Ham, Your addons/fixes are really excellent and definitely enhance the enjoyment of my simming.

I don't wish to be rude but, my burning question is:

Do you have a job?

Where do you find the time to do all of this?

Also, how/where did you learn your craft?

I'm curious about you and others as well.

Are you and Papadoc and others independently wealthy? ...with no families or other real-life commitments? Do you work as a software developer and do this stuff on your coffee breaks?

I'm just very curious being a thirty year old "boy" who sims at the expense of a great deal...I just wonder what the "profile" of a simmer really is.

I, once, just assumed we all lived our lives of craggy solitude in our heavily fortified, underground bunker-style, sub-basements in the back woods of Lonersvilee, Montana or Scratchyourself, West Virginia with electrodes stuck to our heads rocking back and forth, foaming at the mouth as we stare at our computer screens with that glazed look over our eyes....

--Oh, I guess that's just me.

I'm self taught, but my job in aviation maintenance gives one a fanatical attention to detail which serves me very well in both web design and artwork.

Note also that I had an exceptional starting point - the work of Eagle Dynamics (Russia). I was inspired by the work of 'Pampero' (Spain) 'ReactorOne' (France) and 'Relic' (Yugoslavia). Susto (Spain) scanned numerous images from his personal library which proved indispensable as to was the input, encouragement and suggestions from many others across the globe.

Cheer's, Ham

You said, I qoute:

"I, once, just assumed we all lived our lives of craggy solitude in our heavily fortified,
underground bunker-style, sub-basements in the back woods of Lonersvilee, Montana or
Scratchyourself, West Virginia with electrodes stuck to our heads rocking back and forth,foaming at the mouth as we stare at our computer screens with that glazed look over our eyes...."

Geez what a word picture this is. You ever
think about writing science fiction for a
living. You have a hidden talent there guy.

I would have to say my affinity for flight
sims has its costs. You have to be willing
to sacrifice in other areas of your life.
As for me, I watch almost ZERO TV. Which
the avg american couch potato is glued to for
about 4+ hours PER DAY!!!! Then you throw
in there that my simming is mostly after the
kid goes to bed and the wife is busy with her
stuff, then I get to escape into flight sim
narvanna. So ive lost many an hour of sleep to this hobby.

There are those out there in sim land that
take simming TOO seriously and put thier
gaming ahead of paying bills, family time,
soul time, workout time, and worse of all...
ahead of how they treat other people. When
this occurs, I would say theyve lost their
balance and perspective in life. Too target
fixated on simming. And thier lives will eventually crash and burn.

My experience with HAM is that he is a very
concientious and curteous bloke from down
WAY down under. Im pleased that he has
chosen to leave his F15E cockpit for SU27s.
He is an asset to our flight community.

Just my 2 cents,

It's interesting to me as a newbie to discover that simming is just as much--if not more (in many cases)--about the community as it is about the sim. I am surprised how helpful and rather..."selfless" most are in this community.

For instance: how cool is it that Ham--(rather than going on and on about himself and how great he is, etc...) gives a list of people he owes a debt of gratitude to.

I'm not going to get all foggy-eyed about it lol, but I respect it a great deal.

Would be kewl to b able to swithch between them tho with a click...maybe 2.5...

How wide is the HUD in the real Su-27 (in cm)? Now scale the cockpit view in the sim until the HUD is just as wide on your monitor. Then sit back the same distance from the monitor as the pilot sits from the HUD in the real aircraft. Voila, this is the realistic projection --- as if holding up a cardboard frame (illustrating the monitor limitation) in front of the pilot in the real cockpit. Everything will look realistically sized inside and outside the cockpit --- like looking through a clear viewport into a real sized world.

Of course, this narrow projection makes very little fit in your field of view. Hence in sims we need to zoom out somewhat. This affects your sense of dimensions of the world, ie. no appreciation of size and detail, your wingman looks like a toy model, the airfield looks small, no sense of the scale when flying nap-of-the-earth through the city, etc.

The zoom function allows you to combat these limitations somewhat --- you can zoom in and out as you please. BUT scaling down the cockpit, making the aircraft smaller compared to the world is not an option (that I would like).

Why do you want it? To fit the cockpit on your screen? It looks good?

Do you fly looking forward all the time? Then you don't really get the benefit of a virtual cockpit --- the ability to look around and build up spatial sense of position, dimensions, height and movement. Start panning and zooming and this wont bother you the bit in my experience --- in fact you will start to appreciate realistic scaling and focus more on what's outside the cockpit. (Check out my tracks in the Offensive BFM thread.)

In my opinion, the default field-of-view in Flanker is good trade-off, and the zoom function added in 2.02 makes the viewing tools nearly complete. But what I can't personally stand is whole cockpits crammed into my 15 inch monitor, nor fish-eye effects when panning around.

BTW. The "camera" in Flanker is too large. It is of course invisible, but you can notice it by the clipping distance when moving close to objects. Objects are clipped as if the screen (the clipping plane)is bigger than the object! You should be able to get closer and lower before clipping takes place. Consider the outside view --- you can't get low and close enough to really see what the aircraft looks like from a person's standpoint on the tarmac, you can't really get close to an Igla operator, to a missile (they are huge, not matches!), etc.

I'd appreciate it if sims did more to make us appreciate the large dimensions of objects. Other than that, SSI/ED has stated over and over again that everything is scaled 1:1.

Of course no one sane enough to operate one of these jets would actually fly 0-50 feet off the deck, unless pressed hard, but for me that sorta NOE is what I get off on...At these heights xterior object scaling in the zoomed out position feels wrong, they are too small...

BTW have you looked @ tha footage I`m referring to? You`ll see xactly what I mean...

Toecutter, I love flying low too (except for blurred terrain) --- guess it's the rush! Zoom in and the objects don't look too small anymore... :-)

Went back to the 1.5 videos and had a look. I guess ANATOLY.AVI is the one you refer to. The camera view behind the pilot's left shoulder reminds me very much of the zoomed out view in Flanker (guess they did a good job! :-).

Here's an image so that people see what we're talking about:

Note that the camera is behind the pilot. In Flanker everything is projected from the pilot's viewpoint, ie. closer to the HUD. That means you will have to zoom out some degrees further in Flanker to achieve the same cockpit size --- this will of course further exaggerate the wide-angle effect.

Personally, I wouldn't like flying with a zoomed out cockpit view like in the video. I want to feel that the instruments are arm's length away --- that means close to real-life size on my monitor. With this setting, objects outside become more convincing too.

I am of course assuming that the HUD distance, cockpit size and all object dimensions are correctly modelled. You may have pinpointed some discrepancies for all I know, but it seems to me like you're asking for the impossible (small cockpit and large outside world).

BTW, after the cockpit sequence, the sequence of the Su-27 taxiing illustrates my point about outside views and object sizes very well --- you are actually looking up at the pilot in an aircraft closer and larger than what fits in the frame, and with lot of other reference objects around. This creates the right sense of dimensions.

Very interesting to see the stick deflection and subsequent aircraft displacement...

HN-402 - the video Atilla mentions (one of 5)is 17Mb long. I won't post as I have probably upset the SSI copyright lawyers enough for this month

Cheer's, Ham

You seem to be born and bread on 2D cockpits, if I may say so. If you seperate the cockpit from the 3D world everything is of course possible (as if the world is filmed from a invisible aircraft, and the cockpit is video-edited on top). So what you seem to want is achievable, I'll give you that.

But, a true virtual 3D cockpit is an inseparable part of the aircraft and the world modelled. My point is that what you're asking for is simply not possible with a virtual 3D cockpit keeping things 1:1 and using a natural perspective projection. To convince me otherwise you will have to show some "math and trigonometry" --- and geometry as well... :-)

The video footage confirms this, it doesn't dispute it as you suggest. The video camera uses a wide lens and this affects the ouside world as much as the cockpit. Flanker is exactly the same.

You could of course narrow the FOV to eliminate the wide-angle effect and move the camera further back towards the engines, far enough to fit the cockpit on the screen (assuming a cockpit 1 m wide and a FOV of 30 degrees, you have to get 1.9 m back) --- then ask the pilot to move his head and lower the seat so that you have a clear view... :-)

In my view, a true virtual 3D cockpit is an asset, not a problem. It is a general viewing model consistent with the world modelled. It mathematically models how things would look if you had a camera in the cockpit in the pilot head position.

But with the FOV of a 15 inch monitor, of course it has limitations. You can't see all the instruments at once without zooming out with the wide-lens problems you have mentioned; you need to pan around, which is cumbersome with slow linear panning and a digital 4-way hat-switch.

Glance functions and analog panning, eg. mouse input, overcomes this limitation somewhat. If we only had three hands, or even better, an analog panning mechanism on our stick/throttle! Eg. a small track ball in the thumb rest position. (SSI --- what about contacting some hardware developers?)