Head Tracking Gear Support

About a fortnight ago a representative of NaturalPoint Inc., a company selling high quality headtracking gear for the professional and also the gaming market had contacted me. They were looking for more reference applications to use their TrackIR system, and had asked Koolbear from the DescentBB.net whether there were any people in the Descent community who could add that to Descent. Koolbear had given them my e-mail address, and when they asked me whether I could and would add TrackIR support to D2X-XL, I just took enough time to read and understand NaturalPoints developer NDA before saying yes.

Implementation was very straight forward and the support by NaturalPoint was very good, so it didn't take me long and I was in the mines, directing my ship with little movements of my head. After some tuning of the sensitivity, I could control the ship amazingly well despite of the very little practise I had.

So now what I guess most Descent players automatically do in heated battles: Duck and move forward and backward with the ship, now actually does what we always hoped when doing it and never happened: The ship will go right in the direction we're swaying our upper body or turning our head to! Way too cool. I have to say that the system is amazingly responsive, very precise and very well adjustable, and that the idea and tech behind it are ingeniously simple and simply ingenious. I know, that sounds like I am trying some marketing babble, but that's my actual impression of the system.

To utilize TrackIR support in D2X-XL, extract d2x-trackir.dll to the D2X-XL folder, launch the TrackIR software, and configure ship controls in the new TrackIR configuration menu accessible via the controls configuration. Unfortunately, TrackIR is currently only available for MS Windows.

I am bit tired right now, after having cracked away until deep at night at the code (and a few bugs), but I will slap up a video of the player ship being steered with the NaturalPoint TrackIR head tracking gear soon.