This is why you crash all over the place in Grand Theft Auto games:
In the introduction he talks about how driving a car in first-person mode is “inconvenient”. This goes back to the need for in-game maps and how people tend to get lost more easily in games: No peripheral vision. Driving in GTA is no problem in first-person mode until you want to make a turn, at which point the whole thing falls apart. Not only do you not have peripheral vision, you can’t even turn your head.
This is an understandable limitation if the designer doesn’t want to have to make the interior of each and every car in the detail required for a proper in-cab view, but still: You can’t drive if you can’t see where you’re going, and sometimes you’re going ninety degrees to the right or left. Moving the camera up and behind the vehicle lets you see the stuff you need in order to make a reasonably safe turn, at the expense of introducing the problem depicted in the video.
I do like the way Half-Life 2 handled vehicles, where you steer with the step left / right buttons and the mouse is used to move your head around. It still can’t really cure your lack of peripheral vision, but it at least lets you turn your head to compensate. I’d love to try that scheme in a proper metropolitan setting and see how it holds up in traffic. My hope is that I’d be able to drive from the apartment to the bowling alley without totaling my car in the process.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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