[Feedback/Feature Request] Long term HUD improvements

[vvvvvvvv]

I've suggested this in Beta, it was apparently out of scope.

Long story short. Current gravidar is an improvement in the right direction, but would be great to bring tools to flightsim level.

Short version:
* Would be nice to have minimap visible in addition to gravidar.
* Would be nice to have HUD/heading/Horizon visible as overlay.

Long version:

In X-Plane 11/12, normally while flying something like cessna, the instruments are often configured like this:



Aviation "horizon" on the left, map on the right. "Horizon" is this:


in X4 it could be done this way:


On military planes, Horizon and notches are either projected into the helmet, or onto glass pane infrton of the pilot. You can see it in VTOL VR.

And here's Elite HUD for the reference:


Reasoning:

Orientation in space right now is not instantly visible at the glance. The important values are heading (relative to the North), yaw and roll. Ideally a pilot should be able to navigate through sector without ever switching anything.

Current changes in gravidar improved the situation a great deal, compared to previous version. Right now I can mostly align myself to the sector plane, aim "north"/"south"/"east"/"west" (reltive to the sector) without going to the map. Which is good. However while things improved ,this is a bit imprecise. I still need to eyeball axis widget, and can end up 5 degrees or so off the intended direction. For example, when looking NE direction, aligning to the plane becomes harder.

So, alignment problem can be addressed by making traditional aviation hud. Heading at the top witch notches which indicates yaw, Then wireframe horizon which indicates both roll and pitch.

A possible idea is that this doesn't have to be installed on every ship. For examle, wireframe hud could be present only on military vessels and could be missing from civilian ones. It is even possible to make race-specific version, but that is resource intensive. And generally not necessry.

In ddition to "in which direction am I flying" another important question is "where I am" and "whaat's nearby". That's minimap. Currently coordinate display is disabled, and switching to minimap requires me to cycle through 3 or 4 radar modes. So would be nice if it was possible to keep both minimap and radar visible simultanoeously.

That's the rough idea of it.

[TroubledRabbit]

ehm...

I get the inspiration but some things are off completely. Eg.:

- there is no 'horizon', the game itself 'cheats' (so to speak) putting the stations and ships at the pseudo-ecliptic local plane (or in reference to that) but 'horizon' it is not, for better or worse, as said 'horizon' you may take the mentioned above pseudo-ecliptic which is already displayed anyway;
- gravidar serves as 'minimap' already, ability to create/enable additional gravidars (in a perfect hud with ability to scale and move them freely) with different scale simultaneusly might be a thing, though. For me ludicrous idea that my (pilot's) eyes 'see' much farther than the radar of my ship is grave, inherited from previous titles, top bonkerness (I get why it is design that way, still it is a nonsense).

I am not against the idea per se with the addendum of making that 'optional' (additional options are always nice to have).

There is a reason why Flying Sims (even gamey) require a lot of training. If you'd put so much info on the HUD (which sometimes is hardly readable as it is) you are risking creating serious learning curve in the game where flying is important but it is not the game 'only about the flying' (or even 'mostly about').

[azaghal]

Heh... I kinda miss the ecliptic projector from the older games... I used to find it rather helpful in trying to figure out my orientation within the sector, especially if you have spent some time fighting and getting turned "upside-down". Having a way to more easily reorient the ship based on some indicators would be useful.

An ability to have a minimap shown in addition to gravidar would be welcome as well. I don't think they necessarily have the same purpose. Being able to customize what gets shown on the minimap would be nice too - it is highly likely you would not be interested in seeing the same level of details on the minimap as in the case of the full map (probably would not care much about small/medium ships, or even most of the larger civilian ships).

The problem is - if you start introducing the additional elements to the cockpit, it may be useful to also make some items like their positioning configurable - especially given the wide range of different cockpits the game has.

the game itself 'cheats' (so to speak) putting the stations and ships at the pseudo-ecliptic local plane (or in reference to that)

That is one of the weird parts I find about the game - despite technically being a 3D game, the whole universe feels incredibly 2-dimensional (with station layouts, gate positions etc). I think that you rarely end up thinking about up or down outside of combat.

P.S.
Still waiting for GNU/Linux upload on GOG in the meantime to see if gravidar is actually of any use now