Interception point marker

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log0

Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

I've hacked an optional interception point marker (x) into target box code. It works well as long as the target and the interception point are within the view cone. But gets confusing if the angle is too large, target will be out of focus if pilot decides to follow TIP.

Maybe TIP marker should be restricted to a certain view angle (max 15° from TGT), so that it is always in pilots focus even if it is not the true IP.

A line from target towards IP would work too I think. It would also show the relative target velocity direction. I don't want to overload the view with symbols though.

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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Maybe TIP marker should be restricted to a certain view angle (max 15° from TGT), so that it is always in pilots focus even if it is not the true IP.
If TIP was angle relative to front regardless of view setting, then the player could hit 7 to padlock and would be able to follow the TIP while still keeping the target in view.
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log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

Wait. I think @IansterGuy proposed to constrain it to the viewport, like it happens with the target box(arrow). I'll add this constraint.

Now after a few minutes flying I am getting used to it. I think it was the initial confusion about where to focus at, target box or interception point.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Wait. I think @IansterGuy proposed to constrain it to the viewport, like it happens with the target box(arrow). I'll add this constraint.

Now after a few minutes flying I am getting used to it. I think it was the initial confusion about where to focus at, target box or interception point.
Um... I think with such a constraint, you can't properly aim at it. You have to be able to compare your current heading (velocity vector) to the TIP marker. The out-of-view arrows aren't precise enough for that.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:Wait. I think @IansterGuy proposed to constrain it to the viewport, like it happens with the target box(arrow). I'll add this constraint.

Now after a few minutes flying I am getting used to it. I think it was the initial confusion about where to focus at, target box or interception point.
Um... I think with such a constraint, you can't properly aim at it. You have to be able to compare your current heading (velocity vector) to the TIP marker. The out-of-view arrows aren't precise enough for that.
If the marker is out of view how is it going to help you at all? Constraining it to the view edge(for the case when it is out of view) would give you at least a direction hint.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:If the marker is out of view how is it going to help you at all? Constraining it to the view edge(for the case when it is out of view) would give you at least a direction hint.
My point is, when you padlock the target (or otherwise switch between internal views), the marker's position doesn't change. Marker dead center always means you're right on track (0 deg from velocity vector).

Yes, you might have to constrain it in case even relative to velocity vector it falls outside of the screen. My point is more about its independence regarding view mode.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by IansterGuy »

log0 wrote:A line from target towards IP would work too I think. It would also show the relative target velocity direction. I don't want to overload the view with symbols though.
I would not put a line unless it supplies additional information about the predicted path by its curve. As for overloading the view with symbols I would not worry about that because there should be keys to cycle through load and save various HUD display combinations with something like , [I+[1-9]], and [I+Shift+[1-9]].
klauss wrote:Yes, you might have to constrain it in case even relative to velocity vector it falls outside of the screen. My point is more about its independence regarding view mode.
So you want the visual point to be separate from the point interpreted by the game engine? This so that an auto tracking feature would be able to point at it and travel toward it even when it is off screen and only indicated by a directional arrow?
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

IansterGuy wrote:
klauss wrote:Yes, you might have to constrain it in case even relative to velocity vector it falls outside of the screen. My point is more about its independence regarding view mode.
So you want the visual point to be separate from the point interpreted by the game engine? This so that an auto tracking feature would be able to point at it and travel toward it even when it is off screen and only indicated by a directional arrow?
Ehm... not an auto anything, the player.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by maze »

Klauss, I gather you want the player to be actually piloting, that's your vision and it's quite defendable. I'm going to take the absolute opposite stance for the sake of argument here. Should you go this route, you'd have a totally different game, but not one that is necessarily boring.
lansterGuy wrote:This so that an auto tracking feature would be able to point at it and travel toward it even when it is off screen and only indicated by a directional arrow?
Why should you need to point at this point in order to travel towards it? With fly-by-wire and inertial flight, you could set a target speed towards that point without having to face it. So for example you could be shooting back at a ship attacking you, while intercepting another ship. The problem I see with this is that, as long as rotation is done magically and not by thrusting, it would be quite unfair to allow this kind of maneuver.

Back more strictly on-topic:
log0, when your interception point is calculated, how is the lateral speed of the player's ship counted in the calculation? In the default speed setting mode, your lateral speed will be actively countered by your side thrusters, but your target's lateral speed will not. You may also be setting speed relative to target, in which case any kind of lateral speed of the target relative to player ship will be actively countered by the lateral thrusters... I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around those effects created by lateral thrust on the TIP (edit: and whether they can/should be included in the calculation of that point).
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:My point is more about its independence regarding view mode.
I am not sure I understand what you mean with independence regarding view mode, klauss. The TIP is an extension of target box, has the same properties/constraints. It is calculated from target relative position and lies on its flight path/line in 3d space.
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

maze wrote:log0, when your interception point is calculated, how is the lateral speed of the player's ship counted in the calculation? In the default speed setting mode, your lateral speed will be actively countered by your side thrusters, but your target's lateral speed will not. You may also be setting speed relative to target, in which case any kind of lateral speed of the target relative to player ship will be actively countered by the lateral thrusters... I guess I'm trying to wrap my head around those effects created by lateral thrust on the TIP (edit: and whether they can/should be included in the calculation of that point).
The point is the required flight direction (velocity vector) for interception. If you wanted to use it with lateral motion you would need a flight direction marker and try to match it with the TIP.

What we have atm are:
- desired flight direction marker, aka targeting reticle(o)
- current heading marker(+), this is not the true flight direction

I would like to add an optional flight direction marker as a half transparent version of current heading marker (which would blend out when getting closer to current heading maybe).
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

Here is how it could work. I've also replaced the mega-ugly reticle with one that matches the visual style of the hud. The heading and flight markers could be made a bit more compact/smaller.

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Re: Interception point marker

Post by omegakent »

Nice, but as you said, better if smaller, more compact. As the hud is becoming saturated, perhaps a keyboard shortcut should be added to enable or disable advanced indicators.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

If I'm not mistaken, currently flight direction marker would be fixed on the center of the screen... right? (we don't have a way to alter it other than shelton slide)

By independence of view, I meant they're drawn with the OpenGL camera set as if it were the forward view always, so the center of the screen always means forward. Then you can padlock or change views without loosing sight of the markers.

Now, I should change this to mean forward = flight direction marker. So FDM is always at the center, by definition, and all markers are drawn relative to it, no matter which view you're in.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:If I'm not mistaken, currently flight direction marker would be fixed on the center of the screen... right? (we don't have a way to alter it other than shelton slide)

By independence of view, I meant they're drawn with the OpenGL camera set as if it were the forward view always, so the center of the screen always means forward. Then you can padlock or change views without loosing sight of the markers.

Now, I should change this to mean forward = flight direction marker. So FDM is always at the center, by definition, and all markers are drawn relative to it, no matter which view you're in.
The center of the screen is what I call the heading direction(ship nose pointing direction). The flight direction doesn't have to coincide with it even with flight governor enabled. I am doing pass-by and flip maneuvers when approaching a station sometimes just for fun and can get nice slips around them where flight direction is very different from heading direction. This is why I was proposing the slip vector/line in the directional thrusters thread.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:The center of the screen is what I call the heading direction(ship nose pointing direction). The flight direction doesn't have to coincide with it even with flight governor enabled. I am doing pass-by and flip maneuvers when approaching a station sometimes just for fun and can get nice slips around them where flight direction is very different from heading direction. This is why I was proposing the slip vector/line in the directional thrusters thread.
Yes, yes, completely agree there. So one slips when you slide, the other is fixed at view center (which is the desired direction). If you point your screen center (desired direction marker) at the TIP long enough, the FDM will slide there and you'll be on an intercept course.

Question is, what to do when those are way off-screen yet you want to see and match them precisely. The common off-screen arrows are too imprecise for that.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by IansterGuy »

maze wrote:Klauss, I gather you want the player to be actually piloting, that's your vision and it's quite defendable. I'm going to take the absolute opposite stance for the sake of argument here. Should you go this route, you'd have a totally different game, but not one that is necessarily boring.
LOL, always good for an argument. My thought on aiming assistance was that if the things log0 is proposing plus things like autozoom and micro turning was available in the controls then humans could even outperform auto aiming because of their ability to predict the enemy based on experience. In that case adding auto aiming would not be a significant change in the game at all because everything else would already be so high performance. Otherwise I would not suggest auto aiming.
maze wrote:Why should you need to point at this point in order to travel towards it? With fly-by-wire and inertial flight, you could set a target speed towards that point without having to face it. So for example you could be shooting back at a ship attacking you, while intercepting another ship. The problem I see with this is that, as long as rotation is done magically and not by thrusting, it would be quite unfair to allow this kind of maneuver.
Really like this kind of maneuvering. Yup unfair and just too easy without turning inertia, but that is likely to be fixed. I was already thinking [Alt+Backspace] to set best intercept speed for target automatically for any direction. Though actually pointing at the intercept point would be the fastest because the rear thrusters are the strongest.
omegakent wrote:Nice, but as you said, better if smaller, more compact. As the hud is becoming saturated, perhaps a keyboard shortcut should be added to enable or disable advanced indicators.
I agree Log0's design here is really nice. I like the center heading marker being the 3/4 of a cross hair with the bottom hair missing, because it hints that one would normally be turning up, left, and right mostly, when lining up a target to shoot at. I also like the identical but variably faded reticle for flight direction, because it instantly suggests that the two are associated in that the closer they are the better aligned pointing direction is to flight direction and should be looked at in relation to each other. With this design even if all the markers over lap, each center point would still easily be identifiable. I think repurposing the old heading reticle to be the new mouse aiming reticle is a good plan. I am not a fan of the green nor the gunmetal design of the old one anyways.
klauss wrote:If I'm not mistaken, currently flight direction marker would be fixed on the center of the screen... right? (we don't have a way to alter it other than shelton slide)
My interpretation was that sharp turns on a moving ship in maneuver mode would instantly turn the heading with the screen perspective, but the flight direction would only gradualy move as the ship starts moving in the new the heading direction. I was also thinking that using lateral thrusters manually and changing the reference vector would effect the flight direction quite frequently if lateral thruster controls are made more useable as I was planning.
klauss wrote:By independence of view, I meant they're drawn with the OpenGL camera set as if it were the forward view always, so the center of the screen always means forward. Then you can padlock or change views without loosing sight of the markers.
O, ha ha now I understand. That would be a quite the thing to be able to intercept a ship when not even looking at it. Though that would mean that if the camera is in a position where the two indicators would normally be on screen, they would not be shown in the position of their actual locations, unless pointing the camera perspective perfectly toward the heading direction. Actually this sounds like it would work well if everything is in the correct alignment for any of the fixed camera view positions.
log0 wrote:
klauss wrote:Now, I should change this to mean forward = flight direction marker. So FDM is always at the center, by definition, and all markers are drawn relative to it, no matter which view you're in.
The center of the screen is what I call the heading direction(ship nose pointing direction). The flight direction doesn't have to coincide with it even with flight governor enabled. I am doing pass-by and flip maneuvers when approaching a station sometimes just for fun and can get nice slips around them where flight direction is very different from heading direction. This is why I was proposing the slip vector/line in the directional thrusters thread.
I like the name and believe this would work well as you have it in testing. As for Slip vector lines, I would not put a line in between the flight and heading markers because the two marker as you have them should be easy enough to find even off screen if corner arrows are used for flight direction too. It was my thought to reserve any white lines as path prediction lines for any tracked objects like torpedos, missiles, and ships originating from a target. So I prefer the center marker and the faded marker as you have it now.
klauss wrote:... So one slips when you slide, the other is fixed at view center (which is the desired direction).
Yea that's how I understand it, except that the desired direction marker is the mouse steering, or the mouse targeting reticle as I would prefer it be called. It's a good name from my point of view because I was thinking of proposing some advanced mouse targeting turning and aiming functionality for the future of the interface.
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

Heading marker patch is up: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=d ... tid=319507
TIP and reticle will follow as my spare time allows ;)
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by Deus Siddis »

Looking at the screenshot of your feature in action, an idea popped into my head.

What if the indicators become more transparent the closer they get to the crosshair and become more opaque the closer they get to the edge of the view? So the greater the deviation, the more obvious the indicator and vice versa. It might also help the player keep them separate from the crosshair and weapon-target intercept box since they will be more or less transparent when near them.
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

Deus Siddis wrote:Looking at the screenshot of your feature in action, an idea popped into my head.

What if the indicators become more transparent the closer they get to the crosshair and become more opaque the closer they get to the edge of the view? So the greater the deviation, the more obvious the indicator and vice versa. It might also help the player keep them separate from the crosshair and weapon-target intercept box since they will be more or less transparent when near them.
The direction marker is already fading in/out depending on distance to heading marker(from 0.0 to 0.6 alpha). I've also added some fade out to the interception marker.
log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

Interception marker code is up. Patch is against py3 branch. As I have no friggin idea how to add the patch to the (new) patch tracker, you can get it from here: http://pastebin.com/vZVkf5eN

If you want to do yourself a favor, don't use Llama to test it, or for anything else combat related, hehe. (nah just kidding)
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Interception marker code is up. Patch is against py3 branch. As I have no friggin idea how to add the patch to the (new) patch tracker, you can get it from here: http://pastebin.com/vZVkf5eN
If you're logged in, you should see a link "add attachment".
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log0

Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:Interception marker code is up. Patch is against py3 branch. As I have no friggin idea how to add the patch to the (new) patch tracker, you can get it from here: http://pastebin.com/vZVkf5eN
If you're logged in, you should see a link "add attachment".
There is no button to create a patch item, at least I see none.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:
klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:Interception marker code is up. Patch is against py3 branch. As I have no friggin idea how to add the patch to the (new) patch tracker, you can get it from here: http://pastebin.com/vZVkf5eN
If you're logged in, you should see a link "add attachment".
There is no button to create a patch item, at least I see none.
If you want to create a new ticket, you can do so here by clicking on "create ticket". But you probably want to go here and just add another attachment.
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Re: Interception point marker

Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:If you want to create a new ticket, you can do so here by clicking on "create ticket". But you probably want to go here and just add another attachment.
Thanks, will do as soon as the "create ticket" button appears. http://imageshack.us/f/24/createticket.jpg/
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