g-force blendspace poses (to be implemented) hit reaction animations (to be implemented) g-force body animation (current) >> What do involuntary head & body movements (of a placeholder character model) add to the experience of a space flight sim? How does it aid your immersion into first person, if your avatar is ragdolling around in the cockpit for nothing but visual effect, while you are being deprived of camera/game control (in favor of enabling these redundant effects)? What valuable information do you gain from it to improve your flight? The moving parts of your avatar have absolutely no place in a cockpit sim whatsoever! Animating him is redundant, and as such shouldn't be allowed to negatively affect your level of game control. The character model is supposed to follow & mirror my every command, and not take on a life of his own, otherwise he's disrupting the experience & killing the immersion! He is supposed to be nothing but a spineless placeholder model for the player, and I most certainly do not want him imposing on & impeding my experience of playing the space flight sim (<= you know, the ACTUAL game), or my immersion into first person! I want to control the avatar, and not have him act out on me like a balky horse! Animating the avatar in cockpit only creates problems: Reducing the player's level of control in favor of redundant visual effects Imposing on immersion, because it creates the feel of directing a surrogate who's carrying a head-mounted go-pro, instead of controlling an avatar (which adds an additional barrier between the player and the game experience) Negatively affecting coordination Potentially inducing motion sickness, nausea, headaches, eyestrain (see 3.) - due to abrupt & unexspected loss of camera control, and nauseating camera shifts Impeding 1:1 tracking of head-mounted devices like trackIR Making VR support impossible (VR does not work without camera control; and if you already create motion sickness issues without VR, then how much worse of an issue is this going to be if you actually add a head-mounted display to the equation?) And then an endless attempt to find solutions for a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place! Animating the avatar might look good on video, giving it a more cinematic feel, but it creates a more passive gaming experience as a consequence, one that comes at the expense of control & immersion. I'm not controlling an avatar, I'm saddling a balky horse (the character model), and that balky horse is then saddled on top of another balky horse (the spaceship)! What is with this game's compulsive drive to take away control of the camera from the player? EDIT 2: by recommendation of user Space_Wraith i will add another point: further adding to the already existing disparity between different control modes (IM vs. vJOY & Joystick) This head movement is ANOTHER area where interactive mode might have a distinct advantage over other control modes like vjoy or joystick. In interactive mode, if your head is spinning around, you keep the cursor on the target pip, or the direction you want to head to and the ship will go there. If you are using a vjoy or joystick, its going to be quite disorienting having your point of view not be aligned with the view of the ship and trying to steer you ship on course. So its not just bad for trackIR and VR... its also bad for control mode balance! EDIT: I'll include this post here as well, from a recent conversation with a citizen in another thread: Tulkus, June 2nd at 17:17 I have feedback about the head motion from the pilot rag-dolling inside the cockpit seen in the ATV yesterday. I think they called them "G-force blend space poses". I feel they are far more disorienting than it would be to move your head in a cockpit is in real life and would be very detracting to experience. it might make it more realistic to see the character move from outside the ship. but given how hard it is to see a pilot inside a cockpit from the outside while it is pulling heavy Gs, it seems like a bad trade-off. There are multiple reasons why the head bob is unrealistically disorienting. Similar to the issues with head bob with run animations, the brain filters out alot of that movement. Proprioceptive feedback from movement of the joints in the neck along with information about the head's rotational velocity from the vestibular system tells the brain where the head is moving. With this information, a system of reflexes moves the eyes to keep them fixated on the same object. This is easy to show in real life. Look in a mirror or ask anyone to move their head in any way with their eyes open. Their eyes will always continue to fixate on a point while the head moves. The eyes never drift with the head movement. Another thing that makes things less disorienting IRL is the fact that the eyes can twist inside the head through the coronal plane (this is the roll axis). These movements are called intorsion and extorsion. Your eye can actually intort and extort through about 30 degrees of motion. THis is also something you can see in a mirror if you look closely at your eye in a mirror and tilt your head to its side. It is why you can tilt your head to the side a bit without the horizon changing position relative to your field of reference. I hope this information might provide avenues for devs to mitigate the amount of head movement like they did with Bird Neck 2.0