Azrapse: I have no experience with VR. But I was thinking on developing the game in a way that the user could tweak the eye camera height, distance to the dashboard and FOV so that they would feel personally comfortable. A bit like what you do when you sit first on a car you have never driven before, and you move the seat and the mirrors around before starting it.
Again, I don't know if that is the standard procedure with VR games or that would be considered too advanced and, instead, we need to make a set of settings the user chooses one from.
ender910: I might be able to provide some feedback here (I'm the guy from the XWAU forums btw). I consulted with a friend of mine who's been actively developing for VR for the last few years who was able to provide some insights. I'll just kind of quote him word for word here (with minor editing for clarity) so I don't misconstrue anything:
"Well if they are going to have VR they need to build a full interior for the ships, not just the cockpit dashboard and not just the front part of the ship. Other than that it's just a regular ass 3d model, and they need to be to-scale. So no fridge-box sized ships, even if it looks right on monitor. It'll look like a lego starship if you don't scale it to the accurate "real life" scale these thing are supposed to be.
An object is at whatever scale it's at period, monitors just tend to make tiny shit look bigger. You notice it in VR because the view is actually 3D. Left/right eye views are showing shit separated by the distance between your eyes, so all depth cueing works right. You can instantly know shit's not scaled right."
Rule of thumb: if you couldn't get away with making a prop to the scale you're using, it wouldn't work in VR either. E.g., no 2ft dashboard + 50 deg FOV, since a 2ft long dahsboard would be absurd and look like a toy, but it doesn't look so absurd on a super low FOV monitor when stretched across the monitor."
Took me a moment to visualize it in my head, but it makes sense. And for cockpits I could see this being particularly troublesome since you really don't want players to feel extremely claustrophobic, or having any number of other weird scaling/visual issues. Unfortunately, I'm not exactly sure how this impacts current plans for the cockpits, as outlined in the rest of your post.
Thanks for the insightful post!
Currently, the game has a cockpit interior to at 1:1 scale with the ship exterior, (and of course, matches the geometry of the ship exterior). I don't know how claustrophobic the Y-Wing cockpit will feel in VR. It kind of feels so in the movies. But the BTL-S3 Y-Wing is a two-seater, so it should have plenty of room behind the pilot for the optional turret gunner (an optional coop mode I wish to implement some day)
Also, everything in the game follows a 1:1 scale with their "real world" counterparts.
That gave us problems already with long distances and loss of precision with the game engine float coordinates, but we solved that already by making the game player-centrist (the world moves around the player, instead of the player moving around the world). Now I am happy that I didn't choose to solve that by scaling down the world, that was the other possibility. That would have given us problems with VR, as you said.
The cockpit I made has only the front dashboard detailed. The rest are flat surfaces that I didn't bother detailing because they weren't going to be used at this stage. However, the game is supposed to allow the pilot to look around, we had to create the full interior sooner or later anyway. Also, the gunner station should have some detailing for later, but which instruments the gunner needs is something that is yet to be determined.
I am not sure how will we do with all the dead-angles, though. In the original game, when you look at a direction where the line of sight is blocked by the cockpit body, instead, you are shown some kind of monitor displaying what looks to be the footage of a camera mounted on the exterior of the cockpit, towards that angle.
For example, if you look up by pressing the keypad 5, since the Y-Wing ceiling is totally solid, you get a monitor labeled "UP".
How can that be done with VR, I don't know. I can think on solutions, like making the cockpit become transparent, like in the "Contact" movie. But that sounds too otherworldly.
A panel that slides don't in front of the pilot's eyes showing the view outside? It would look okay on a flat monitor, but I bet it would be disconcerting in VR stereoscopic view.