- Yes
- No
You may have already experienced this particular issue if you played with TGPs before, but let me sketch the scenario:
You are flying around looking through your targeting sight (either internal or external pod), and with the stabilize sight option you can set a spi (sensor point of interest) on the ground from which you can easily switch back and forth between 3rd person and sight while maintaining where you were looking at, great! Back in the sight, you spot a missile launch, and you hit the wasd keys to maneuver and dodge incoming fire, but you just happen to forget to exit the targeting sight before that. No problem, you go back into the sight after all that, but you find yourself your sight is now looking at some random spot in the sky, what happened?
Here’s the issue, the spi is continuously updated through the use of the sight, now this is normally useful because if you slew away to another point, and that point is saved for later use. But there are several scenarios where this is detrimental:
- The targeting point is outside the TGP gimbal limits. Getting into the sight moves the spi to the outer limit of the pod, which is most likely useless and causes disorientation and the loss of the point of actual interest.
- You are flying in while in the TGP sight but reach the gimbal limits of the pod due to maneuvering/rolling/overflying the target.
Yes, these scenarios can be mitigated by exiting the sight (and thus saving the poi) before maneuvering (or reorientating usually rather) or making 100% sure the spi is inside gimbal limits before entering the sight, but in both of these scenarios this just causes unneccesary limitation due to bad/no feedback to such gimbal limits. Without laser weapons you can not know if the spi is inside the limits due to the laser marker (green circle) not appearing while inside limits, and inside the sight, a square does not easily tell you the limits of your sight (this square is more tailord/useful towards the forwards looking sights of most Soviet aircraft instead).
My suggestion is to introduce an, at least a toggleable, option to make is so that the spi can be only set using the stabilize sight key (and not be shifted due to anything else). This mechanic is actually already in the game on TV weapons. Moving in the TV sight does not change the spi (it used to, but not anymore), forcing you to use the “stabilize sight” key in order to update the spi instead. I’ve found such behavior to be very useful.
Now being able to update the spi by moving inside the sight is very useful too, because sometimes you want to always use the latest looked at point as spi. So in order to mitigate this, here are two solutions to the base mechanic:
- Allow the spi only to be moved inside the sight by use of mouse input (or whatever is used to manipulate the sight) and ignore spi updates caused by anything else (unless the stabilize sight key is used of course). This would eliminate any non intentional updates to the spi.
- Kick the player out of the sight if the gimbal limits are reached in order to prevent the spi from being updated unintentionally (toggleable).