Please fix the dashbaords ...

Seeing that this thread is still ongoing I thought I'd make a little video for people to argue over. So I loaded up an alt with a default sidewinder and switched off TRackIR - took the ship out and was rather bothered by what I saw. I expected my head movement to lag the ship movement, this it seemed to do in yaw but in pitch it seems reversed. Maybe I am just coffee-deprived at the moment so I will let people argue as to whether in pitch the head-movement is reversed in error and that in yaw it is correct. Personally, I'm off to turn on my TRackIR again. ;)

Yes, I think a Dev got a minus sign wrong. And you get +1 for actually trying it out and then uploading a video to prove it. Videos are something I need to get better at ..

So do we agree that this is a bug? Time for the tracker then... chances of being fixed compare un-favourably to a whelk's chance in a super-nova.


for those of a masochistic bent
 
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Just an extra tidbit of insight - our screens are tiny viewports through which we see the cockpit, kinda like looking at the world through a welding mask. This is why the G-force simulation can be bad, because we have such a small FOV defined by the limitations of the screen itself, thus causing instruments to move off the screen but not out of the range of our vision. I see this clearly in VR, where I can face straight forward and move my eyes far left, right, up, and down, and see WAY more than I can see on my 2D screen.
Like I said earlier, never had the issue when I was using a 4:3 monitor. 😛
 
I'm a bit confused. Some people say that head tracking stops the "dashboard" from moving around. I think @Para Handy was one (I can't find the specific post). Is this because there is a setting in Elite that disables this animation (like in VR) by enabling external head tracking, or is it because you naturally look down to compensate for the effect? If the former, can I tell Elite to use head tracking even though I don't own a head tracker, thus locking my dashboard into place?

Also, are there any settings in the graphicsconfig.xml or other setting files that can disable the G-force "moving dashboard" effect? Like the OP, there are some rare times when I'd love to turn this off.
 
Then how do you steer left and right and up and down when headlook is enabled? Like I said before, I don't want to wear stuff on my head.

Tobii Eye Tracker. https://gaming.tobii.com/product/eye-tracker-5/

It mounts on the bottom of your monitor and requires 0 gizmos on your head.

Also it has more much more functionality other than just head tracking, in games that support it, like directing a flashlight or selecting objects with your gaze, etc. The downside is that you need to be at "desk distances" from the monitor, so if you want to play on your couch using your giant living room tv, it doesn't work.
 
Frontier is simulating G-forces to help give us a sense of being in motion, but I agree, there should be a switch to turn this off and lock the "dashboard" in place like the 2D panels on older flight simulators. They provide an option to turn off "shakey cam", which I do because I cannot stand it (a ship in vacuum shouldn't be shaking all over like there is air turbulence), so why not this?
They do? I must find that option.
 
Frontier is simulating G-forces to help give us a sense of being in motion, but I agree, there should be a switch to turn this off and lock the "dashboard" in place like the 2D panels on older flight simulators. They provide an option to turn off "shakey cam", which I do because I cannot stand it (a ship in vacuum shouldn't be shaking all over like there is air turbulence), so why not this?
Turning off camera shake is great! Much more like a real spaceship rather than a steampunk aeroplane. Why was I not told this long ago?
 
Then you need to define what you mean by pulling up, because pulling up means to raise the nose sharply, and unless you supply more power from the engines you won't accelerate when pulling up, you will slow down, pulling the nose up will eventually put the plane into a stall and you will crash due to no airspeed over the wings. If you are applying more power then you are changing the vectors of thrust dynamically, which make the calclulations just a little bit harder. Of course if you have just taken off from the ground and are accelerating to flight speed with the nose raised to gain height that's a completely different situation because we aren't talking about a continuous curve provided by the thrusters in our ships but accelerating along one side of an angle to the ground, which will indeed push you back into your seat, you really need to stop thinking aircraft!

"Raising the nose sharply" is what I'm talking about. Again, it doesn't matter if the example is an aircraft or a spaceship because it doesn't matter where the forces the pilot is subjected to come from.

You can as well use your SRV as an example. Drive through rough terrain with drive assist enabled and explain to me why the cockpit moves down when going down an incline --- as if the pilot is raising his head --- rather than up as if the pilot would lower his head as he would do because the SRV is trying to decelerate.
 
I only really notice it when dogfighting (Thargoids in particular). POV moves and cuts off the bottom half of my radar (not an issue) and a significant chunk of my throttle settings disappear, just when I need to see the blue zone.
 
Its you and your seat that move - not the dash. The hand-wavium lore is that you are seated in a gel seat that cushions you from the effect of G forces as the ship accelerates.

Granted it can't be completely realistic - Our ships acceleration rates make a jet fighter look puny. You would pass out every time you pressed boost, but they are trying to give some impression of what it would be like to actually try to turn a ship in space at the absurd rates we use during combat. My 920m/sec IEagle will boost from 400 - 900 in about 2 secs, so 250m/sec/sec or 25G, roughly.

In your ship when you pull the stick back to lift the prow, you are making the ship turn in your 'vertical' axis in an arc, but you and your head want to carry on in a straight line so your head should drop.

Unfortunately in the game your head rises.. this looks wrong (try it - you see less of the dash when turning 'up') . Its upside down, so maybe the OP has a point in a way?

I thought about the seat, and what would happen is that when pulling up, the seat would --- unless strangely built --- be lowerd towards the floor of the cockpit, provided that the left-to-right axis around which the ship is turning is located behind the pilot. That would mean that the cockpit would appear to move up rather than down. Lifting the seat up, away for the floor, wouldn't be cushioning but contribute to the forces driving the pilot into his seat, and it wouldn't make sense to do that.

I'm not so sure if the ships in Elite are accelecating much faster, if at all, than nowadays jet fighters. You could measure how it long it takes for them to reach a certain speed and compare to that the jet fighters; I don't have any numbers for jet fighters, though. I only know that jet fighters don't top out at relatively low speeds like the ships in Elite do ...

You're right about the head having a tendency to move in a straight line (like everything else), and it's what I'm saying all along: Your head would drop and not raise, hence the cockpit/dashboard should move up and not down. They got it the wrong way in the game, and even if you don't want to consider the effect a bug by itself, it's buggy because it's the opposite of what it would have to be.
 
I only know that jet fighters don't top out at relatively low speeds like the ships in Elite do
380 m/s (my Corvette on boost) = 850 MPH - the Courier at 777 m/s = 1738 MPH... Is that slower than a modern fighter jet?
(I don't know where they are these days, but supersonic is 650 MPH+ )
 
What I'm still not understanding from the OP is this - what instruments are disappearing off the screen? Just the very bottom of the scanner? I'm not seeing why that's a problem. I mean I get it might be annoying to some people I guess but I don't think it actually removes anything useful from the screen.

My personal bugbear would be the little circular directional compass. I'd like that - and only that - as a physical instrument on the ship dash rather than the hologram, so I can still follow a series of jumps without having the hologram hud on at all.

I'm loosing almost half the radar when pulling up in my Mamba. That means I can't see what's behind me, I can't see my pips, I can't see my throttle, I can't see my hull ... How much is lost depends on the ship since some ships turn faster than others, of course. And just those ships in which it is most important to be able to see the instruments are the ones that are the worst because they turn fast to be suited for combat.

I can show you a screenshot some time when I get back from trying to get a Guardian FSD booster and other of their stuff.
 
100 Credit Bounty Awarded (top right, alert panel) is quite a good indicator of target hull = 0%
o7 You're welcome :)

To the OP surely you don't look at your insturuments while turning? Aren't you better to look where you're turning? On the straights you can afford a peak at at instrumentation, doing that while cornering is just silly. Besides, in all honesty, there's no info there that won't still be there, when you look again, two and a half seconds later.

Unnecessary nerf imo .. presumably from a Corvette driver trying to remove my iEagle's obvious turn advantage.

Of course I want to look at my instruments when I'm turning, and one reason for that is I want to see where I'm turning. Don't you use your radar?

The information changes all the time, and 2.5 seconds can be a rather long time. I would have to stop turning to be able to check the instruments, and it's questionalbe what's worse, having to stop turning or not being able to see the instruments.

I don't have a Corvette, and I'm not trying to remove someones advantage. And why should players using VR have an advantage in being able to see their instruments all the time? If it remains impossible to disable the dashboard moving off scren, than make it the same for VR users so that don't have an unfair advantage anymore!
 
Normal space is M/S, supercruise, as you said is KM/S (MM/S briefly) then fractions / multiples of Light Speed (C)

(Consider also the size of our ships compared to fighters in atmosphere... for an effective leviathon they move fast enough :) )

Argh, sorry, I meant km/h, not km/s, for normal space. But you seem to be right, it says m/s here, for example: https://inara.cz/galaxy-shipyard/57 I'm currently landed on a planet and can't check right now.

Right, our ships are really big :) Only we don't really notice because there isn't much to see in relation. I guess that'll change with Odyssey. And I'm not saying they are generally too slow.
 
Right, our ships are really big :) Only we don't really notice because there isn't much to see in relation
It is very noticable in VR - even the tiny Courier cockpit is quite big, and Cutter / Beluga is large enough to have a proper party going on...
Hopefully Odyssey will translate some of that scale effectively when on foot :)
 
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