"Meet one of the ace pilots you’ll fly alongside in STAR WARS™: Squadrons in this original standalone CG short, made in collaboration by Motive Studios, Lucasfilm, and ILM."
Airs 9/14 @ 11am (47 hrs from now)
Reminder: this starts in ~24 minutes.
That short was awesome.
Why haven't we gotten a Star Wars Top Gun movie yet?
Well, back when they were churning one out every year it probably would've happened (it just not have been good, but that never stopped Top Gun ).
In the meantime, you may have to settle for blasting Kenny Loggins while watching the TIE Fighter animation.
Damn, EA must be pretty damn confident in Squadrons to be making a 7 minute long CG animated, orchestrated short just for funsies. My hype for this game is through the roof at this point. I just hope it plays nice with my HOTAS setup (VKB/Virpil Mix).
I don't see why they'd be particularly different from the models they're using in the game presently (which are oriented towards stylistic "accuracy" with film shots combined with a Totally Games style usable UI). VR space ship games with mediocre (or bad) visibly isn't that uncommon, if you were that worried about visibility, you wouldn't be playing VR (and you'd turn off the cockpit view).
I think it's more of a concern here because TIEs have, like, the worst visibility of any sci-fi strike craft, while the Rebel craft are pretty good.
Not really. It sucks for quite a few of them. X-Wing's have excellent visibility directly above them and, unlike TIE Fighters, no visibility below the angle of attack (the opposite direction in other words).
Y-Wings--my second favorite Rebel fighter-bomber--have shit visibility in every direction that isn't forward (only half-shit to their immediate left and right), and much, much worse visibility than a TIE Fighter looking forward, because they have an armored canopy. Ironically, this might be why they get slaughtered by TIE Fighters in A New Hope (or part of the reason).
A-Wings have better forward visibility, though it's still poor at low angles of attack, for the same reason, and like a TIE Fighter, they have nonexistent visibility behind them. B-Wings are similar, but worse.
Canonically (i.e., in the trench run shots), Y-Wings have about the same visibility as a car, although the pilots sit lower. But the Rebel pilots' heads are right in their cockpit bubbles, giving most of them a partially obstructed hemisphere, while TIE Fighter pilots are sitting back from theirs (unlike, say, a Babylon V Starfury cockpit), leaving a cone of vision. TIEs have better lower-angle visibility in that cone, but no side views at all, and a heavily obstructed top view. If everything shows up on radar then it's probably fine, but that's not clear in the movies.
I'd expect that in VR the X-Wing, A-Wing and Y-Wing will present significantly more viewable space than if you played on a flat screen, but in the TIEs there's just not going to be much difference at all.
You've clearly seen out of a car, so I won't dispute that. Y-Wing pilots do not sit "right against their canopies."
The exploded cross-section puts the armored canopy almost directly above the pilot, on the same axis. For reference, you see the pilot's head? Where his eyeballs are, towards the front of it? It's inline with the rearmost edge of the side-swinging cockpit door. What he sees out of is that window that begins, at its closest, above where his hands are. Oh, and its partially obscured by his console and instrumentation, hah.
He doesn't see shit unless he cranes his head close enough to scratch his nose against the yoke. His visibility is terrible except at least he can see some to his left and right. At least a TIE Fighter pilot has vision slots immediately above their head--the Y-Wing pilot, bless him, gets to stare where his ion cannon's barrels are on the other side of his cockpit armor.
Fortunately, a video game can basically do whatever it wants with geometry and field of views, which is equally applicable to a TIE Fighter or a Y-Wing.
EDIT: And I refuse to believe a Y-Wing, or a TIE Fighter, or anything else doesn't have some sort of assisting locational sensor display to augment their own eyesight. Even if it's literally being blasted into the pilot's eyeballs. It's there.
Yeah, but the Y-Wing's pilot doesn't suddenly sit 40 centimeters further now, which is the point. And I suppose that graphic isn't of a "Clone Wars-era Y-Wing Fighter Bomber", it's just of a Y-Wing that happens to have its body panels. Whatever, I defer to the real Star Wars fans, I'm just here to bitch about bad-aircraft-design-ergonomics™.
As I said, I really doubt it's going to be an issue. VR is already accustomed to space combat simulation where cockpit visibility could be a lot better--hell, this is considered part of the charm in Elite Dangerous--and aircraft simulation where cockpit visibility is sub-optimal (or outright bad) by design. Having a vastly inferior viewpoint compared to turning your cockpit furniture off complete is preferable to throwing up because of the lack of a point of reference (which is a problem for some people).
And if it is a concern, which I actually doubt it is considering what percentage of the game's audience will actually play VR six months after that the release, there are plenty of solutions. Tweak the field of view, or move the perspective much further ahead than it would otherwise be. If you can solve this problem in the gameplay mode +90% of the audience will be playing (without VR), where they have manual look control via inputs (I would hope), you can solve this in VR.
I'd invite anyone who actually played Ace Combat 7 in PSVR to share their experience. From what I remember of it, maximum visibility from the cockpit was not their concern--in fact, a certain degree of obstruction was seen as improving the experience.
The point about the pilot position was that windows arrayed around the top suit the human anatomy. People can look around and see out the windows. To make equivalent use of a front-facing window, the pilot needs to be close to it to look around.
Canonically, you see the view from a Y-Wing in the trench run (about 6 minutes in). Like driving a car from the back seat, I think. Vader's view is shown at about 12:29. Presumably he and his guards have instruments to keep in formation, because they can't do it visually.
The view doesn't actually even look that bad in the bits you see during the trench run, considering that when we get to see the front view (at 6:33), it's over the shoulder of the pilot. It's at least not as bad as that exploded-view poster makes it seem. The biggest issues are a lack of visibility up and down, which, yeah, as pointed out, makes the TIE fighter comparatively OK.
Does anyone remember how TIE Fighter solved this? Or was it simply not nearly as much of an issue because you couldn't easily look around your cockpit so you mostly made do with the front view?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Does anyone remember how TIE Fighter solved this? Or was it simply not nearly as much of an issue because you couldn't easily look around your cockpit so you mostly made do with the front view?
Yes. And not just because I have the GOG TIE FIghter collection.
1) Static (and toggle-able) 2D cockpit art assets. 3D cockpit models were not implemented until X-Wing Alliance, unsurprisingly, and Totally Games' 2D assets were correspondingly low resolution and dominated by the UI. If you were worried about visibility, you disabled the cockpit view (the chase-style external camera view was pretty thoroughly useless, with no UI elements implemented back then). Most "serious" players advocated this, but that was pretty much a nonissue until competitive multiplayer anyway.
2) Without 3D cockpit models, view options are just separate panels, just like the "map computer". Some of them are artistic, like the (overall very useless) rear views from the X-Wing and Y-Wing, which are two-thirds or more cockpit furniture/funny astromech droid. The others are actually practical, as are the other views in TIE series ships in TIE Fighter: a simple rectangular window panel (technically a video screen?) with good visibility and a handy label under it in case you forgot which way you were looking.
3) That aside, it didn't matter much either. The vast majority of players accepted poor visibility, the same way they excepted very short draw distances. The "simulators" from Totally Games were, remember, extremely simplistic compared to actual contemporary flight simulation from mostly American and Russian development studios: barely any flight model, simple AI, nonexistent landscape and geography. Visibility didn't matter that much, and it wasn't all that much better in the actual simulators--with 2D cockpits being universal, headview tracking was very crude and limited to a small field of vision from the initial viewpoint. If that MiG-29 you're tracking in your Janes' F-14B leaves your 10 to 2 o'clock....well, you just stop tracking it. Turn your plane around or something, if you're not already dead.
I know that Ace Combat 7 has a movable FOV, but it also has a HUD element that points towards your target. It's been awhile so I do not recall if there was a similar UI feature in TIE Fighter.
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I know that Ace Combat 7 has a movable FOV, but it also has a HUD element that points towards your target. It's been awhile so I do not recall if there was a similar UI feature in TIE Fighter.
The two radars and central display combined had a similar functionality.
TIE Fighter inherited the forward and rear proximity "radar" from X-Wing (in the top corners of the screen), which was in all the franchise entries. I think they cribbed it from Wing Commander.
It got really weird with things like the Missile Boat, that had their instrumentation on consoles outside the cockpit for god knows why,
To be honest I'd be shocked if VR cock pit views vs flat screens mattered at all for all but really fancy competitive players.
Like it's a cute topic but you ain't losing because you can't look left and right in a tie fighter.
I guess that depends on how accurate the flight model is and what kind of god-mode radar everyone has. The first axiom of BFM is “lose sight, lose fight.” I know my going in game plan against a poor visibility fighter is going to be some extreme vertical maneuvering post-merge. I think even with “perfect” radar it’ll still be difficult to interpret vertical relation, but I’ll have to see.
Bottom line is that bubble canopies were designed for a reason, and poor visibility is a design flaw in a within visual range fighter. That’s just science.
Unless the ship canopy designs are specifically made to limit the view, I cannot imagine a world where a VR player would not have a gigantic advantage over a pancake player. Back in the day when I played online WW2 flight sims (AirWarrior, Fighter Duel, etc), players that could master the arcane view systems to track another plane were almost always better able to manage a dogfight/furball. In a space sim where you're less limited to aileron control and can juke in any direction the instant the other guy isn't looking directly at you, I'm pretty sure only having forward visibility is going to be a huge DISadvantage! Even with "lock on" view, the challenge is keeping situational awareness of which direction you are looking vs which way you are flying/pointing and how your plane is oriented compared to the other guy, the ground, other obstacles, etc.
VR is going to provide additional visibilty, and an intuitive "feel" for which way you are looking. I am thinking back to the comments that FPS players had whilst playing Farpoint VR with an Aim controller... being able to look around, and fire (sometimes blindly) in a different direction that you are looking added an entire level of gameplay that simply is impossible to recreate in a flat screen game.
We'll see in a less than a month!
Stupid on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Remember, the view out doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the view in.
@Stupid:
You can have the best of both worlds - being able to look around and full resolution - with headtracking, provided peripherals like TrackIR or Tobii eye-/headtrackers are supported. From what I've heard about more 'serious' sims like IL-2, they're cool in VR, but visibility at most distances other than very close is very much a limiting factor, though I don't know how much this is improved on VR headsets like the Index that have higher resolutions.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The ships should feel like they have some weight, mind you. When you look at fan films, for instance, I think you can always tell a difference between those where the ships move like you'd expect them to move (obviously based on Star Wars and WW2 aerial combat footage, rather than on actual space flight) and those where there isn't even a pretense of Hollywood physics.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Star Wars keeps flipping between “I’m in space” and “I’m a WWII dog fighter”. Ships bank when they turn, and doing a split-S seems like a valid way to turn more quickly (which only makes sense when there’s gravity involved) etc. If it’s more the latter than the former then more of my skill is transferable, but if not they I’ll just need to learn what the quirks are.
Like in Elite Dangerous you get a faster turn rate by turning obliquely to the plane of travel and adding yaw. It doesn’t make sense but it works.
Edit: So “accurate” isn’t the right word. I meant how closely the flight model resembles an atmospheric one.
Star Wars keeps flipping between “I’m in space” and “I’m a WWII dog fighter”. Ships bank when they turn, and doing a split-S seems like a valid way to turn more quickly (which only makes sense when there’s gravity involved) etc. If it’s more the latter than the former then more of my skill is transferable, but if not they I’ll just need to learn what the quirks are.
Like in Elite Dangerous you get a faster turn rate by turning obliquely to the plane of travel and adding yaw. It doesn’t make sense but it works.
Elite has its own quirks, going back to the original BBC Micro game and its control scheme. The equivalent of what you describe in most other games would be "roll (until target is at 12 o'clock position), then pitch". But...
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
Actually the flight model in star wars is based on the swimming profile of the Beluga whale.
Star Wars keeps flipping between “I’m in space” and “I’m a WWII dog fighter”. Ships bank when they turn, and doing a split-S seems like a valid way to turn more quickly (which only makes sense when there’s gravity involved) etc. If it’s more the latter than the former then more of my skill is transferable, but if not they I’ll just need to learn what the quirks are.
Like in Elite Dangerous you get a faster turn rate by turning obliquely to the plane of travel and adding yaw. It doesn’t make sense but it works.
Edit: So “accurate” isn’t the right word. I meant how closely the flight model resembles an atmospheric one.
I think the turn rate getting better in elite is based on where the thrusters are on most ships: Right at the back.
Which makes it easier to turn by going 'up or down' because you can use the main thrusters not the smaller side ones.
Actually the flight model in star wars is based on the swimming profile of the Beluga whale.
*giggles*
I hate you now since I'm imagining Han Solo and Chewie riding the back of a Beluga whale screaming, "You're all clear kid. Now let's blow this thing and go home."
Star Wars keeps flipping between “I’m in space” and “I’m a WWII dog fighter”. Ships bank when they turn, and doing a split-S seems like a valid way to turn more quickly (which only makes sense when there’s gravity involved) etc. If it’s more the latter than the former then more of my skill is transferable, but if not they I’ll just need to learn what the quirks are.
Like in Elite Dangerous you get a faster turn rate by turning obliquely to the plane of travel and adding yaw. It doesn’t make sense but it works.
Edit: So “accurate” isn’t the right word. I meant how closely the flight model resembles an atmospheric one.
I think the turn rate getting better in elite is based on where the thrusters are on most ships: Right at the back.
Which makes it easier to turn by going 'up or down' because you can use the main thrusters not the smaller side ones.
FA on/off also vastly changes how the ships fly.
FA off is 'more' Newtonian, but still not 100% accurate.
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Handsome CostanzaAsk me about 8bitdoRIP Iwata-sanRegistered Userregular
Actually the flight model in star wars is based on the swimming profile of the Beluga whale.
*giggles*
I hate you now since I'm imagining Han Solo and Chewie riding the back of a Beluga whale screaming, "You're all clear kid. Now let's blow this thing and go home."
To be honest I'd be shocked if VR cock pit views vs flat screens mattered at all for all but really fancy competitive players.
Like it's a cute topic but you ain't losing because you can't look left and right in a tie fighter.
I guess that depends on how accurate the flight model is and what kind of god-mode radar everyone has. The first axiom of BFM is “lose sight, lose fight.” I know my going in game plan against a poor visibility fighter is going to be some extreme vertical maneuvering post-merge. I think even with “perfect” radar it’ll still be difficult to interpret vertical relation, but I’ll have to see.
Bottom line is that bubble canopies were designed for a reason, and poor visibility is a design flaw in a within visual range fighter. That’s just science.
The flight model is very much like WWII planes with a fair amount of weight behind the ships. The only thing that's different is the ability to drift.
The radar is a single front-arc display radar, where enemies behind are on the edges.
edit: the radar has a lot of filters that can be toggled (like shown in the video when he changes radar to show only missiles). From what I've been told, it can be changed to show only allies, only capital ships, only player ships, etc.
ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
edited September 2020
One thing you'll notice from that video is the constant little beeping sound that goes "boop ... beepbeepbeepbeepbeep"
The first boop is letting you know you've put your throttle to 50%, which is the optimal turning speed. The beepbeepbeepbeepbeep is letting you know your ship has hit that 50% speed and is capable of making the optimal turning rate. Its a really satisfying mechanic, imo.
Lots of times you'll just hear the "boop" due to the person moving their throttle from higher/lower than 50% past the 50% mark with no beepbeepbeepbeepbeep follow up. The beepx5 only happens when you are right at 50% long enough to hit that perfect turning speed.
ObiFettUse the ForceAs You WishRegistered Userregular
Another thing that the video reminded me my friend told me. Remember how in the old games Corvettes had a blind spot you could sit in right behind their engines where they couldn't hit you? He tested that out in the training grounds and it totally still exists. Its hard to do in live combat because the Corvette moves around a ton, but it is doable.
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Or just watch this.
I hear that if you puke in VR, you puke in real life!
Canonically (i.e., in the trench run shots), Y-Wings have about the same visibility as a car, although the pilots sit lower. But the Rebel pilots' heads are right in their cockpit bubbles, giving most of them a partially obstructed hemisphere, while TIE Fighter pilots are sitting back from theirs (unlike, say, a Babylon V Starfury cockpit), leaving a cone of vision. TIEs have better lower-angle visibility in that cone, but no side views at all, and a heavily obstructed top view. If everything shows up on radar then it's probably fine, but that's not clear in the movies.
I'd expect that in VR the X-Wing, A-Wing and Y-Wing will present significantly more viewable space than if you played on a flat screen, but in the TIEs there's just not going to be much difference at all.
The exploded cross-section puts the armored canopy almost directly above the pilot, on the same axis. For reference, you see the pilot's head? Where his eyeballs are, towards the front of it? It's inline with the rearmost edge of the side-swinging cockpit door. What he sees out of is that window that begins, at its closest, above where his hands are. Oh, and its partially obscured by his console and instrumentation, hah.
He doesn't see shit unless he cranes his head close enough to scratch his nose against the yoke. His visibility is terrible except at least he can see some to his left and right. At least a TIE Fighter pilot has vision slots immediately above their head--the Y-Wing pilot, bless him, gets to stare where his ion cannon's barrels are on the other side of his cockpit armor.
Fortunately, a video game can basically do whatever it wants with geometry and field of views, which is equally applicable to a TIE Fighter or a Y-Wing.
EDIT: And I refuse to believe a Y-Wing, or a TIE Fighter, or anything else doesn't have some sort of assisting locational sensor display to augment their own eyesight. Even if it's literally being blasted into the pilot's eyeballs. It's there.
As I said, I really doubt it's going to be an issue. VR is already accustomed to space combat simulation where cockpit visibility could be a lot better--hell, this is considered part of the charm in Elite Dangerous--and aircraft simulation where cockpit visibility is sub-optimal (or outright bad) by design. Having a vastly inferior viewpoint compared to turning your cockpit furniture off complete is preferable to throwing up because of the lack of a point of reference (which is a problem for some people).
And if it is a concern, which I actually doubt it is considering what percentage of the game's audience will actually play VR six months after that the release, there are plenty of solutions. Tweak the field of view, or move the perspective much further ahead than it would otherwise be. If you can solve this problem in the gameplay mode +90% of the audience will be playing (without VR), where they have manual look control via inputs (I would hope), you can solve this in VR.
I'd invite anyone who actually played Ace Combat 7 in PSVR to share their experience. From what I remember of it, maximum visibility from the cockpit was not their concern--in fact, a certain degree of obstruction was seen as improving the experience.
Canonically, you see the view from a Y-Wing in the trench run (about 6 minutes in). Like driving a car from the back seat, I think. Vader's view is shown at about 12:29. Presumably he and his guards have instruments to keep in formation, because they can't do it visually.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Yes. And not just because I have the GOG TIE FIghter collection.
1) Static (and toggle-able) 2D cockpit art assets. 3D cockpit models were not implemented until X-Wing Alliance, unsurprisingly, and Totally Games' 2D assets were correspondingly low resolution and dominated by the UI. If you were worried about visibility, you disabled the cockpit view (the chase-style external camera view was pretty thoroughly useless, with no UI elements implemented back then). Most "serious" players advocated this, but that was pretty much a nonissue until competitive multiplayer anyway.
2) Without 3D cockpit models, view options are just separate panels, just like the "map computer". Some of them are artistic, like the (overall very useless) rear views from the X-Wing and Y-Wing, which are two-thirds or more cockpit furniture/funny astromech droid. The others are actually practical, as are the other views in TIE series ships in TIE Fighter: a simple rectangular window panel (technically a video screen?) with good visibility and a handy label under it in case you forgot which way you were looking.
3) That aside, it didn't matter much either. The vast majority of players accepted poor visibility, the same way they excepted very short draw distances. The "simulators" from Totally Games were, remember, extremely simplistic compared to actual contemporary flight simulation from mostly American and Russian development studios: barely any flight model, simple AI, nonexistent landscape and geography. Visibility didn't matter that much, and it wasn't all that much better in the actual simulators--with 2D cockpits being universal, headview tracking was very crude and limited to a small field of vision from the initial viewpoint. If that MiG-29 you're tracking in your Janes' F-14B leaves your 10 to 2 o'clock....well, you just stop tracking it. Turn your plane around or something, if you're not already dead.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
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Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
It got really weird with things like the Missile Boat, that had their instrumentation on consoles outside the cockpit for god knows why,
Like it's a cute topic but you ain't losing because you can't look left and right in a tie fighter.
On the otherhand eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee I'm flying in a star war!
PSN / Xbox / NNID: Fodder185
I guess that depends on how accurate the flight model is and what kind of god-mode radar everyone has. The first axiom of BFM is “lose sight, lose fight.” I know my going in game plan against a poor visibility fighter is going to be some extreme vertical maneuvering post-merge. I think even with “perfect” radar it’ll still be difficult to interpret vertical relation, but I’ll have to see.
Bottom line is that bubble canopies were designed for a reason, and poor visibility is a design flaw in a within visual range fighter. That’s just science.
VR is going to provide additional visibilty, and an intuitive "feel" for which way you are looking. I am thinking back to the comments that FPS players had whilst playing Farpoint VR with an Aim controller... being able to look around, and fire (sometimes blindly) in a different direction that you are looking added an entire level of gameplay that simply is impossible to recreate in a flat screen game.
We'll see in a less than a month!
You can have the best of both worlds - being able to look around and full resolution - with headtracking, provided peripherals like TrackIR or Tobii eye-/headtrackers are supported. From what I've heard about more 'serious' sims like IL-2, they're cool in VR, but visibility at most distances other than very close is very much a limiting factor, though I don't know how much this is improved on VR headsets like the Index that have higher resolutions.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
"Wheee" with a touch of WWII sea planes
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Like in Elite Dangerous you get a faster turn rate by turning obliquely to the plane of travel and adding yaw. It doesn’t make sense but it works.
Edit: So “accurate” isn’t the right word. I meant how closely the flight model resembles an atmospheric one.
Elite has its own quirks, going back to the original BBC Micro game and its control scheme. The equivalent of what you describe in most other games would be "roll (until target is at 12 o'clock position), then pitch". But...
*giggles*
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
I think the turn rate getting better in elite is based on where the thrusters are on most ships: Right at the back.
Which makes it easier to turn by going 'up or down' because you can use the main thrusters not the smaller side ones.
I hate you now since I'm imagining Han Solo and Chewie riding the back of a Beluga whale screaming, "You're all clear kid. Now let's blow this thing and go home."
Steam: betsuni7
FA on/off also vastly changes how the ships fly.
FA off is 'more' Newtonian, but still not 100% accurate.
*giggles harder*
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
The flight model is very much like WWII planes with a fair amount of weight behind the ships. The only thing that's different is the ability to drift.
The radar is a single front-arc display radar, where enemies behind are on the edges.
edit: the radar has a lot of filters that can be toggled (like shown in the video when he changes radar to show only missiles). From what I've been told, it can be changed to show only allies, only capital ships, only player ships, etc.
Just show her your happy grin and that'll be enough.
Edit: I'm grinning like a kid again with anticipation of playing this with my PSVR at least once.
Steam: betsuni7
The first boop is letting you know you've put your throttle to 50%, which is the optimal turning speed. The beepbeepbeepbeepbeep is letting you know your ship has hit that 50% speed and is capable of making the optimal turning rate. Its a really satisfying mechanic, imo.
Lots of times you'll just hear the "boop" due to the person moving their throttle from higher/lower than 50% past the 50% mark with no beepbeepbeepbeepbeep follow up. The beepx5 only happens when you are right at 50% long enough to hit that perfect turning speed.