This one flew under my radar so far (haha, sorry):
Rescue the civilians, race the clock, and raze the enemy in MH-Zombie, the world’s only helicopter arcade simulator! Three flight physics modes, three difficulty modes, and a tutorial mode provide a stepped learning curve and wider accessibility to realistic helicopter flight.
The reason this came to my attention is because it’s one of the few games that [just] implemented #headTracking via UDP e.g. available by #OpenTrack (and various others). This is great because it doesn’t force people to jump the hoops of #TrackIR, which is only supported for Windows and officially limited to their proprietary devices. See this in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMGFdO7VXiY
Apparently it’s written for mobile games but runs on PC as well – that seems to include Linux PC which even makes this a #LinuxGaming title! 🤓
I don’t know about you but for 3 bucks I’ll totally get this for the occasional pew pew fun. Game seems to be a labour of love so sharing is highly appreciated.
It has been a while that I tried #StarCitizen. With the new #Neuralnet Tracker plugin (AI haha) for #OpenTrack we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try #headTracking without a dedicated #headTracker nowadays. And all that on a #Linux PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.
I’m flabbergasted how good this tracker-neuralnet plugin for #OpenTrack works. It does the #headTracking with just a webcam without any clips, reflectors or LED stripes. I kinda expected this to not work really well in a dark room, that I prefer for gaming, but I was wrong. Even with a tiny light in one corner of the room only it kept tracking flawless.
…can even scratch my nose and it keeps tracking.
To get this neuralnet tracker input in the first place I had to download the ONNX runtime package onnxruntime-linux-x64-1.18.1.tgz from https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.18.1 (My Fedora offered 1.15.1 from it’s repo but this was at the time of writing not sufficient and having it installed resulted in failure due to an API mismatch). I didn’t even install it somewhere, just unpacked it in my Downloads folder.
Back in my OpenTracks folder I run cmake the way I’ve done it before several times but this time I added the unpacked onnxruntime folder to the config.
Configure did it’s magic (note how it picked up module tracker-neuralnet once the ONNXRuntime_DIR was set) and here we are one make later. This is rather impressive 🤓
I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this.
Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️
Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn’t check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end – sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.
No Man’s Sky with headtracking and HOTAS (on Linux PC)
Wondering about that button box? Didn’t use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/
How it’s done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!
This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).
So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.
Doing so I noticed that NMS does “look-around” on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"
And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓
PS: I’m aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in “gamemode”.
