I used to think TrackIR was silly, gimicky, and too nerdy even for me. I know some of you use it, but for those who don't know what it is or didn't want to spend 200 bucks on the official TrackIR product, you can do it for FREE or close to free if you don't have some spare parts laying around. Briefly, Evochron supports TrackIR data sent to it which allows you to look around the cockpit and out the windows simply by moving your head. Your first reaction to this would be, do you have to wear a giant cyborg helmet? And if you turn your head how would you see the screen? Both of those concerns are irrelevant and you can try it out for yourself. I'll tell you how.
First of all, I want to give kudos to Vice for spending the time on this feature. He must have believed in the immersion this brings to Evochron. Having tried it myself, I can't imagine playing Evochron without it, it's that good. With the right sensitivity (curve) tweaking, a very slight turn of your head will give you the freedom to look left,right,up,down in realtime WHILE flying your ship. The advantages in combat have gone up 10-fold! Vonari blast by out of your viewport? Look over or up and maintain your heading. Landing on planets? It sure is cool looking anywhere to get a good view of the surface. (I personally think planetary flight is where head tracking shines! It's gorgeous!)
So with that out of the way, let's get started!
THINGS YOU NEED
1.) A web cam. Any old webcam will do, as long as it has a decent framerate. (15FPS minimum if you want smooth functionality. Or a digital camera that can act as a webcam plugged in to USB. If you have a Wii-mote, you can even use it as a "camera", and is apparently epic with 100FPS frame rate and very accurate. You can buy one at the store and follow instructions online on how to accomplish this. Or even a built-in camera on a laptop. I use bootcamp Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro and simply use the built-in iSight. Note: it does NOT have to support color. In fact, it will be configured to be completely dark and only able to pick up a bright LED. It does NOT have to be night vision capable. Any camera can "see" infrared as a light source. Our eyes can't. Which is why IR is nice because you don't have distracting light.
2.) A super bright LED pen, keychain, or clip. The PROPER thing to do is buy an IR (Infrared) LED with the right amount of batteries from radioshack, or cannabilize a remote controller or something with IR LEDs. Even ripping open an old optical mouse. It's simple to do, but for now just find a bright LED.
3.) A headset. Headphones. A ball cap or hat. Something you can wear on your head to attach the LED pointing toward the camera.
4.) Magic. All you need now is an open source (free) program called FreeTrack. You can download it, even with lots of LED construction tips at The Official FreeTrack Web Site. This software does what the TrackIR software does, and it outputs data in FreeTrack form as well as TrackIR for TrackIR compatible games. Evochron picks it up beautifully.
INSTRUCTIONS:
1.) Mount the web cam on your monitor and align it so it can see your head. For those with built-in cams, you have a sleek solution. Just test it and make sure it works and you can see your face/head.
2.) Install the FreeTrack software. Run it and set the "source" to your webcam. It should be in a the drop down list.
3.) This is a little bit more complicated but go ahead and hit the "Start" button and verify you can see the web cam working. If it's already pitch black, try shining your LED at the camera and see if it picks up a "dot". It's important from here, you drag the "threshhold" slider to darken the video so the ONLY thing that shows up is your LED. There can be no other video imagery displayed. Not even a little bit.
4.) If the threshhold slider isn't doing it for you, click the "Camera" button and start messing around with the sliders. Usually dropping the brightness all the way down and increasing the contrast will blackout the video feed. This is sort of an art. Make sure you don't do it so much that the camera can't "see" your LED.
5.) Pay close attention to the red text indicating the current camera "FPS". This is critical. Click the framerate tab and make sure you set the framerate to the actual framerate your camera is reporting on the first tab. Turn off the "auto" checkbox and set the multiplier to 4.
6.) Once you have a pitch black video feed and a very clear "dot" when you shine your LED at the cam, go ahead and mount the LED to your headset or ballcap. Do it fancy, or hell use tape. Just get it mounted so it points toward the camera so you can start tweaking and testing.
7.) This is another absolutely critical setup step. In order for the software to track your movement, the camera needs to pick up a CLEAN light source from your LED with absolutely pitch black darkness everywhere else. Because each of you will have different LED's and sit at different distances, this dot will be bigger or smaller. Adjust your camera settings to make this dot WHITE as much as possible without introducing any of the background imagery in to the video feed. Now you need to tell FreeTrack how big this dot is (in pixels) and what it's min/max size must be for the software to consider it your light source. You do this by clicking the Set Tab. Set the minimum to just a few points below the full size of the dot, and set the maximum to 10 points over the actual size of the dot. You can gauge this by watching the LED indicator at the bottom right. If you only have one LED, this indicator meter should only show ONE led lit up AT ALL TIMES! This indicator shows you how many light sources (points based on the whites in the video feed) it's detecting. This is CRITICAL. Keep setting the minimum higher until you see all lights on the indicator go off. Then click 4 points back down so you see only 1 green LED lit up on the indicator. Lower the maximum value all the way down until you see the lights go off again. Then bump this max value up 10 points. Tinker with it, you will get a feel for it.
8.) Click the "Model" button near the top and make sure you set it to how many LED's you are using. In most cases you only need 1, which is the default.
9.) There is a little drop down at the very bottom set to "Front" by default. This shows a 3D skull which will move in relation to where your LED dot is moving on the webcam. Set this to "First Person" which will show a 3D box with you in the center of it. Easier to test this way. If you aren't seeing movement, face forward directly at the screen and click "center". Try again.
10.) Now move your head to test movement. There should be little to NO delay in movement on screen in correlation to your head movement. If you are getting lag, go back and adjust the framerate setting under the framerate tab up or down until it's spot on. Usually this setting will be 15 or 30. Movement lag is almost always associated with this setting. Move your head ALL around and pay CLOSE attention to the LED indicator. If at ANY time you see two LEDS light up, increase the "minimum" pixel size value by 1 or 2. If at ANY time you see the 1st light go off, you will need to lower the minimum value. Also make sure the maximum isn't effecting it too. The reason this is so critical, is because each time these "blips" happen, the software is confused and doesn't have a solid read on ONE point (if using single LED configuration). This causes movement to stop and you will get pauses or jitters when moving your head around. Just make sure (in a single LED configuration for example) the 1st green light on the indicator is permanently illuminated. Never less. Never more.
11.) Once you have all of that working, start fiddling with sensitivity and curves to suit your tastes. If you are holding your head perfectly still and you notice jittery shaking, click the Profile option and increase the "smoothing" slider for both X and Y until it stops. Don't go too much, because the more smoothing you add, the less snappy and responsive it is to your head motion. Also on this profile options page, kick up the sensitivity sliders for X and Y to 2.0 or 3.0. (I prefer 3.0). This sensitivity makes motion snappy and realistic with more movement. To adjust HOW FAR the cockpit camera rotates, we use pitch curves for that.
12.) Chances are, you are making a lot of head movement to get the camera to rotate far enough. And it's still probably not going as far as you want it. We use the "Curves" option to fix this. By default, the X (left to right) and the Y (up and down) are preset to Linear. Ignore the "rotate" axis. We aren't using it. You will need to adjust the curves for X and Y to meet your tastes. Drag the 3 points around and experiment. (be careful not to mix them up and cross them!!! You should always be able to get a curved line!). The curves represent how much travel and how sensitive it is the further you rotate your head that direction. Curves allow you to fine tune movement. Linear is a snappy slope which is a consistent rotation of the camera with the movement of your head, but is also really responsive and can make you dizzy. If you right click in the curve areas you can choose a couple presets. For example, try "Low Soft". Do this for both X and Y. What this does is adjust the curve to allow small movements while centered without the camera moving all over the place. It makes the center view feel "sticky" and requires slightly more movement to actually look around. I imagine a lot of people will use this kind of curve so it's easy to stay centered more often. If your travel isn't far enough, I found dragging the curve points closer to the bottom helps and you have to make sure you drag the points far enough to the right which indicates more travel. I think by default, the 3rd point isn't even set at the very right of the chart. So drag it over as far right as possible. Move the middle point over to 120 or so and lower it enough to get far travel. Be careful though, because moving these points DOWN effects the sensitivity on that axis. With these settings you can fine tune each axis to your liking. It's sort of an art form so it's something you have to play with.
13.) When you first launch Evochron, go to your configuration options and make sure you enable TrackIR Support.
The goal in all of this is make sure you get the smoothest movement possible while in Evochron. I fought with this for quite some time. A GOOD tweaked configuration will give you really smooth camera looking while in game with no jitters, pauses, or lag. Might I suggest, you have Evochron running while you tweak all of these settings. It will run in the background and you can see the effects of your changes in real-time.
It's theoretically possible to do this without an LED by using a highly reflective material which can reflect light (in a lot of directions so the camera picks it up) from a bright light source in front of you. Technically, you could achieve this simply from a bright laptop display if you use a laptop. Otherwise you would need something very bright in front of you to reflect enough light to the camera. This could be annoying but I have experimented with it myself and it's definitely possible. The trick is having enough light, and especially finding something which reflects light in multiple directions. It's definitely a challenge, but the benefit of this setup without using an LED and batteries is pretty enticing.
When it's all dialed in, the experience is amazing!!! I apologize for the long post again, but it took days of research and tweaking to learn all of this and there is a lot to it. So I wanted to share my knowledge and experience for those who thought this sort of thing was out of their reach or budget. It's well worth the effort and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. And for FREE!!
As an added benefit, Warsign spent a great deal of time and effort on a cockpit mod with TrackIR users specifically in mind. When you get this far, you should take a look here and download the Evoch V 2.0 Marvin Edition cockpit. It's one of the most amazing cockpit mods I have seen!
Good luck and post here to let me know how it goes! I will gladly help anybody who has problems or questions.
BEEJ
edit: typos
[Edited on 4-27-2010 by iBeej]
Yes, Beej, that would be a very good idea. Some of us do our thinking in pictures ... the negatronic brain can't properly absorb a bunch of abstract words. And any time I can get something "on the cheap," I'm interested. So, please, sqeeze some diagrams or snapshots into your verbosity for those of us who need to be drawn a picture.
D:D