I'm strafing a target at max speed, tracking with my turret, landing shots and kicking ***. Suddenly I run straight up a tree, lose all momentum and my turret is now jacked straight down and it's impossible for me to aim at my target until I back up off the tree. I have a fairly simple solution. Add a toggle for split screen camera views. The top screen would be the turret view the bottom screen would be the forward view of the vehicle. This would allow you to keep an eye on what's in front of you when your turret is facing another direction. Imagine it as a view port in front of the driver while the turret is remotely operated on a secondary screen. If this is too GPU intensive then perhaps a toggle between tank view and turret view. It makes sense to be able to look out the front of my tank even if my turret is facing backwards.
Do you know how expensive it is to render the same scene multiple times and maintain performance? It'd be easier to include the same kind of "free look" implemented for ESFs so that you can explore different views without having to move your turret physically, at the cost of shooting while using it. This may also be an egregious "why don't you have a co-pilot" situation for the ES medium tanks.
Your entire surroundings are already rendered. Just like switching to third person doesnt change performance instantly, so wouldnt different screens as long as they are within 300m distance of yourself. (see the phoenix). Splitscreen for yourself, or a second window similar to your minimap for forwards/gunnerview would be great. Gunnerview would be based on the way your rendered gun is pointing rather than having the gunner send you his frames. I think that would be fully possible without performance issues, and it would add a lot to quality of life.
Planetside 2 is a team game. If you want to solo a team vehicle, then you must suffer from inconvenience in some aspects. Deal with it or get rekt. It's also a part of gameplay to be sneaky and engage enemy from behind. Split screen would allow you to have a cheat against that. Get a gunner or get rekt.
You realize that having a frontal view to see where you are driving while aiming somewhere else is something completely different than teamwork? His suggestion works for solo Lightnings and team-oriented MBT's or any other vehicle for that matter. He didnt ask for a rear-view mirror to spot enemy flanking attacks comming or something like that. It's a sensible idea. You sacrifice a part of your screen so you can keep an eye on where you are moving. This helps in making driving+gunning better, which is good since stopping+fire is the most used technique. This change increases the skillceiling that you can reach with tanks.
That's not what I mean. To the first point, it's still only rendering once and, to the second point, it has nothing to do with capped Infantry render distance. Traditional, non-parallelized 3D to 2D rendering works by defining a geometric frustum - what will become the point of view - in a cleared scene. Meshes are then added to the scene, on top of the frustum essentially. During the process of rendering, a calculation test is made between the frustum's limits and each unit of geometry to see whether or not it will appear in the rendering, if it will have a shader applied to it. That's one frame when it's done, bar post-processing. If you want multiple points of view, such as everything in front of you and everything to your left at once, you have to define separate frustrums and add the geometry to each one and render each one. Whether or not you go with separate frustum's or separate scenes, it will still cost the same amoutn of time as the first one; if you go a cheaper route like alternating which points of view is updated per unit time, you'll still lose some performance. Culling would be good but that can take just as much time. You could parallelize the process to a certain extent by spreading different views between cores or processors but most 3D-ready software was designed to be monolithic. What the client is really capable of accomplishing within its minimum requirements would require testing. Without special accommodations, however, you can generally assume that having n views will require rendering n frames before sending a compiled frame to print.
Are there alternatives? Such as a 360 fustrums and then selecting parts of the view to show off, such as the front of the tank and turret direction.
A frustum is the portion of a cone or pyramid that remains after its upper part has been cut off by a plane parallel to its base. This is the most common style of projections for establishing how the world is seen by a point of view since it looks most like how we see the world. This is called the perspective projection. The near and far planes are not the same scale, though their sides have the same ratio; were they the same, it would be called an orthographic projection. What happens during rendering is that any 3D mesh geometry that falls in between the near plane and the far plane (above) is selectively turned into visual data using shaders and is compressed into a flat image. You can consider the near plane and the far plane mapped. When the planes are resized, repositioned, distorted, or the mapping by which their interior geometry is processed is changed, the scope of their rendered elements is changed. In this game, that mostly applies to the fov, though the most stark example you are probably familiar with is the fisheye effect. Obviously fisheye is probably not what you want. The trick is that non-linear mapping can be used to render a range of the scene wider than a simple perspective projection but you may need copious post-production image processing to sort out what you're looking at. There are methods of projection called cylinder and panorama but I don't think those immediately satisfy the "do it in fewer shots" aspect. At least I don't know enough about their technical side and can only go by what I see in images to make that assessment. Edit: while Cubic 360, the last entry in that video above, might look most suitable to what you want to accomplish, it looks like the provided example still renders the scene multiple times. I'll look to see if that's absolutely required of all existing implementations.
The fish eye effect seems (I'm guessing) to be created by how you display it. Similar to displaying the map of the round world, putting the round 360 vision on a flat 2d screen would make that effect. Cubic seems to go around that by displaying each lookimg direction separately, causing the fisheye effect to disappear. Didn't Ps2 have a 180 FOV option if you edited the files a long time ago? That would mean that the groundwork would be there already, and only the selective FOV would need to be shown, with the ability to show different views. I would like it if you looked into how that renders. It would be wonderful if multiple screens is possible.
I knew there would be at least 1 git gud post. Most games over come the limited view of the world while driving and gunning by giving you a pretty decent 3rd person view. If the camera angle was significantly set back from the vehicle and a crosshair was rendered in 3rd person it could also alleviate the need for dual cameras. (PS4 so no git gud overlays for me. Just a piece of masking tape on my monitor) Either way I primarily would like this on the lightning. The whole point of the smaller tank is to be a faster single manned blitz tank. Being hindered by the driving and gunning mechanics as it is (again most other games over come it by giving you much further 3rd person, but that would be asking too much I'm sure, being able to see around corners and all that) limits the effectiveness of the lightning to the point it makes it pretty obsolete and is only really an option when you can't pull an MBT. MBTs have greater armor hp and DPS to over come the draw backs of trying to drive and gun at the same time, basically allowing them to just stop and trade fire. Or they move sideways. Being better able to drive and gun at the same time would give any of the tracked turret vehicles a more rewarding and fun play style in my oppinion. As far as git gud? It would certainly still apply if you could see where you are going while shooting. Overcoming mechanics that could be better shouldn't be "git gud".
Ive long hated the way they made the MBTs driver gunned. In ps1 the driver drove and the gunner would gun. This allowed the driver to always be in 3rd person and look where he was going. The lightening in ps1 was always easy prey due to it being driver gunned. I was pretty displeased when i logged into PS2 to find that they made the MBTs driver gunnery.
