Synchronised hands in VR Multiplayer

[deephack]

So we currently have support in VR for hand controllers which is very nice indeed. My suggestion for a further development of this would be to have these hands visible to other players in multiplayer. This is already done with head position which is great but adding the hands would allow all kinds of cool hand signals. Preferrably the hands should be attached to the player body arms and move them also.

 

I realise that this is quite a bit of development work and almost certainly not any kind of priotity but the immersion gains would be there for sure. Hand signals, saluting and "keeping up foreign relations" would all become possible

[cfrag]

23 hours ago, deephack said:

have these hands visible to other players in multiplayer. This is already done with head position which is great but adding the hands would allow all kinds of cool hand signals

Uh... While I appreciate the idea and potentially slightly greater immersion, I don't think I really want that, for a couple of reasons:

• First and foremost, the inverse kinetics calculation for the pilot body are computational expensive. A three-point resolver (two hands plus head) to fit the body's skeleton is way more computation expensive than one-point. And that's not even including the many problems of handling clipping issues - when the player sticks their hands outside, breaking immersion for everyone else
• How often do you see, or look at, other pilots (including crew) hands? I'd say an optimistic amount is 1% of the time you spend in a cockpit, and that would include open 2-seaters like the Huey and Hip.
• Most controllers aren't equipped to show finger position (even Valve's Index Controllers only have partial support). So the other person will be waving around some inert, ghoulish hand. 
• This would put a constant overhead on all cockpits (IK calculation) and aircraft that have players for a minuscule added benefit: being able to occasionally glimpse another player's hands. This feature is either there for all, or not there at all.
• The added benefit appears likewise to be minuscule: what hand signals can you convey with your hands that you can't convey by talking?

While - as a VR-only DCS player - I appreciate the small gain in eye candy, I believe that currently, the cost in performance far outweigh the benefits.

[Gunfreak]

Except for the potential preformance issue.(and time spent on not very important things)Wouldn't it be easier to make hand animations that you control with keybinds, that way everyone vr or not can use it. And anyone can just bind the keys to voice attack.

 

Personally I would rather have cold war infantry models, some actual useful ww2 ships etc then time spent on this. And I too fly vr exclusively.