In 3rd person view, a pilot can anticipate when and where they might get shot, by seeing fire coming before it lands. In 1st person view, this is not possible unless rockets/missiles are being shot (via the radar) .

I'd like to have an optional rear view mirror/camera when flying a ship in 1st person view. If I had VR, i could just turn my head, but since I don't, this would be the next best thing (imo).

The concept is not completely unheard of either ;-)

+1

I remember this as a feature in Wing Commander. Would be mighty handy here.

+1 ....but,

A "mirror" effect might take a bit of effort to implement. I recall something simliar in X-wing, but they were commands "lookleft", "lookright", and "lookback" which could be bound to keys...this allowed the pilot to quickly glance 90 degrees left and right, or 180 degrees back, without changing the orientation of your ship. Currently, this is only something i can do by locking turbo and then looking around. Maybe a quicker solution would be to create a "mouselook" mode that does not drag the ship along with it?

Just spitballing here ;)

"A "mirror" effect might take a bit of effort to implement." - shouldn't be too hard actually - in most titles that feature one, they simply have a reverse view, with a reduced LOD and sometimes other things missing (like fog blobs or the skybox). Meh, I am not sure how it would work under mouselook (should it always display the reverse of the ship, or the rear view of the camera?) but technicalities aside I'm not sure how useful a fixed rear view mirror would actually be in VO.

As someone who uses VR a lot, I can tell you now that looking to the sides is all you get, looking behind? Kind of I guess? The 3D cockpit kind of blocks most of that, and even disabled I don't find myself looking behind a lot. But I'm not an owl, so only do it a lot if you want a really bloody sore neck. This extra dimension adds a lot though! Watching swarms and other missiles that track is great for dodging them while still remaining hostile. I've always wanted a key you can hold down to look around without enabling mouselook or turbo (and it should work with mouselook on too) - just hold a key, mouse becomes disconnected from flight while held, and enables the pilot to look in any direction quickly (including behind if so desired).

I mean, you kind of can do that now in fake VR mode. Really should be something added to the 2d client!

+1 I used to play a racing game on playstation that used PSP as rear view. The idea is great