Feedback on TrackIR

[Jawms]

I have been using TrackIR 5 with games for the better part of 10 years now. I have come to love it with the X series, Arma, War Thunder, etc. There are tons of applications for it and I am very pleased to be able to use it in all of the X games I have played.

The current implementation does have some issues however. The simplest is the inability to look behind you. There are plenty of ships that have windows that extend past 90deg to the left, right, and up. Yet these are the bounds where our ability to look around is stopped. I do not understand the design decision with those hard limits, who cares if I get to look down at my chair? Or down the neck of my headless body?

The next piece of grief is with targeting. The default command for targeting something you are looking at is T. This is a VERY temperamental command and rarely does it bracket what I am looking at. Most times it gets something vaguely in the direction I am looking. My head is quite accurate with TrackIR so when I place the center of my screen on something and press T, it is quite irksome when it brackets something off to my right 45deg.

Next issue is with the lack of a dot. A center screen dot would make life alot easier for selecting things. Think of a mouse pointer attached to the center of the screen.

Last issue for today is the map. I love that there is a keyboard to turn off headtracking so that doing things in menus doesn't require you to hold you face super still, but why isn't that an automatic option when opening a menu? The pause menu takes up the whole screen, what need would I have to look around the cockpit (what little I actually get to see) while modifying controls?

In the majority of cases I leave my TrackIR off, and my stick off to the side as using them as a control method is lacking in functionality. In X3/TC/AP I could navigate menus with hotkeys and the control hat on my stick. X4 sees me reaching for the mouse 90% of the time.

I get that TrackIR is a niche product. I understand that your time should be spent on many other things. So if you do one thing listed in this post, allow me to make sure my Teladi pilot isn't breathing down my neck?

Thanks for your time.