One major benefit of the original cockpits was that they obscured much of the viewing real estate, so your PC only had to do a fraction of the work to display a windshield's worth of ships (and in in the early '90s, it was fully taxed to just do that!). As computers became more powerful in the mid '90s, it became possible to render up a whole screen's worth of space combat, and people were enamored with the increased visibility and sense of freedom. I think market research of the day showed that most people immediately hit F1 as they launched into space to drop the cockpit away. (Did anybody here not do that?
) So cutting cockpits from WC4 on was an easy decision.
I certainly didn't
. I always played with full cockpit view - but I acknowledge I was very much in a minority.
About what you said regarding cockpits in the original WC... I've certainly heard this argument a few times before, but oddly enough, it seems to be entirely false. Everything that was going on in space was drawn first - then the cockpit was drawn on top of that. All the ships were still present under the cockpit, however, and if there were any transparent "holes" in the cockpit, you would see the action underneath (indeed, a couple of weeks ago you ran a news article that pointed out a bug of this kind in one of the WC1 cockpit side views). In that regard, the cockpit actually added more computing work to the game, rather than reducing it. So, the presence of cockpits in WC1/2 wasn't related to a desire to speed the game up in the slightest - rather, it was all about the immersion of it. Remember, the original Squadron proposal even talked about having the player character's head and body visible on-screen, for a sort of 3rd person view.
Oh, another random thought regarding WC4 cockpits. It seems to me that by the time WC4 was being released, even if you set aside the complaints about cockpits obscuring visibility, the presentation of cockpits in WC3-like fashion would have seemed extremely dated - thanks to, among other things, Chris Roberts' own efforts with Strike Commander. We can understand why Origin didn't choose to try to integrate Strike Commander's virtual cockpits into WC3, given how many new things WC3 was already doing - enough risk is enough. But by the time WC4 came around, Origin had used virtual cockpits in Strike Commander, Pacific Strike, and possibly Wings of Glory (that one may have come a bit later, actually). The technology was proven, and the simple 2d cockpits we see in WC3 would have felt like an unjustifiable anachronism in WC4. However, WC4's development schedule, as you know, was pretty crazy already. Adding virtual cockpits would have required a lot of time and effort, and this probably wouldn't have seemed justified at all given that WC4 was being marketed almost entirely as a story rather than a game. So, by cutting the cockpits out entirely, they could pretend to be making a feature out of their anachronism
.
This discussion makes me wonder... wouldn't it be great to put together a series of articles on the development of the WC series, talking to the developers and trying to get them to recall and explain the justification for the various decisions made over the course of the series? All these things that we've heard bits and pieces about over the years, such as the WC4 cockpits, or the story of how SM1 & 2 emerged basically out of a desire to use assets cut from the original game... it would be fantastic to collect such stories in writing in a nice compact form. I wonder how many of the original developers it would be possible to get to talk about things like that. Chris Roberts, almost certainly, but who else might it be possible to reach?
