Top/down instead of side lasers

[Cdr. Jettison]

Recently, I've come across a space simulator game (I think it was Ad Astra). As in Oolite, player ship has up to four laser mounts there, but instead of port/starboard there are top/bottom lasers. All view and weapon positions in Oolite being defined in shipdata.plist, I guess it should be possible to abuse view_position_port/starboard and weapon_position_port/starboad to point up/down (zenith/nadir) instead to get this effect?

To do this properly aft view should probably also be flipped upside down (as if you were standing on your head when looking behind you). That way 1) cycling over all the views front-top-aft-bottom-front will give you consistant change, just like doing it laterally front-port-aft-starboard-front does it now and 2) the up/down controls stay the same over all four views whereas yaw/roll axes stay the same for front/aft views and are simply exchanged for top/down views.

There are OXP ships that do some nice things with custom views like gun/scoop/cargo views in Thargoid's Vortex, but yet I didn't see OXPs fiddling with view/weapon positions.

What do you think would it be practical/useful thing to do? Or have I overlooked something obvious? I probably won't have the time to do and playtest it this week (well, actually I probably should to learn quite a bit more about quaternions first ), but it would be nice if someone had a try at it and shared their experiences here in forum.

[JensAyton]

I guess it should be possible to abuse view_position_port/starboard and weapon_position_port/starboad to point up/down (zenith/nadir) instead to get this effect?

No. You can set the position, but not the direction.

[Wildeblood]

I guess it should be possible to abuse view_position_port/starboard and weapon_position_port/starboad to point up/down (zenith/nadir) instead to get this effect?

No. You can set the position, but not the direction.

I thought about this same thing quite a while ago, but it became confusing so I stopped thinking about it. Flip your monitor onto its side. You now have top and bottom views instead of port and starboard, but your ship is drawn sideways in external views. Flip the ship's model 90 degrees. Cool. Design a custom HUD, because the normal one will be drawn down one side of your monitor. The scanner will still be drawn sideways, even if moved to a better position. That's when I stopped thinking about it. If you were willing to accept no scanner, or a scanner drawn sideways, it could be done - sort of. That's all - then I went back to thinking about a player-flyable Astromine instead.

[DaddyHoggy]

I guess it should be possible to abuse view_position_port/starboard and weapon_position_port/starboad to point up/down (zenith/nadir) instead to get this effect?

No. You can set the position, but not the direction.

I thought about this same thing quite a while ago, but it became confusing so I stopped thinking about it. Flip your monitor onto its side. You now have top and bottom views instead of port and starboard, but your ship is drawn sideways in external views. Flip the ship's model 90 degrees. Cool. Design a custom HUD, because the normal one will be drawn down one side of your monitor. The scanner will still be drawn sideways, even if moved to a better position. That's when I stopped thinking about it. If you were willing to accept no scanner, or a scanner drawn sideways, it could be done - sort of. That's all - then I went back to thinking about a player-flyable Astromine instead.

If you're lucky - most modern LCD screens can rotate and come with rotational software - I've got one of my widescreen monitors at work, rotated and setup to be 1080x1920 - excellent for documents.