Do you play with orbit lines on or off?
- Thread starter jacozilla
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I use them as well to have a clue on how to properly align to the starport when landing.
Wouldn't it be a really bad projection-system if it couldn't appear like it was really there, outside your cockpit? I never had a problem with that, since technology in thousand years probably advances quite a bit over what's possible today.
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My lines are on as I use them for navigating in SC. If I want pretty views I have a debug camera. 
That's arguably true, but it's subjective. Part of the problem with the lines appearing "at the same distance" as the planets, which I didn't elaborate upon but will now that it's been raised, is that the virtual distance itself is something that the brain has to intuit from other visual cues and from the "knowledge" that one is sitting in a spacecraft looking out at the infinite beyond. If the planets give the illusion of being tens of light-seconds away and the lines are the same distance as the planets, this isn't a problem. But if the lines suddenly appear to be too close, and the planets are the same distance, there's a disconnect and all of a sudden you're looking at a 3D virtual space of arbitrary size and not an entire galaxy.
Like I said, it's hard to explain unless you see it yourself, and not everyone sees it. This is why I'm fine with the cockpit holograms and the on-helmet projections, because they remain within the cockpit and move believably with the pilot's head. But I never felt as though the orbit lines were as convincing. They have the tendency to make the whole space outside the cockpit feel that little more artificial.
One of the joys of ED for me is that it can be utterly convincing for long stretches of time. When I play games like Tomb Raider or Assassin's Creed, or simulators like FSX, or even other first-person games like the Call Of Duty series, no matter how beautifully rendered the visuals are I sometimes find my perception flipping between absolute immersion in the virtual world and sudden bursts of "matrix vision" where the world breaks down and I can "see" a construct of geometric shapes, bitmaps and bounding boxes. The frequency and duration vary but it's always there, a nagging reminder of the artificiality of the game world. It never really goes away.
By contrast, ED is the single most convincing simulation of a fictional world that I've experienced in 35 years of gaming. Maybe it helps that I'm such an SF nut, and maybe the fact that ED "only" has to render mostly black space with a few round things in it. Or perhaps it's because I know ED is portraying as realistic a vision of the actual galaxy as current technology permits. All I know is that for most of my gameplay sessions it remains an amazingly believable experience. When I look at that cluster of wiring running down my Diamondback's B-pillar, it's as though I'm looking at something three feet away. And when I glance just to the right or left of it at the stars, it's as though I'm looking at things hundreds or thousands of light years away. Even the lack of forced focus effects doesn't break the illusion for me. It's a rather incredible achievement.
The orbit lines, when I turn them on, break that illusion. They turn the infinite cosmos into a finite box of stuff, into which a smaller box of stuff (the cockpit) is placed. It's a shame, because they are unquestionably useful, but at the end of the day I have to go with what feels right.
Disclaimer: as I revealed in early posts about 3D, VR etc., I don't have stereo depth perception. One of my eyes is considerably weaker than the other and provides only marginal peripheral vision. Almost all of my day-to-day distance judgement, whether for nearby or distant objects, is done using parallax rather than stereoscopy. I don't see the real world in quite the same way most people do, which may have a considerable effect on my perception of virtual worlds. So all of the above may well be unique to me, or at least to me and others with effective monocular vision. Incidentally this is also the reason I stick with TrackIR and haven't tried Oculus Rift; depending on whether or not it works with my eyes it could be amazing, or crushingly disappointing, and I'm not ready for that level of disappointment. No 3D cinema or TV technology has ever worked for me (how could it?) which doesn't bode well.
TL;DR: Ultimately ED feels astonishingly real for me with the lines off, much less so with them on. So of course they stay off! YMMV.
I like the orbit lines on.
Really good when exploring. You can tell lots from them.
Plus when going to a station can tell if the station is infront or behind the planet.
Both....Have them on sometimes and sometimes I turn em off.
Custom orbit lines would be amazing. I'm huge fan of anything that can be customized for personal preference..
I personally play mostly with lines off because I find them distracting and immersion breaking..
There's few really helpful things that can be achieved with them, but I wish they didn't take the whole screen in busy systems. So being able to select which lines you'd personally want to see would be really good addition.
Wow, it's becoming necro city around here. Is there something in the water?
(To go briefly on-topic, I too would still like a little more granularity in how the orbit lines are rendered but appreciate it's probably off the table by this point, unless it's part of the "core improvements" coming in 2.4 (or is it 3.x?). In particular I wouldn't mind the ability to suppress everything except exclusion limits. Despite what I said further up the thread (in 2015!) I still crash into the occasional star, or overcook orbital cruise approaches, if I don't have the orbit lines switched on).
(To go briefly on-topic, I too would still like a little more granularity in how the orbit lines are rendered but appreciate it's probably off the table by this point, unless it's part of the "core improvements" coming in 2.4 (or is it 3.x?). In particular I wouldn't mind the ability to suppress everything except exclusion limits. Despite what I said further up the thread (in 2015!) I still crash into the occasional star, or overcook orbital cruise approaches, if I don't have the orbit lines switched on).
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