Given that full VR is both likely a ways out, and a considerable investment, both on Turn Tens part and our own, I would like to make a feature request that I think should be easy to implement and provide a stop gap prior to full VR while also streamlining implementation.
Would it be possible to make head tracking follow a basic two channel input? Say for instance one of the sticks of a seconds controller???
Even without VR, having a flat display headset and headtracking makes any racing game significantly more immersive. Ideally this head tracking device would be a wheel peripheral like the shifters and ebrakes, but in the absence of this option being able to map headtracking to the stick of another controller would allow the community to cheaply hack existing controllers to this end. Once demonstrated either small parties would pop up to provide more polished solutions or the larger wheel manufacturers might start making this an option, at which point changing the input source to something else would be fairly straightforward.
This makes DIY wheel w/head tracking fairly straight forward to achieve if we just had the ability to tie the tracking to a stick. Which stick, and on which controller would both ideally be selectable. I do not see this as being a particularly complicated feature to implement, but given F7 supports split screen, I could be very wrong…
What do you all think? Has this been asked for before? Does anyone know of good flat display headsets? I know a number of the VR headsets have a flat display option for watching movies and things, but is there a cheaper solution if all you really want is a flat HDMI headset display at a decent resolution?
I already feel like I am cluttering the boards so I am going to put this here and it can branch if needs be.
As an example of a directly hacked controller (sure its a 360 but you get the idea)
Does anyone know what standards define how force feedback is communicated/implemented by the controller manufacturer? I found some information on the software side for programming force feedback but I am wondering how this is driven at the wheel level. Primarily to understand if a DIY FF wheel using a hacked controller or the XAC is possible.
I believe FM4 featured something with head tracking via the Kinect. You could tilt your head and it would slightly turn the camera in the direction you titled your head. FM5 may have also had this feature? Not sure on that, but I definitely remember FM4 having some kind of head tracking option in the menus.
The Kinect is basically a dead and wasted peripheral now. You can blame the market paranoia about the Kinect on that. Microsoft tried to make it a standard peripheral of the Xbox One but tinfoil hats were scared that it could listen and watch everything you did and forced Microsoft to remove it from future versions of the Xbox One. Now everyone is buying VR headsets, which use the same exact technology and are somehow okay with it.
FM4 did have head tracking using the Kinect, but it didn’t really work all that well. It was difficult for the Kinect unit to accurately pick up your head movement. I don’t think it was the tin foil hats that doomed the Kinect, I think it really was more an overall lack of content utilizing it.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Microsoft included the Kinect with every Xbox One and people complained that it cost too much and were worried about it spying on them and stuff. So Microsoft removed it from all versions after that and then it died pretty much immediately.
Microsoft tried to make the Kinect a standard piece of hardware that developers could assume was always connected to the system, therefore making it viable to develope software that uses it. But the market didn’t. want it, so they removed it and it died.
The Xbox One costed too much alltogether (with the packaged kinect) and MS removed it from the set to reduce costs and be more competitive with Sony. It wasn’t about tinfoil… (MS tried to force us to use it though, just like the always online nonsense so I am seomewhat happy they hit themselves hard this gen )
But yeah, due to their(!) stupidity we all lost a great feature. I do like the kinect, play it regularly (mostly just dance).
Must have been OPTIONAL from the start.
Head tracking imo, is pointless. There’s a much easier system they can implement which is a very simple look to apex feature, akin to F1 2018 & essentially an inverse of the “Drift Camera” setting we currently have where you can control things like speed & angle.
In fact, if they combined the two together, they could create a camera which looks to the apex when you turn, but switches to the drift camera when you step the car out
Project CARS 2 (and also the first PCARS game) has a pretty decent helmet camera implementation with things like “look to apex”, “helmet lean”, “depth of field” (you look further into the distance, blurring the sides, the faster you drive)) and muffled sounds to replicate the helmet’s audio. While in the first game, you were only able to switch to the helmet view, in the 2nd game apparently you can also change each helmet view setting.
I like the idea of Apex tracking in most situations, but I would also like to be able to experiment with head tracking even in a relatively basic way. Even if they just turned off the snap look to sides when using the right stick as an option I could work with that. I also think being able to adjust sensitivity would be helpful but will take what I can get.
All the devs need to do is add headlook and allow you to map the axes to a game controller. Then you can use opensource software like Opentrack to make it compatible with pretty much any head tracking device.
It would be pretty easy for the developers to do that and leave it up to the player to map it. Opentrack has spline curves that let you set how much your real life head turn translates to turning in the game. So 15 - 30 degrees in real life can give you 90 to 180 degrees rotation in the game. All on spline curves so you can set your own constraints and deadzone how you want it.
It would be hardly any work for the devs, hardest part would be adding the mapping to the options menu. Probably less than a days work.
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