Version 0
0.0 WiFi OpenTrack 4.0
Background
I’m not exactly new to flight sims but I didn’t play any for years and the landgamescape changed a lot since then. Just for a frame of reference: When MicroProse announced yet another B-17 game it was like the 3rd iteration for me. Yes, I did play B-17 Flying Fortress on an Amiga back in the days. Still have that box with this manual full of pictures and data. Also read 📖 A Higher Call years later.
Far from it. In fact I don’t even enjoy “real” flying. Aviation does have a certain effect on me though and I’m even sometimes found at an airfield.
And while I can crash a virtual Cessna anywhere nowadays, and even got some other virtual planes in the air, I’m not qualified for any real flying.
Please keep this in mind for everything on this page especially when I describe any flight systems of mine.
There were other PC games as well. With jets, helicopters and what else. And Elite, of course, and Wing Commander and eventually X: Beyond the Frontier. Pew Pew.
And then it all stopped for many years. Until Corona happened and it was stay-at-home all of the sudden and my outdoor hobbys were set to inactive from one day to another.
Chasing Immersion
Naturally I spent a lot more time at the PC again and while reading through the patch notes of X4: Foundations I stumbled over something they called “head tracking”.
This was unknown to me and in the end I had to jump quite some hoops to get it working. The full story can be read on my blog.
So this is probably what can be called version 0 of the cockpit. I used my smartphone’s gyroscope sensor and forwarded the data to opentrack. It was clunky, messy, slow and sucked. And I wanted more. This was my start for chasing immersion.