3D Cockpits

During a conversation with Claude I learned that a 3D modelled cockpit is mandatory for VR support: modern VR headsets come with head tracking, which means that head movements have to be reflected in the game.

I didn't have anyone to build 3D cockpits for me, and I didn't want to start learning a 3D modelling program (I had tried Blender, and it was a horror trip for me), so I told Claude to model them after the 2D cockpit views of the game, with some hints from me.

So I gave Claude the order to rebuild the cockpit. After one night and a dozen or more hand-drawn sketches and images, I found out that Claude hadn't understood the assignment and its implications at all. When I took a closer look at the "finished" cockpit, I noticed that it was far from finished. The problem is that you need to look at the flat cockpit really closely to understand how the 3D version of a correspondingly built cockpit should look, and while humans can handle that thanks to their visual and spatial imagination, Claude couldn't.

Instead of building a simple "tub" with some interior and a dashboard and just fitting it inside the existing ship models, it had built something super complicated involving over 20,000 triangles. In the end I made a pretty accurate hand-drawn sketch of the basic structure, and only then did it get built acceptably well.

Sigh. That really was a pain in the neck.

What Claude did quite nicely was to put some pseudo devices into the cockpit. These are actually just textures with height information, which D2X-XL v2 renders quite nicely, giving them a rather 3D-ish look.

The HUD icons are fully integrated into the cockpit now, with the weapon icons resting in the struts. If you turn them off, the display openings get a nice cover (see the last picture).

Anyhow, acceptable 3D cockpits are available now, so I can add VR support (without having a headset). The cockpits do not look super great and super sleek - I don't want to work my way into some 3D modelling software to build one myself. The entire process of upgrading D2X-XL has exhausted me quite a bit, and I just want to lean back, rest, and enjoy the fruit of my labor.

Here are some screenshots of what I consider final. What you see outside of the cockpit are the external parts of the actual ship model you are sitting in.