A potential fix for the Aircraft visibility problems?

[zapatista]

Originally Posted by SlipBall

zapatista
109 The view that I prefer is to have all of my gauges in view. Is it possible for me to lock that as my normal view?...maybe a config edit?

hiya slipball,

you have several options to keep your instruments in view in the il2 series
1) if you use your "wide" (90 FoV) to achieve that, you have the major problem that everything in the "game world" has shrunk in size (including your cockpit instruments) and distant aircraft and ground objects will be much harder to spot
2) you could tilt your widescreen monitor to 90 degrees, making it taller then wide dont laugh, some people actually prefer that view. they have all instruments in view, and their mirror, and have a good visibility of the sky up in front of them. personally i find it disorienting, but it could work if you have 3 monitors setup side by side.
3) you could use a small 2e display to just have a small cluster of the most important instruments displayed, this was possible with a small addon program in the il2 series. eg you could use a tablet pc or similar 7' or 9' screen for that purpose. this is my preferred option, but untill the most recent patch still wasnt possible in CoD. several people requested this feature, but no idea if the last official patch made any changes to enable this (sadly i doubt they included it)
4) you could setup your correct" normal FoV" for your setup (calculated by above method). and use a track-IR to follow your head movement, small brief downward glances to the instruments become fairly intuitive after a while, and not to distracting. this is probably the best current option for most of us.

i think those are the main options i can see for now, other might have more suggestions

my personal ambition for the future is to add 2 smaller 20' monitors on either side of my 27', the amount of pixels they use is roughly similar to adding one extra widescreen (instead of 2, so easier on the GPU and CPU), and the vertical resolution and pixel count is the same as my monitor (1200) so it blends in fairly well. multi monitor setups in CoD are still not perfectly integrated, so still looking at cost effective options myself

it would be great to have a small tablet pc with a few instruments displayed, its resolution is relatively low so no major drain on the pc as a 2e display, and the gaming advantage is significant (compared to the limitations of 1 large screen with no instruments in view during dog-fighting for ex)

so with your current setup, what would be your personal "normal FoV" ? i think you'd be amazed at how low the FoV needs to be (and most people dont use that because it gives them a very narrow visual field). it will give you some idea as to how much distant objects and planes shrink in size when you set ti to 70 or 90, and hence why now suddenly they are so much harder to spot for most