[Roanoke]

why would you want a big chunk of your ship blocking your FOV ?

[Lynx]

To increase the immersion, perhaps? You no longer are a disembodied eye flaoting in space but really sit in a space fighter with only a few centimeters of armor between you and death.

[Lightspeed]

This feature is err... problematic to say the very least.

If you put enough detail in the cockpit for a view like this, the game will degrade to unplayable degree.

A cockpit should ONLY be rendered for the player.

[Lynx]

Yeah. As bobbau said, his detail box comes into play here so it'll only displayed for the player. And a good looking cockpit requires about 700 -2000 polies, so that would hardly make the game unplayable in any way.

[MetalDestroyer]

Great we have cockpit, but it's a little messy.

[Lightspeed]

And it's useless. You can't put gauges on it.

[Nuke]

cfs3 does it decently without too much framerate drop. perhaps have a system where you include two cockpit subobjects. one high detail for the player, and the other low detail designed to look good from the outside. it means more work for modders but would increase performance. no more trouble than creating lods anyway.

as for gauges is there any way to render a particular frame of an ani file at any given time. you could have a 10 position ani gauge assigned to say ship speed. then the game will render the frame thats closest to the actual value. so if you are at half speed it will render frame 5, full spead frame 10 and so on. of course only rendered in the player cockpit model.

[WMCoolmon]

Nuke: probably. It'd require hardcoding a lot of it, but something like that could be toggled using a ship flag.

I think, though Bobb would probably know, that in order to really have hud gauges on a ship's textures we'd need to go to DirectX 9, which has a special RenderToTexture function.

Anyway, my guess on the clipping stuff then is that the clipping plane isn't being computed with enough accuracy close-up to render the polygons close-up. There was a similar problem in T2 if you got far away from water.

If I'm right, though, it'd probably involve some VERY low-level modifications to the rendering engine core.

Edit: Oh, and this might sound a little conceited but in-game cockpits do add to the feeling of the game. Flying Bobb's Hercules and being able to see the gun ports to the sides and look back and see the engines was pretty cool. Even Mechwarrior 2 had that, and it used a purely-software renderer built from scratch. (It was pre-Win95)

[phatosealpha]

Does this build work with the burn decals?  and if so, does a shot that hits your cockpit leave a visible scorch mark?

[Lynx]

Originally posted by Lightspeed
And it's useless. You can't put gauges on it.

Most games with 3d cockpits don't have gauges mapped  on them.

[WMCoolmon]

*Checks flags in the launcher*

Looks like the impact decals in the experimental options list is there, so probably.

I'm not sure if they'll be seen from inside the cockpit, though. I don't have any decal textures to check, and I'd have to dig up the how-to instructions, wherever they are.

[aldo_14]

It would only render decals facing out from the cockpit glass-surface anyways, I think; unless you make decals double sided.

[Flaser]

Hmm...I had a silly idea - but how about using models as gagues? With the recent animation additions it could work to some degree - I think analogue gagues are the best for this sort of thing with the pointers moving around.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Flaser
Hmm...I had a silly idea - but how about using models as gagues? With the recent animation additions it could work to some degree - I think analogue gagues are the best for this sort of thing with the pointers moving around.

Too complex, I think.  Also digital readouts look better.

Of course, I designed all my cockpits anticipating that the pilot would have an in-helmet HUD (i.e. the game one) and that the other stuff as-seen-in-cockpit-texture represented mostly redundant info.

[Ransom]

Personally I think a cockpit is a waste of space unless it works something like X2's (basically, replacing the HUD).

[aldo_14]

I don't......

[Lynx]

I think the current HUD would need to get a bit more optimized for a cockpit. Some of the less important gauges should be merged and/or made smaller, and overall be more compact, since additionally to the space the gauges take up on the screen there's now a cockpit too.

Every space-sime I now with a cockpit has rather few gauges, and most of those are MFD's that serve multiple purposes. Just check out Wing commander, the X-Wing series, Independence War 1/2, even Freelancer, all those have a rather versatile and multifunctional HUD that takes far less screen space than the freespace one, so there might be a good reason why it's that way.

[Nuke]

cfs3 virtual cocpits are the best but they use that dx9 render to texture feature for all the gauges in adition to model animations, like the stick, rudder pedals, throttle and all the other levvers knobs and switches and stuff. and if you want to you can look look at your wings and watch your control surfaces move or in the event of flak, check to see if your wings are still there. they are the best virtual cockpits ive seen to date.

[Flaser]

I'm still in love with the analogue gagues of the Su-27 in LOMAC - that stuff was obviously necesarry as well as usefull at the same time - and a lot clearer and to the point than the American F-15 :b

[Nico]

hey, that's cool. Somebody nice enough to try this with the eze or the perseus?