Just thinking, it’s quite simple in my case. The first games I ever played with any vertical look capability were flight sims, with a joystick. And anyone that doesn’t use “Pull back to look up” in a flight sim should be strung up by their toenails.
I had fly by wire completely and utterly explained wrong to me as child and until now never realised it. It had been explained to me as the flight controls being manipulated manual through wires (like a bicycle brake) brought from all other the plane to the cockpit and not as in electrical cable carrying control signals to actuators. I guess I have a post for TIL.
I *believe*, though at this point we're getting into "how I think it works" rather than "how I know it works" territory, that it's simple mechanics ('cos the earliest planes were very simple machines): if you push the stick forward, you're increasing the tension on the linkage which pulls the movey-bit up and thus plane goes down; if you pull the stick back, you're decreasing the tension on the linkage which lets the movey-bit fall down and thus the plane goes up. When it became possible to do things t'other way around, the only people willing to get into these new-fangled flying machines were used to the old method and thus we're back to not changing it 'cos you don't want the pilot to forget which is which halfway through a flight. As I say, though, that's just how I *think* it all worked, I'm no student of the history of flight and flight mechanics! (Me da was a radio engineer for Naval helicopters, if that helps...) I can see how that explanation would make sense!
Yea, sorry Mr G. It took me a bit of time to work out what was what and i was going to make a post proclaiming how dumb i was but you know, dumb is dumb. Although when i did get my head on straight i did have a chuckle at the thought of the first airplane person pushing forward on the stick and ploughing into the ground or forgetting what way was what and cursing him/her self.
I suppose that if you consider the view port to be a rectangle on the surface of a sphere, invert is like the mouse being attached to the outside rear of the sphere and standard is like being attached to the inside front. I guess in theory this (possibly) means standard is more immersive for first person games but invert makes more sense for third person and piloting.
When I first started playing FPS games with a mouse (Quake) I had to have the Y-axis inverted, nothing else made sense (I’m assuming it was a holdover from flight sim games on the Atari STe). I stopped playing PC games for a while in the early 2000s, but when I came back to FPS games a few years later it was totally alien trying to use an inverted Y-axis. I can’t do it now at all, it’s like a switch in my brain flipped from one direction to the other and is now jammed there! I installed the Jedi Knight games again recently and by default the controls were set to an inverted Y-axis. It freaked me right out, I couldn’t figure out WTF was going on for a moment!
Nearly.... control surfaces (elevator) move upwards, pitch changes up. Control surfaces down, pitch down.
Y'see, that's what I *thought* - from years of making paper plans and bending the backs of the wings upwards to make the nose climb - but then I made the mistake of second-guessing myself and DuckDuckGoing it. Ended up more confused than when I started, 'cos a bunch of sites were telling me dropping the control surfaces down increased the lift on the wings (which I then took to mean "make plane go up now plzkthx".)
Exactly as Jeff says. Elevators on the tailplane control pitch. Flap on the main wing leading and trailing control surfaces generate lift.
I was an inverted mouse user ever since the Doom days but there have been so many games released which don't support inverting that, 2 or 3 years ago, I made the decision to retrain my brain to non-inverted. It was a very painful couple of weeks but I'm glad I did now and wouldn't go back!
