So in anticipation of getting my Track IR, I watched YouTube videos on setting it up with games I already have. For Farming Simulator, it is literally a bloody nightmare, but I am working on that even as I type this. However, for games like ETS2, it works natively and even has built in profiles to work properly with those games. I hopped into ETS2 … crashed … realized major patches had come out that broke my mods, and started a new profile. Ah the joys of a modded game being updated. But either way, after starting a new profile and hopping into the truck, all i can say is WOW!
Now – a little bit of history here. I had Track IR already once – years and years ago. I think it was version 3 at the time. I’m not sure. But I was pretty much exclusively an armchair pilot who went on to real flying afterwards. But in the simulator – FSX – I was strictly a virtual flight deck pilot. In the virtual flight deck, especially on advanced airliners like the PMDG 737, there were gazillions of knobs and such to click with the mouse to have a smooth flight. At the time, TIR was so sensitive to my head movement, that I ended up actually sending it back for a refund because I could not hold my head still enough at all to click a single knob on the flight deck. It made for a very interesting – and very disastrous – test flight that ended in me closing out the game else I’d eventually crash the plane anyway.
Now, years later and coming into 2016, I have been doing a lot of driving games that do NOT need knobs, etc switched on and off around me. Whatever I do need is hard mapped to buttons on my Logitech G27 setup that I use. Thus, I decided to give TIR another try. I am glad i did, but there are some things I;’d like to post here to help save some people some money:
Do NOT bother with the “Pro Clip” add-on. It;s junk. Not only does it add an extra wire to the side of your headset for the cat to play with, but it just doesn’t work – at all. You will see many YouTubers who got it to work, but they are advanced programmers and geniuses who did scripting or something to get it that way, because I guarantee you they didn’t just slide a few sliders and get this thing to work. No matter what I tried, even positioning the clip just like the ONE YouTube poster who actually posted his clip (straight vertical), it would not read my head properly. I;d turn left – the camera would go UP and left. I look right, camera goes DOWN and right. It kept thinking I was rolling my head somehow. It also was VERY VERY glitch-ridden in the movements, and it was a nightmare.
I had almost given up and once again pondered a second return of the TIR setup when I noticed on my desk the little hat clip I had set aside. The hat clip is a reflector only version of the head piece, and it is the basic item you get if you do not want to use the track clip pro. It;’s passive, where the Pro is active (giving off beams of light instead of just being reflectors). I scrounged around and found a hat, ditched the Track Clip Pro, and restarted the TIR software. BAM! I didn’t even have to configure anything and it worked out beautifully. All i had to do was hit the hotkey to re-center the camera based on ym new clip position and I was in business. It was right after that when I went into ETS2 and had a wonderful set of 2 drives with this thing on.
I’ll have to keep posting and let folks know how it works in FS15. I am following Reef’s awesome advice here: http://fs-uk.com/forum/index.php?topic=169990.msg1195394#msg1195394
Anyway, for those considering TIR, save your money and just get TIR 5. Don’t bother with the Track Clip Pro. I should have researched more, because a Google Search actually found a LOT of people out there who had the same struggle I am having, or different struggles, which all ended the same – with them using the basic hat clip and tossing the Pro Clip back in the box.