Are there plans for landing-aid systems i.e. radio altimeters to display real distances between ship and surface or external cameras displayed on MFDs?
TL;DRThe developers want to bring back the assisted landing display that was lost in the cockpit UI conversion, hopefully, but are wary of external cameras because render-to-texture screens cost performance.
So for the people that remember pre-3.0, we actually had on the 3D radar, when you went into landing mode, you had sort of an assisted landing. That's something we're going to be looking to bring back. It was simply when the conversion to Item 2.0 happened and all the cockpits got changed from their old UI system to render to texture, that was just something that just didn't fit on the schedule at the time. So that's hopefully going to come back. External cameras, it's interesting. The graphics guys are sort of always pointing a gun to our head over render to texture on screens saying, please don't do stuff like this. So I don't want to do anything down that line. But it is an often talked about point.
When you say please don't do something like that, you mean like unnecessarily or frivolously?
Yeah, don't have 16 cameras doing render to texture in a cockpit all pointing different ways.
Yes, obviously everything has a performance cost and the choice is one more camera or getting another player in your close field. We're always going to choose to have another player, of course.