6 replies to this topic

[pesco]

It has been noted that in BattleTech lore, MechWarriors HUDs (often?) show a compressed panoramic 360-degree view around their mech on a strip of screen covering around 160 degrees of their actual vision. Wouldn't it be useful to have this option in MWO; not necessarily at launch but in general? It could work like this: When the pilot presses a button, a long box appears on the HUD showing the normal view at first. It quickly (~.5s or less) animates to a compressed view. Depending on what works, the compression need not be uniform; the middle might look normal with things becoming more "squished" towards the sides.

This could be very useful to quickly get a glance at one's surroundings without torso-twisting madly.

Discuss.


Edit: Through pure happenstance I just found that the Developer Q&A 1 contains this:

Quote

Are we going to see new elements to the cockpit, such as the 360 degree squeezed into 180 degrees view bar mentioned so many times in the novels?
[...]
[MATT C] [...] Say we were testing out having a 360 degree view and it made the game less fun during play testing I think it is safe to say we would cut it, at the current stage of development we are still trying out new ideas relating to the cockpit design so you never know what may end up in the game at launch.

I wonder if the devs have tried anything in the indicated direction?

Edited by pesco, 06 April 2012 - 03:33 AM.

[Redburn]

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[BerryChunks]

you're talking about rendering 360 degrees of detail in a Free moving game, as opposed to a cut-scene or other pre-loadable instance.

If they add this option at the HUD, get ready to see people crash computers left and right.

[Mechteric]

I don't hink game crashing has anything to do with it. It depends on the game engine really, I mean look at the Halflife 2 engine, it easily renders multiple views, think about how those Portals worked. I imagine even if it is possible to do so the question really would be how effective is it, because you'd be compressing 360 degrees down to 70 or less depending on your FOV for the game. I think "realistically" that 360 degree would be shrunk down to something like 120 degrees in the cockpit.

[CyBerkut]

I suspect that they won't put that in, as it could lower the value of scouts, etc. (Role warfare) somewhat. Depending on what kind of flexibility we get with arranging our displays / graphics, I could easily welcome a 360 panoramic view bar. If such a thing were made available, it should almost certainly be optional. It doesn't have to a humongous load upon the client computers if implemented carefully. Plenty of combat flight sims and racing sims have rear view mirrors... plenty of people use those with satisfactory performance. A 360 view bar could be rendered with less detail to reduce GPU/CPU load, if needed.

[Exilyth]

I've already posted this in a topic about rear firing weapons, but I think it's still reletvant:

"Projection matrices can only have a field of view of up to 180°, but you could combine multiple views from different angles into one view. You can imagine it like a ring or circle of cameras around the mech, with all images being displayed side by side on a single screen inside your cockpit.
The implementation would be nearly trivial: just render each cameras view to a different section on the same framebuffer. Then again, the performance hit would be large, as you'd have to render the same scene [amount of cameras] times. Also, there will be some distortion where the edges of different views meet."

Also, as has been mentioned, the view would have to be compressed to your monitors dimensions. With a non constant compression (e.g. the middle/front is cmpressed less than the side/rear view), the usefullness of that additional information might get mitigated.

Edited by Exilyth, 06 April 2012 - 01:52 PM.

[Siilk]

I'd rather like to see a front view(i.e. movement direction as opposed to torso direction) and a rear-view cockpit monitors or HUD windows. Judging by my experience with MW games, it would be extremely useful, especially the first one.