very dissappointed!

[MudWasp48 3]

Lothar, That OFFice has my attention, I'll have to have a friend download it for me like he did HitR.

 

The trackir5 got here early today. Regular guy was not driving delivery and sub must not be making so many pitstops. Nay, regular guy is great, just likes to chew the fat and have someone listen to his ramblings. Maybe the sub ran the route in reverse?

 

The device sure has come a long way since version2. Been really enjoying the eye-candy flying a Roland down by Switzerland, and a Strutter near London. Took a free flight in a DFW.C.V. at dawn with a full moon setting and set off for Paris. The colors in the clouds and sky as the rising rays of the sun light them up riveled X-plane or FSX. Decided not to bomb any landmarks and took out two bridges. Good time!

 

Did some quick combat and remembered that I need to turn the plane, not just me head.... OUCH. Need to listen for the normal sound of stressed wood creaking. Deflections shots are a bit off now, but I'll work on that. Gotta put a hot key for F12 on the trhrottle or joystick .I can read the wing mounted guages now!

[+matt milne 5]

automatic frequency scaling (turbo mode) is standard in virtually all post 2010 processors and GPUs. keep a close eye on the temperatures to ensure longer unit life (I set 50 C as the ceiling for mine, and use a lower voltage for the cpu.)

[+Lothar of the Hill People 6]

The VC viewpoint is set where the eye is in the cockpit normally.

 

The virtual pilot's eye, Pol. To achieve true simulation viewing, the human eye and virtual camera need to be in the same spot in 3D relative to the real/virtual screen. Then gages and instruments in your cockpit are rendered to appear in actual size, your gunsight appears just as far away from your real eye as if you were in the cockpit, distant enemies are more readily spotted by eye at actual size, your real-world spatial intuition can be applied to deflection shooting, etc. My OFFfov program helps achieve this, along with other features. Need a big screen or multi-monitor set-up to really take advantage of this kind of immersion though.

 

FYI, the FOV controls in the OFF Workshops are mislabeled. Instead of horizontal and vertical they actually control FOV UP and DOWN above and below CFS3's virtual camera. Sum them to get the total vertical FOV, while the rendered horizontal FOV depends on the total VFOV and the aspect ratio of the screen. I'm sure the controls can be corrected in WOFF if they haven't already for people who aren't using my FOV manager, which gives you a nice set of easy-to-use sliders to configure your view while hiding all the scary 3D math under the hood.

[+Polovski 460]

Hi Lothar, OK with you now. Can you send us an example in the xdp whatever to our support email address to show what you mean - if we understand it we can see if we can improve that in WOFF?

Thanks.

[Tamper 9]

Very interesting discussion here.

 

So, Lothar - a question, then: Am I correct in the inference that the "most accurate" spot for the VC viewpoint would be further back than it is by default in OFF (to allow for the distance between player's eye and monitor, IOW)?

[+Polovski 460]

The most accurate depends, the image on the screen is what the pilot's eye sees from that position - he is sat in the cockpit. You are not really in the cockpit of course. You are sat .5 meter or so back from that flat representation.

 

Everyone has their own preferences, I like to zoom out one notch to get a wider view (zoom is set to [ ] keys usually). The default view is to give you a feel of cramped WW1 cockpit as you often would be very close to instruments but also doesn't give you peripheral vision. 3 monitors helps but edges can get distorted.

 

The models for virtual cockpits are designed to be used with the eye set as the pilot's eye, so odd heights or eye placement may cause glitches of course.

[Tamper 9]

Yes, I wasn't sure what term to use, and choosing 'most accurate' might not have been the best choice. One definitely gets the feel you mentioned with the default view, and that would generally be considered a plus on the side of immersion. But, just as you said, the peripheral vision suffers - and that's impossible to correct in any game/sim, etc. on a single, flat monitor. Multiple monitors of course, helps - but then yes, you start running into distortion problems, and the bezel edges, etc. And the cost is prohibitive for many of us (like me *lol*).

 

I also zoom out, but there seems to be an issue with this; the 'in-could' effect doesn't go all the way to the edges of the screen. Always bothered me, because I prefer zooming out. I recall reading somewhere it was a CFS3 thing - but that can't be correct, because I have had it on (at least) one machine where it didn't do that. Maybe a driver thing or how I've fiddled with the workshop FOV settings (?) I really have never figured out.

 

This discussion caught my eye because I would love to find the 'happy medium'; that is, a reasonable FOV (including periphery), that still 'feels' right in the cockpit, but doesn't chop off the cloud effect.

[+Polovski 460]

Thanks Tamper - for the "in-cloud" effect you can disable it in cfs3config settings - not as immersive maybe but then you don't get that edge which also can spoil immersion.

[+Lothar of the Hill People 6]

Hi Lothar, OK with you now. Can you send us an example in the xdp whatever to our support email address to show what you mean - if we understand it we can see if we can improve that in WOFF?

 

Done! Not sure where the email will end up, but it's more than just a bug report. If you or someone else at OBD could get back to me about the other matter, Polovski, I'd really appreciate it.

[+Lothar of the Hill People 6]

So, Lothar - a question, then: Am I correct in the inference that the "most accurate" spot for the VC viewpoint would be further back than it is by default in OFF (to allow for the distance between player's eye and monitor, IOW)?

 

Actually, a more realistic view is generally closer in than default for typical-sized monitors. Zooming out like Pol prefers increases your peripheral vision at the cost of heavy distortion: the fish-eye effect that was one of the biggest complaints in reviews of CFS3. While you can see more of the sky, it's impairs spotting aircraft at a distance because they are rendered to appear smaller than they actually are in the 3D scene. So the fish-eye view's more useful in combat for tracking enemies who are already close, but still they are closer than they appear so deflection shooting is more difficult. Maybe that's why he's always colliding with other planes in the WOFF previews haha!

 

A realistic field of view does limit your peripheral vision. A large screen or multiple monitors helps most but is also the most expensive solution. TrackIR is somewhere in the middle. Cheapest salve is to sit as close to your screen as physically possible; I move my monitor up to the edge of my desk to fly. Think of the screen as a window into the gameworld--ideally you'd want to wrap it around your eyes like goggles. I guess 3D virtual reality goggles is the best and most expensive solution.

 

Give my FOV manager a try (run OFFbase, and from the main Squadron window click the OFFramp button to open the mod manager, and select the OFFfov page). It's pretty intuitive, and does all the fancy 3D math to calculate the rendered field of view and line it up with the actual field of view of your screen.

 

I know a lot of people are used to the zoomed-out fish-eye experience, but once you get used to "being in the cockpit" you'll start to find inhumanely zooming out a little nauseating. It's like flying through the passenger side mirror of a car.

 

A final note about TrackIR in all this: In a simulation view, you should set the z movement to 0cm:1cm, effectively disabling z movement. Thus if you move your head an inch forward, what's on screen shouldn't change--it just gets an inch closer to you so everything stays the same perceived size. You are physically in the virtual cockpit, controlling the virtual plane.

 

But if you can't sit close enough or have a big enough screen to comfortably play as a visual simulation, set TrackIR z movement to 1cm:1cm. In this arcade view, you sit outside the virtual cockpit, on your couch or whatever, and you control the virtual pilot, who in turn controls the plane. Moving your head an inch forward moves the virtual pilot's head an inch forward. Your gages and everything else in front of you actually appear 2 inches closer to you, but your mind is translating itself into the virtual pilot's position so this is okay. This translation process is the same as flying from spot view--we know how to move a plane to the left even if it doesn't look to the left from where we're sitting.

 

Same translation process happens flying a radio-controlled plane, as another example. It's what makes most "first person" games playable, but adds a barely imperceptible lag to our mental processing that breaks true immersion. "Second person" is a more apt description of virtually all such games, while true "first person" simulation as described above is almost never achieved in the consumer space. AFAIK, my OFFfov program makes OFF the only true visual first-person flight simulator available for the home computer.

Edited April 25, 2013 by Lothar of the Hill People

[RamblingSid 3]

I have 3ea EVGA GTX 570 HD's if you want them. I noticed when I started using the 3SLI format was a little better. I also updated to 24 GB of ram. I run everything on Ultimate. BUT once in a while I will still hit a low frame rate. I don't think you can do anything about that. If you would like the 3 GTX 570's let me know. PM me. I updated to 660's and don't need them anymore.

 

Hi Porterjr,

 

what do you think of the 660s vis a vis OFF ?

 

Currently I use a 570 but am thinking of replacing with a 660 to celebrate the release of WOFF (whenever that may be).

 

Single card though, not sli or crossfire or whatever it's called.

 

Cheers.

RS

[MudWasp48 3]

I was looking at 660's too. Seems to be the sweet spot in price for performance. A brand I'm not familar with, Galaxy, has a 3GB for a decent price on newegg