships have limited rear visibility.  Also you have 360deg radar on a high speed fighter at large ranges in space, bubble canopy doesn't serve a big purpose.  Also as Paladin said in WC1 I'd rather have armor around me if the shields fail.


Apologies for edits, I derped and hit Modify instead of Quote... should be fixed now. -HT

[AndrewofDoom]

So much...obstruction of my view. 

[Herra Tohtori]

Also you have 360deg radar on a high speed fighter at large ranges in space, bubble canopy doesn't serve a big purpose.

Trust me on this - visibility would be a huge factor in combat worthiness of space fighters. Even with 360 helmet HUD projected radar information, seeing the target directly will always be a pilot's first instinctive guidance in a dogfight (excluding BVR engagements).

Also as Paladin said in WC1 I'd rather have armor around me if the shields fail.

And I would rather be able to see the enemy when the radar fails, or gets spoofed, or you're dealing with low observability ships, or electric warfare, or an environment where you have BAZILLION radar contacts and the only way to detect ships from debris is to detect movement. LIDAR would be harder to spoof after you get a contact, but even that can be disrupted relatively easily.

Armour's only going to protect you so much, if you can't see the enemy any armour will eventually fail when you cannot neutralize the threat.

But this is a different discussion than the original topic.

[Scooby_Doo]

Could you swap positions of throttle and joystick? In most cases, right hand is used for the stick and left for the throttle. Otherwise, looks awesome.

Done, and the joystick got replaced, it's got a brand new hi-hat version and it's probably more detailed than the entire original freespace 2 models, even after some optimizing, but then it's right there you can see blocky stuff too easily. Now I've got to remodel the throttle stick.

Also you have 360deg radar on a high speed fighter at large ranges in space, bubble canopy doesn't serve a big purpose.

Trust me on this - visibility would be a huge factor in combat worthiness of space fighters. Even with 360 helmet HUD projected radar information, seeing the target directly will always be a pilot's first instinctive guidance in a dogfight (excluding BVR engagements).

Also as Paladin said in WC1 I'd rather have armor around me if the shields fail.

And I would rather be able to see the enemy when the radar fails, or gets spoofed, or you're dealing with low observability ships, or electric warfare, or an environment where you have BAZILLION radar contacts and the only way to detect ships from debris is to detect movement. LIDAR would be harder to spoof after you get a contact, but even that can be disrupted relatively easily.

Armour's only going to protect you so much, if you can't see the enemy any armour will eventually fail when you cannot neutralize the threat.

But this is a different discussion than the original topic.

I guess it would all depend on the universe. In freespace it would make some sense,  ships tend to move sluggishly in ww1 style combat style where you can obviously, well ignoring the fact shivan ships tend to be pitch black, see them.  WC tends to if you can see them they're already shotting at you.  Not sure where SW stands (Ties tend to be really tiny)  If you tend to use missile and/or extra long range weapons or move really fast  you won't even see the enemy (BVR).  Course the simplistic hud we get with scp would be no where's adequate.

So much...obstruction of my view. 

It'll vary from ship to ship, some will have a much better view, some worse.  Also I think the first screenshot the cockpit wasn't tilted correctly, the center reticle seems to be too low. 

[Scooby_Doo]

Ugh so I tilt the cockpit down, then some of the gauges are too low, so I have to drop the pilot eyes down a bit which puts me back to the beginning..

So far....
straight up view


target tracking view.

Yes all those buttons are meshed, they're not normal mapped (normal mapping would fail way too often)

What I really need is the ability to have multiple functions for each of the display boxes (in essence a true MFD).  That way you could have the talking head, directives, etc without having a separate box for each of them

[Dragon]

Really nice. Can't wait to see it finished.

[General Battuta]

This is takin me back to Allied Force

[Scooby_Doo]

More detailing, this time the window framing.  This one's for ships that have boxed cockpit windows (Aries, Black widow, cobra... etc) 
basically:

     ________
     |       |

tilted ones should just need some vertex scaling to make those


        -----
      /       \


haven't touched bubble canopies yet, those should be easier.

Although now looking at it, the caution strip area needs to be reduced (it's meant to protect the pilot as that's where the canopy closes and it prevents rendering leaks)

[Black Wolf]

Aesthetically it looks spectacular (I continue to be jealous that you make WC ships and not FS ships, Scooby ) but I have to echo the sentiments of others and say that I wouldn't want to play the game in that mode - just too much loss of visibility IMO.

[Scooby_Doo]

Doesn't help that I choose the banshee for this, it doesn't have the greatest visibility.   Also bubble canopies will have considerably less framework.

I just moved the body out of the way for this and thinning the struts some.


Edit: killed a weird bug, if you looked back the head rest was half gone, and if you looked down a chunk of the seat was gone.  Thought it might be because of the eye point, turns out since I recycled cockpit-1 into cockpit-2 I had an area that was for glass (a concept that didn't work, but I didn't take out), that the clear transparency was still there in the alpha channel.

Also discovered if I moved the eyepoint further back I got an even wider view of the control panel so the pilot doesn't have to sit so low in the cockpit.

I still don't like the targetting hud, also the text has gotta quite a bit smaller 

[Scooby_Doo]

Hmm what I think I really need is a hotkey to quickly peek down at the controls.  Have the radar, target/self shields visible but the rest a quick look down to see them fully.

[Herra Tohtori]

Head tracking works for that, but yeah, toggle view direction between the control panels and forward direction would be good too.

What we really need, though, is an in-game, player-controllable field of view feature.

[Scooby_Doo]

Heck all I would need is about a -25 deg on the X? to do that (key bind and perhaps joystick hat switch).

Also you're going to lose your lower ~180 degree view with a cockpit, unless it's a forward sitting cockpit (like wc longbow, B5 starfury), even real fighters have to deal with it (course you can physically move your head)


Also on another great idea, is it possible to hid certain elements on the hud via scripting?  And if not could this be considered for the post 3.7 release? I could do something like this:
Given one hud display panel (a large one) pressing a key, "7" for example, it would toggle through radar, self shield, target shield, ets management, target display,...) 
On another hud display give them the same options
And assign those optional sometimes there hud controls to whatever display you want (like the talking head)
and best yet, save those settings to a file so you can load them in the future!

That way you could tailor the hud to fit how you want it to be.  Only big downside I can see offhand is the number of subsystems on the cockpit model for each hud display (each display would need a seperate mesh for each type of gauge (uvmap coords would differ).

[Dragon]

Actually, you can have any number of gauges you want mapped onto a single display (they may overlap), then disable all but one, and cycle through them. It's even SEXP-able, so scripting should be able to do that, too.

[Scooby_Doo]

Hmmm I see getHUDGaugeColor (r,b,g,a) and setHUDGaugeColor (r,g,b,a) and getHUDGaugeHandle ("string"), just need to find the list of gauge names.


Hmm for some reason setHUDGaugeColor doesn't work in real-time.

edit: well I tried the camera tilting thing and didn't get very far when I realized it was far more complicated using scripts. (i'd have to not only keep track of the main camera, but i'd have to keep track of the ships position and orientation for every frame) ugh
Also is there a way to see the list of hud gauge entries, I see there's a HudGauge, perhaps there something in that that'll help?

[Scooby_Doo]

Actually, you can have any number of gauges you want mapped onto a single display (they may overlap), then disable all but one, and cycle through them. It's even SEXP-able, so scripting should be able to do that, too.

How does this work? I can show/hide the gauge name, but that would hide all of that gauge.