forums.naturalpoint.com

hi guys,

have bin checking the ro forums for updates on trackir implementation. here is what one of the developers posted:

"It won't be included. You need to do your game like OFP/ArmA for starters, where your first person view of your weapon is actually the third person model. It's the only way to have true full-body awareness as well as an acurate representation of where your body parts really are in relation to the world. You could of course try to emulate is with a whole lot of additional modelling for first person view but apart from the increased resources required to render it and time to model/texture it, what you see still wouldn't be synched with your 3rd person representation in the game world, leading to cries of "WTF? My shoulder was totally not visible, I'm looking at it now and it's in cover!" Yes, it's nice to have, but it just won't work with the way most games are made currently.

Personally I'd love to see a few more companies go down the path BIS did with the whole third person model being all you see (but some better animations would be nice) as it makes a huge difference to immersion."

is this so? i mean that it is not feasible to work it into the game?

thx,

himmel

it's certainly the crux of the argument.

They could put in support where motion is limited to a large degree, so you wouldn't see the edges of your hand models (almost all FPS games show your hands on a gun, but these models end at the elbow, and usually don't render polygons on the far sides of the hands/gun). But this limitation is less exciting for everyone.

There are other options, which would be less realistic/immersive, like moving your entire body around instead of leaning at the torso (then the hand models would move with you). Or they could use head motion for other commands, like letting you reload by rolling your head.

In general we expect that people are slowly (years) going to transition over, as they see how other games rending the full body and thus improving the experience.
IL2 is a good example of this. An older game that had to be limited to 2D TrackIR support so you wouldn't see the edges of your cockpit space, but the next game from the IL2 devs will have fully modeled cockpits and 6DOF support. FlightSimulator really drove home how important it was to change the practice of limited 2D cockpits, for the Flight Sim community.

ArmA (and Battleground Europe:WWIIonline) simply hasn't had the same huge effect on the FPS community. yet. But this effect will happen in time.

Note: A lot of FPS game developers start with more of the arms rendered, but then optimize the model down to discard unseen portions. This used to be much more important when computers were chugging on all the polygons, but now it's pretty trivial to skip this optimization step for your player model.

Note: It's also been harder to convince FPS developers that their audience will appreciate support of a peripheral. Flight Simmers already own joysticks, and are more open to buying something beyond the keyboard and mouse. A suprising amount of FPS players don't even own headphones.

Sooo, there are a lot of factors.

We're working on getting more high profile FPS games. We're hoping to get the message out that high end peripherals like TrackIR are big value add to making a PC game (as opposed to consoles, where the control experience is dumbed down). So, rest assured we're aware of this, and working hard to change it.

[quote=NaturalPoint-Warren]
.... We're hoping to get the message out that high end peripherals like TrackIR are big value add to making a PC game (as opposed to consoles, where the control experience is dumbed down). So, rest assured we're aware of this, and working hard to change it.
[/quote]

well i for my part will do all i can to promo the trackir in my gamer circle when ever i can.

in my book it should be part of any pc game really.

anyhow thx for the great reply.

best,

himmel