3rd person isn't realistic. I'm sure that the devs have a nice "Bridge" interface planned for us.

Actually they don't.

I've asked Incarnate, he's said there is currently no plans for cockpits or any other kind of internal graphics system, as they "waste polygons". I agree, but IMHO, we should have that option, I know for me it would add a lot of immersiveness to the game if I had a good cockpit interface...but that's just me.

I said that I do not favor cockpit displays for fighter craft, beyond the use of a HUD (although I would like the HUD to be more configurable). I do recognize the immersiveness factor, but I think it's outweighed by the combat visibility disadvantages. I didn't say anything about cap ships or how we'll be implementing their control interfaces.

How about we just say the ships are designed like in the Mobile Suit Gundam series. You don't see out the cockpit, the ship has cameras on it that feed info to the video screens. This could also explain how visibility is so good in space. Some sort of X-Ray echolocation that gets translated into a visual image by the computer's processors. Storywise, there are plenty of ways to get over the lack of a cockpit.

Yes, and storywise, we already did (long ago, and with exactly that sort of explanation). However, that doesn't always help people who want to have some sort of visible cockpit.

/me drags the thread back on-topic

in progress update? pretty please? pretty please with sugar on top? and icing and sprinkles too?

Even if you did try to justify the 360 spherical vision of a capital ship it would still be hard to control. You're basically sticking a camera at the center of the huge capital ship model. The problem with that is you really have no indicator as to HOW big it is. You'll end up bumping and crashing that thing everywhere. With a HUD or third person perspective, that problem is solved.

The way I pictured the third person perspective of the capital ship would be to have a player controllable camera that can rotate around the capital ship at a fixed location. You will be able to engage enemy targets by simply clicking on them in this third person perspective, kind of like how Homeworld works. The AI turrets would automatically engage the targets you click on, and evenly distribute the workload if you click on more than one enemy target. Meanwhile you'll still be able to control your frigate via keyboard/joystick.

As far as visible cockpits of fighters go, maybe a ghost or transparent outline of the ship (viewed from inside the exact cockpit location) can be sort of placed in the spherical camera of your HUD. For example you'd see transparent outlines of the wings, nose cone, tail fins, etc. of the Hornet as you look around. It won't actually restrict your view, since it's transparent, but it'll make each ship's HUD unique and cool looking without resorting to heavy use of polygons and textures.

I don't think cap ships should have a 3rd person view, you're supposed to be a good pilot even to get a hold of on of these, and even then, you should have a good spatial sense if you want to even fly a fighter, although much more in the case of capital ships, because they are so huge.

It's not very intuitive to make the player guess the spatial capacity of such a huge ship. For the fighters it's not a problem, because the camera already takes up a good amount of space to fill up that area. You can see this by pressing shift + [ (or ]) until you've got your own ship selected. When you do, you'll see the bounding box used for the model. For the capital ship it would be enormous and elongated. Even for a pilot who has spatial awareness it'll be hard, especially with those huge dorsal fins protruding. Perhaps my idea of a transparent ship model outline may solve that problem though.

Please consider restarting the current "perspective" discussion to its own thread. Somebody looking for this topic is unlikely to find it given that the listed topic is "update?".