Some things I have found helpful for Truck Simulation Part 2

In todays post we are going to explore headtracking for American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator.  This is a really cool way to gain more visibility in game.  For those who have tried its hard to go back.  For those with a single monitor setup it will greatly help you at intersections.  I use it all the time.  Check it out.

Open track can be downloaded via the GitHub repo for the project

Download the latest OpenTrack

Taking a look at the Neuralnet Tracker settings we can choose our Camera.  Here in the dropdown you can select your camera.  I have tested with both webcams and using DroidCam both work really well. Head tracking doesn't require much. You can see its working off a very low resolution so most any webcams will work.  Outside of selecting your camera I leave all settings at default.

Looking under the options menu then Game Detection you can reference your games here. Clicking the on executable field will allow you to select the exe for your game.

Once you have your game selected lets make sure we have headtracking enabled in our configuration file for American Truck Simulator.  You will use the same process for Euro Truck Simulator 2 also.  So lets locate our Config file.  For those new to the game you can find it in your My Documents folder under American Truck Simulator config.cfg  Taking a look at line 104 and 105 set both values to 1.  The Default is 0.  

This is where things get really fun. You can choose how you want your headtracking to work.  Yaw is for your look left to right movement.  Pitch is for your look Up and down movement.  I find that a little bit of both is good for me.  Now for other sims such as flight simulators you can take advantage of all the degrees of freedom.  To not complicate things too much I will just stick to Yaw and Pitch or sometimes just yaw.

After some research I found that maxing out smoothing helps smooth out the motion.  Keep in mind lighting is your friend.  If you have a lot of shadows cast on your face the camera will pick those up and sometimes change where you are looking.  This can happen more in night driving as the screen isn't illuminating your face the same as during the day.

This bit is important as this is how far and quick your movements are. In the picture below you will see that my look left is different than my right.  For the right I just need to see my other mirror so 25-30 degrees of movement is good for me.  Now  for my look left motion I want to be able to look closer to 90 degrees so I can see out the window.  This is where you will find headtracking most helpful at stop signs and intersections.

Here is a look at my Pitch movements.  This is just a bonus for me so I can look down at the dashboard.  Really if you set your setting position you can achieve a lot with just yaw.

Now occasionally you will find that the tracking may become off center.  You can bind a key to center the camera for you.  I'm using a button on my steering wheel but you can use anything key or button you'd like.   You will notice other options available but at this time I'm just using center and start and stop tracking.  

This should be enough to get you going.  Please let me know what you think.  I really enjoy the ability to use headtracking in ATS and ETS2.  For those with TrackIR I would love to know your experience.  Until part 3 take care and Happy Trucking

C Ray