The Weaknesses of Falcon's Action Camera
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Hey All,
I have a very strange question, that not many people have brought up. Is anyone currently working on, or can someone shed light onto how the BMS/Falcon action camera (shift+tilde) chooses what to show, and what angles to use?
In the game Total Air War, it’s action camera is leagues beyond. I cover this in my own video, here:
@28:02
I think I know why the TAW (Total Air War) action cam is so godlike, and the falcon 4 cam is so lacking. The TAW cam seems to be able to know actions BEFORE they happen, while the falcon cam can only view the present.
What I mean by this, is that say for a CAS mission, the taw action cam will focus on the jets and their targets seconds before the missiles/bombs have launched, ensuring a cool view when they DO launch. The Falcon cam can only show it at the split second (in which there’s a chance it will show a bad angle) or in post, and where it may be too late to see the cool action shots.
It definitely has to do with the TAW AI and their action loops. In the taw action cam you can see the action each plane is performing, the camera can prioritize as such.
I still to this day don’t know why the falcon cam will refuse to show action, though. Half the time there’s a neat ground battle near me, I hit the button and it focuses on my plane (in stable flight doing nothing fun) instead.My question is, firstly I want to understand if this is even possible to make a new logic of how the Falcon action cam chooses what to focus on. I took a cursory glance at the FreeFalcon code to get an understanding, and I think the above summary (focuses on the present, not the potential future) is correct.
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Why does the Falcon action cam focus on the wrong objects (i.e. a ground battle or air battle is happening, why focus on my plane or other idle ones)
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Can it predict future actions (i.e. the AI has a lock and is about to fire, the AI is running in for a ground attack), if so, how to implement?
I think I’m sounding a little crazy here, but hope someone else gets what I am trying to bring up. I’m just curious if there are any focuses, as the Total Air War system would be perfect for BMS in which an actual air AND ground war is occurring all the time, TAW’s camera is too good for its world
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@ajthenoob all things are possible … the algorithm or approach you describe for TAW is probably right.
I think it’s clear this (external views in general) just hasn’t been a priority focus for any BMS devs, past 20 years.
specifically for Action Cam … it sounds as if there’s some tension to just get rid of it – apparently (just repeating what I’ve heard) the way it jumps around causes bubble de-aggregation problems in MP. but it’s fun in SP, because it’s the only cam that works after you’ve ejected. so… who knows if it will see further investment.
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Here is the relevant FreeFalcon code.
TLDR Action Cam makes a priority list:
A missile, or plane that’s shooting it, or its target, or a plane that’s talking in the current comms, or a random plane, in that order. Cycle objects, refresh every 8sec.I feel like this makes sense. It’s pretty rudimentary, I don’t know how the AI in Falcon works but there could be a “smarter” way of doing this if we could find and ‘focus on’ other attributes or “weight” the objects in some form - we don’t need the camera to focus on the SA-5 for 1 minute as it’s missile is up for 2 minutes long, we can cycle between SA
In Total Air War, we can use keybinds to manually switch objects, or filter focus to friendly or enemy, or air/ground.
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@airtex2019 I’m mainly a SP player, so I love action camera. When I was a kid, playing Total Air War, I wanted to have a constantly playing screen that would just let the action cam run and you could watch the air war live. Funny enough the best game for that is falcon 4 but it’s action cam just isn’t up to snuff.
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I think most people here love flying way more than watching. That’s kind of a point of this bestest sim.
Don’t take me wrong, I too have this action camera impetus. When I was in the army and we had hand grenade practice, I was the one who “forgot” to put my head down after the throw. Got a hit on my helmet from a staff sergeant before the grenade went off and pulled my curious brain cell back into the hole.🫣🤪