These are US sized, 80 meter tall 5 megawatt wind generators complete with rumbling wind audio effects, anti-col lights and animation of course. Can't express enough how massive these are, such structures fill up screen real-estate economically which has traditionally made them a background object of choice for racing games (along with Ferris wheels and Space Needles).
Here in Yorkshire we have quite modestly sized wind-farms which caused some issues with radar returns at RAF Fylingdales if memory serves.
My first attempt at flying through the blades in the AH64D wasn't a great success. AD broke up the model to allow individual blades to come off when damaged.
Headtracking Software
Cyclic brought to my attention some alternative head tracking software: FaceTracknoIR
I'll be investigating how we can include this alongside other input devices. I like this one as it's within my budget (free with optional donation).
Alternative hardware we were looking at was Kinect for hand-tracking for operation of virtual MFDs, at least until the "non-commercial" nature of Microsofts Kinect SDK came to light. So until there's clarification on Microsoft's SDK usage, plans for virtual cockpit operation via Kinect will be shelved.
I asked Wim who is the developer of FaceTrackNoir to sign up to the blog and give us a little info on where this is going in the future. I had made a small donation to this program and was sent the latest Alpha test version of the software.
ReplyDeleteI must say I was very impressed with it. Although it took a little work to get it tuned just right it was really no more hassle than the track ir. Having head tracking without a stupid antler on your head feels good. I am sure if Wim has some time he will be able to custom build a profile just for Combat Helo with some extra tweaks built into the GUI especially for flight Sims like this.
To get this running you require a webcam however I would strongly recommend the PS3eye Camera ($35) as it will run much higher FPS than a regular web cam. If you have the cash to spare get the Kinetic as this unit has its own processor but of course costs 3 times the price. Having its own processor means no load on yours. Using the PS3eye hogs between 10-15% of processor power. However I had no problem what so ever running DCSA10 at max settings with Face Track and still getting 80FPS using a core i5 and GTX570 GPU. FaceAPI have software that run both the PS3eye and the Kinect. The software required is all free ware and I may ask Richard if he could post links to this here on the blog. Or just post a link to Wim’s website which is
http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm
However to obtain the latest version of this software you will need to help with a small donation to keep him running. The latest edition works with the newer i5 and i7 CPUS. No I am not working on a commission basis here.
Its definitely what the future is all about. This year Kinect will release their Avatar chat program. The Kinect will not only track head and body movements but also lip-sync. This now means you will be able to track head movement and also give radio commands to the SIM without having to mash radio message keys. If you need to press F1 to bring up the comms menu then just say F1 and up it comes and just keep talking to it until you get what you need.
The future looks bright…….
Hello Combat-Helo devs,
ReplyDeleteI'd love to help you implement the interface for headtracking (or FaceTrackNoIR specific, if you like). If you just contact me about it, we can certainly make things work...
BTW.: The screenshots look good!
Thanks guys, Will be in touch about the headtracking interface.
ReplyDelete