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Hello all,

I am a developer of a competing product and I was wondering how...

Just kidding.

Seriously, I don't own a TrackIR (yet), but I have been reading a lot of other peoples' descriptions of how they work.

My main simulator is Lock On, and from the options menu I am able to assign the horizontal and vertical view angles to any DirectX axis - e.g. a joystick.

The view can also be controlled by the mouse, but it appears this is done a little differently.

The view can also be controlled by TrackIR, of course, which seems to behave a lot like a pair of DirectX joystick axes.

Getting to my question - it seems that people can plug in their Track IR and still have all 8 DirectX axes available for joystick, throttle, toebrake pedals and other stuff. Is this correct? If so, how does it work? Is TrackIR using some kind of fancy mouse driver even in "native mode"? I ask because everyone seems to say you must turn off the "use mouse as view control" option in Lock On when using TrackIR.

Hope this makes sense,

-SK

Swing, from what I can gather from using TIR and how games go together I think the following happens.

In mouce mode the movement from the TIR is out put in the same data format as that of a mouse, so that any game that has a mouse look can intergrate TIR in mouse mode.

In Native mode the data is in a different data format (so as not to interfere with a mouse) and possibly at a higher rate. The game would have to have driver recognition software as part of it's routines and how to move the view as required.

The TIR driver takes the raw data flow from the sensor that is reading the x,y co-ordinates of the reflector and does the math to see what is happening with the reflected dot(s) from frame to frame. This data is then translated into data that the game can read and interperate how to move the view.

I don't think I am to far off the mark for the basics on how a TIR works, and as I say this is just an educated guess

The important thinks is that what ever is really happening works. To compare how much difference a TIR adds to the immersion in a sim (driving or flight), think of it this way.

How much differnece does a wheel or joystick/HOTAS add to the control of the respective sim?

TIR is that much of a breakthrough

Ok, I suspected there was a special driver involved with all the "TrackIR-enhanced" nomenclature flying around. I guess then this is something that cannot easily be emulated by a joystick axis without subtracting from how many are visible to DirectX.

Thanks!

-SK