kestrel7e7

Mouselook steals mouse control, making it impossible to change direction while looking around, many of the movements in that video are impossible without head tracking. In addition to hands-free freelook, head tracking provides analog lean, analog zoom and a high level of immersiveness. If you watch gamers at a major lan event you'll find they hold their head very rigidly while playing. Maybe you hold your head more rigidly than you think? Head tracking becomes second nature very quickly. Using Freetrack you can center sights immediately with one click either momentarily or with a toggle mode. You don't have to hold your head rigidly with TIR3/4 or Freetrack in 3point or 4point tracking mode because IL2 is only 2dof it will only measure your head rotation and not translation. You can toggle tracking on/off as required, you can also increase smoothing on the fly with a hotkey to reduce sensitivity to head movements and also add a central deadzone so you can relax your head. There's really no excuse for not using it...

A new version of Freetrack, v2.1, has been released. Works great with ArmA and comes with a demo video so you can see it in action even if you don't have a webcam or point model. http://www.free-track.org

I've always known the universe revolves around me.

I use Taksi, a free alternative to Fraps, and VideoDub but I don't do much editing or fancy effects...

This thread at the Freetrack forum lists people's experiences with different webcams: http://freetrack.online.fr/forum/index.php?showtopic=39

The posted video was done using a cheap 30fps webcam, the program was made for that in mind.

You would make Uncle Fester proud.

Most webcams can do 30fps if you set the exposure low enough, that's all you need. The tracking system requires tracking points like leds or reflectors, if you're electro-phobic you can buy components kits or pre-built hardware. Check the english section of the Freetrack forums. Freetrack uses tracking points because they are more accurate, less computationally expensive and more robust to different lighting conditions than tracking systems that rely on unaided visual cues alone.

Yeah, full 6dof, where possible. In the case of ArmA it's 4dof.

It's good for keeping tabs on your surroundings when running, otherwise you've got tunnel vision. Threats are more likely to become visible to the side of you while moving forward, than in front of you (due to corners and obstacles). Running from tanks/enemies/monsters in FPS games is always a nightmare, you normally have to turn your back to them to run at full speed, which means you've got zero situational awareness and no defence. In RL you'd still be able to glance behind and shoot. It would be good if the gun moved with the TIR view with finer aim control done with the floating mouse (which controls your body orientation as well). This would need some super next-gen dynamic animations though.

Yay blissful ignorance! It's not cynicism if it's true, it's called RL. Look at the facts. Vincent came from out of nowhere to make a post that amounted to nothing _after_ DeltaOmega533 solved his very simple problem of background light. It was a bump post if ever I saw one, second only to using the word 'bump'. The incredible amount of technical support provided by NaturalPoint goes over and above most consumer computer hardware companies, however some people think that this support is free, technical support is never free, time costs money and this money has to come from somewhere, in this case it comes from the unit price.

Nice to see the TIR guys here, keeping up with what going on. He only posted to bump the thread because it's full of positive testimonials, cheap advertising, he couldn't let it go to waste.

You're forgetting ArmA is perfect, you must be doing something wrong. If you can't figure it out you'll have to go back to playing cs you bunny hopping noob!

Thank you for proving my point Norailgunner.

A good control management GUI should identify conflicts and most importantly, tell you the source of the conflict when it happens (not just red text), offer alternatives, allow bindings to be set in the one screen instead of splitting it into two (it's not like there isn't enough room, the second screen being a massive window box with little in it), allow you to bind ALL actions (including get-into-vehicle-right-now-because-I'm-being-shot-at-and-I-don't-want-to-die), auto analog axis detection that requires full deflection and not a micro movement... am I being anal enough for you or do you want me to continue? I've seen and used plenty of control input GUIs that are cleaner, faster, easier and more powerful. But then I remember this is Bohemia Interactive forums, the home of the Church of ArmA, with the motto 'There is Only One ArmA, Only ArmA is Perfect.'

That's the only way they could make cockpits back then, it looks complicated but most of the controls are replicated, redundant and rarely used, modern cockpits are a whole different story and cockpits of the future will be childsplay, more like the bottom image than the top. The moral is not to build in complexity you don't need to and follow the K.I.S.S. principle. Arma's control setup seems to have been designed by someone who relishes unnecessary complexity.

There better be bunnies in the next version...

Wait for Freetrack 1.2

EXACTLY! Surely the 'Get into vehicle right NOW because I'm being shot at and I don't want to @#%&@ die!!!!' action deserves a hotkey! No, because you would need at least 3 keys: Get in as driver, Get in as Gunner, Get in as Cargo, have you 3 different unused keys at convienent places close to eachother left? The action menu usually has the 'get in as (depends on the closest door to you)' on top anyway so i dont see the problem with that? Obviously you only need one key because it is only logical (and physically possible) that you get into the closest seat to your current position relative to the vehicle, which is how most games deal with vehicle entry. Once inside you can then switch positions (if possible) using the clumsy menu to your heart's content. @ 3k.Baxter Most mousewheels are very sensitive and you can easily scroll the wheel accidently while pressing it.

EXACTLY! Surely the 'Get into vehicle right NOW because I'm being shot at and I don't want to @#%&@ die!!!!' action deserves a hotkey!

To me, that's a complement! If the helicopter's yaw axis was behind the airframe at speed then it would lead to extremely strange sideways slipping behaviour... but I've never seen this. Nice try though.

The non-rigid, flapping nature of helicopter rotors is why helicopters don't exhibit quantifiable gyroscopic precession, making analogies with rigid gyroscopes is impossible. "The rotor of a helicopter has very little inertia for its size. In fact, most pilots would like it to have more inertia during autorotation. I.e. The rotational speed of a helicopter rotor is very slow compared to that of a gyroscope. The mass at the circumference of a helicopter rotor is very small compared to that of a gyroscope." "Lu said "If you have an infinitely rigid rotor you in effect have a gyroscope." You have to forget gyroscopic precession & the helicopter rotor. For gyroscopic precession to take place, the rotating device must have considerable [Angular Momentum] A helicopter's rotor does not have enough." http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51070

Of course, for example the Earth exhibits gyroscopic precession with a period of 25,800 years.

The 90 degree phase lag is the more significant manifestation of the gyroscopic precession phenomena but there are other manifestations. "If the object is unconfined and the force is applied at some distance from the center of gravity, the object both translates and rotates about the center of gravity." http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/torque.html This holds for all objects, even gyroscopic ones. Â An unconstrained preceeding gyroscope translates and rotates with respect to its center of gravity but seems to rotate about a different point in much the same way as a circling aircraft appears to rotate about a point in the air in the middle of its circle. But you don't use that observation as the basis for coding the physics of an aeroplane in a flight sim. :P The proportion of mass in a helicopter's spinning rotors is small compared with the amount of mass in its airframe so making analogies with gyroscopes in which all of the mass is spinning leads to huge over-estimations of gyroscopic effects. Ultimately these effects on the center of rotation of a helicopter are too negligable to be included in a non-flightsim game like ArmA, yet alone to exaggerate them to such an unrealistic level... I've played many sim and non-sim games with helicopters in the past but I don't think I've encountered anything like this.

1) You're kidding right? You guys REALLY need a 3rd party physics engine because there's no way you can make your own given your lack of understanding of first principles, perhaps this explains why the OFP/ArmA physics engine is the way it is. 2) I saw a video of a plane circling and its center of rotation was 500m away from its fuselage, therefore all forces must be applied wrt this location... Â :P But seriously, trying to analyze aircraft motion dynamics from a video is difficult, at best, because it lacks a good frame of reference and you could be deceived by optical illusions of perspective, depth etc. 3) "If the object is unconfined and the force is applied at some distance from the center of gravity, the object both translates and rotates about the center of gravity." http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/education/rocket/torque.html Gyroscopic forces from the rotors act wrt their pivots which in turn act wrt the center of gravity about which the aircraft rotates when it is unconstrained. Since aircraft are mostly unconstrained (external aerodynamic forces, in the form of drag, Â are only applied in the opposite direction of motion and simply can't shift the center of rotation a significant amount) a good approximation, for a GAME, would be to make CG=CR. But no, BIS has to put the CR OUTSIDE the model of the aircraft !!!!!!. I pity the poor ArmA helicopter passengers, swinging around beneath the rotors like a pendulum and getting air-sick. Thank God game developers aren't responsible for designing things that matter!