When playing the old IL-2, I remember looking around with a joystick hat taking me out of immersion right away (and being a really hard way to get situational awareness, too). As soon as I heard descriptions of Oculus Rift, I knew I'd want to play similar games with it, but I didn't realize IL-2 itself was getting a remake. Very cool.
Yes, flight sims have always been the core base of support for TrackIR.
Mind you, it seems that's partly because TrackIR's manufacturers NaturalPoint had trouble attracting support from FPS developers. From the guy who was apparently product manager for NaturalPoint http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/385-oculus-rift-headtrac... :
Thanks for the kind words. My larger point is that they have already won the battle, whereas NP and TrackIR only conquered one genre - flight-sim. OR doesn't really need the sim community, unless it completely flops with shooters. We make up less than 1% of gamers. I'm more sensitive to this stuff because I was in charge of TrackIR business development while I was at NP and I mainly left because I could not crack the shooter genre. It was really frustrating and I remember all these shooter devs and engine devs (including Gabe Newell when I showed him our mod for HL2 with head tracking)) laughing at me when I explained how cool TrackIR was and what it could do. They ALL told me it was a cheat and they would never take the time to implement special code to support a 3rd party device outside of a mouse and keyboard. Drives me nuts. What made them change their mind? The stupid screen? Weird.
Interesting. Never heard of that before. Looking at a video, the only thing I can see that might be a problem is the motion scaling (where rotations are scaled up, so that a normal monitor will stay in your field of vision even while you look "behind" you). For people who've tried it - is that something that's easy to adjust to, or does your brain nag that things aren't quite right?
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When playing the old IL-2, I remember looking around with a joystick hat taking me out of immersion right away (and being a really hard way to get situational awareness, too). As soon as I heard descriptions of Oculus Rift, I knew I'd want to play similar games with it, but I didn't realize IL-2 itself was getting a remake. Very cool.
In the meanwhile I've heard that TrackIR works really well with sims (some saying it being almost as essential as a joystick)
Yes, flight sims have always been the core base of support for TrackIR.
Mind you, it seems that's partly because TrackIR's manufacturers NaturalPoint had trouble attracting support from FPS developers. From the guy who was apparently product manager for NaturalPoint http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/385-oculus-rift-headtrac... :
Interesting. Never heard of that before. Looking at a video, the only thing I can see that might be a problem is the motion scaling (where rotations are scaled up, so that a normal monitor will stay in your field of vision even while you look "behind" you). For people who've tried it - is that something that's easy to adjust to, or does your brain nag that things aren't quite right?
As an avid flight simulator enthusiast, here's my experience with head tracking:
At first, the motion scaling and latency are awkward, but you still use it just because it frees up your hands.
After a few hours, though, you adjust to it, and it feels natural and immersive, like you're actually looking around outside.
For simulation games, head tracking is less important than having a joystick, but only just.