129. Restored the LookUp View (Pilot's Cockpit) with improvements
Mod: Improved LookUp View and some other bug fixes
In Tornado, hitting the Home key twice yields the Lookup view. Here is the default Lookup view of out-of-the-box Tornado.
In Mod#124 I removed this default Lookup view! I thought it was 'useless' since it seemed to me
more suited for Tornado ADV missions, what with its total emphasis on the sky. Recently, I have been informed by Mandjare78 that
"this function was very useful for a real Tornado pilot in low flying, as to predict the next turn between hills and mountains." I never knew that! I always thought the second Home key was for air-to-air (Tornado ADV) combat, which was pretty useless to for me, since 90% of the time I am flying the Tornado IDS!
So now that I've been informed how important the view is, I've restored the original "sightpoint above the canopy rail" feature. With FIVE improvements.
(1) I raised the horizon a bit so that now you will see majority of sky with some earth. This should help orientate the gamer.
You can see an unobstructed view of the horizon, with a status bar to boot! (2) The Lookup view now comes with a status bar. More information to the gamer. I had to modify the LoadFramePan procedure of the FRAMEPAN.ASM file so that the status bar is flicker-free.
(3) I have made the free-style external view (see the third screenshot of
my previous post here) as the third Home key press.
Hitting the Home key a THIRD time gives you this nice external view of Mod 122-124.
You can pan this view left (z key) and right (x key), and pitch up (0 key) and down (1 key) (4) A fourth Home key press will cycle the gamer back to the PilotPanel view. A slight inconvenience of having to toggle/cycle through three Home key screens, but balanced by the increased functionality and gameplay made available.
(5) Fixed a graphics bug where hitting Control+F5 (Change Drone Type) will cause a screen anomaly in many views (Pilot View, Lookup View, etc.). I modified the MODEL.ASM and VIEWS.ASM files for this.
SummaryHit Home once - Pilot Panel (cockpit) view
Hit Home again - Modified Lookup view with status bar
Hit Home a third time - the freestyle external view which is fully adjustable
Hi Contrl+Home anytime to return to the Pilot Panel (cockpit) view
Six seconds away from the target. Trees are whizzing by at 420 knots, 150 feet above ground.
The Lookup view in gorgeous green Night Vision colours See the latest attached FLIGHT.EXE.
Cheers and Happy Father's Day
Frankie Kam
Update on 16th June 2019 (Father's Day in Malaysia) - Control+Home key added (shortcut to Pilot Panel view) A problem feature with this mod is that it takes 3 hits of the Home key to return to the Pilot Panel view. This can be tedious if, let's say, from the Pilot Panel view, the gamer jumps into the Navigator Panel view with the PgUp key, and then decides to revert to the Pilot Panel view. Not possible! Hitting the Home key at this point will show the Lookup view. Another hit on the Home key will bring up the Freestyle External view. So the gamer has to hit the Home key THREE times to get the Pilot Panel view! A usability problem indeed.
So solve this frustrating problem, I
added the Control+Home key combination to shortcut back to the Pilot Panel view. This key
immediately brings the gamer back to the Pilot Panel view.
The Control+Home key will shortcut to Pilot Panel view No matter which view is currently active, Control+Home will show up the Pilot Panel view immediately! So there is no need for the user to hit Home three times to return to the Pilot Panel view. In my humble opinion, this is a 'finesse' move, to borrow a chess term.
I've removed the previous FLIGHT.EXE upload. In its place, I have UPLOADED the latest 'finesse' FLIGHT.EXE. I have re-uploaded the latest modified VIEWS.ASM and MODEL.ASM source code. The latter two files are uploaded just in case I may need to refer to them in future.
ENJOY!