Quote:
Originally Posted by robtek
Some people are hopeless!
There is NOT only black and white!!!
NOBODY is forced to use the mouse for flaps, power, firing the guns, prop-pitch etc...
Those controls will still be on the hotas!!! except if one is a hidden masochist and likes to loose all fights 
SoW:BoB will have so many additional switches and levers that have to be used in "full real" settings that most hotas systems wont have enough buttons!
It is easier to remember a position in a cockpit and use the mouse than to remember ,say 30, new, obscure key combinations. |
I would say it in a more polite way, but basically i agree. It has nothing to do with the fact that a pilot has or doesn't have to look down into the cockpit before flicking a switch. It's all about having the option to model an aircraft and its operation in high fidelity and detail, while at the same time not having to map and remember 200 different keybindings and HOTAS controls.
Like i said before, important stuff stays on keyboard and stick, not-so-important
or things that i don't want to accidentally toggle stay on the mouse.
Now, as for the necessity of TrackIR in this, if the inteface is "smart" you won't need to buy one. Take RoF for example, a title that i'm not really a fan of for many reasons, but still has some nice features. One such feature is the custom snap-views. Move your camera to see what you want to see, hold down one of the keypad keys, press F10 and it's memorized. The interesting part in this is that
when you are holding down the key to activate the snap-view, any kind of panning via mouse or TrackIR is disabled, which gives you a steady picture. Also, each plane has it's own set of different custom views, they are saved as entries in a text file because they are simply a set of coordinates.
Now, add to this the ability to toggle the "hand" cursor on/off to toggle between mouse for panning the camera and mouse for clicking stuff and you're set, maybe by pressing the middle mouse button or any other key you want to map to it.
For example, let's say i map the left cockpit console to keypad 4. I'm flying a FW190 and because i don't consider the "initialize kommandogerat" lever a critical control i haven't mapped it to my stick or keyboard. All that lever does is set mixture to rich and "calibrate" the automatic kommandogerat system for engine start, ergo i have to use ONCE per flight.
So, i'm going to click it because i don't want to map and memorize a keyboard shortcut that is only relevant to ONE instance per mission in ONE airframe. Let's say i also don't have a TrackIR. There are two ways to do this:
1) Pan with the mouse to the left, press middle mouse to toggle the "virtual hand", click on lever, press middle mouse again to resume panning or even faster...
2) Press middle mouse button to toggle the "virtual hand", hold down keypad 4 (the shortcut we had defined earlier as the left console snap-view), click lever, press middle mouse again, release keypad 4 and the view snaps back to where it was.
Sorry to have to spell this out in such detail, but i'm getting the idea that a lot of people have the wrong idea that they'll have to click stuff all the time. Maybe it's lack of imagination or they simply haven't tried anything apart from IL2 the last 10 years but trust me, it's way easier than most people think and definitely easier to remember than a full out "all things on HOTAS and keyboard" approach. I mean Jesus, i'm not going to look down so that i can click the gun triggers on the stick in a dogfight, but i sure as heck like to have the option of not having to remember 200 different key combinations either. Neither interface on its own is superior, but when going for high fidelity modelling and including things like carb heaters, fuel pumps and the like, a mix of the two works really well.