(Because the devs aren't busy enough!) A major cause of crashes (especially online) is not safely rejoining the track after going off. For the average user there's no way to look over the shoulder and there's no spotter to help you merge back into traffic. So how about an 'enhanced' glance feature? Here's how it could work - the traditional glance left and right (green) functionality everyone knows would remain the same but if the player holds down their glance button then the view switches to an over-the-shoulder view (blue) and remains there until the button is released. The time needed to hold the button to switch from green to blue could be adjustable to the players taste, and maybe the blue views could have their own key bindings. From a development standpoint I don't know how feasible this idea is to implement, but one potential problem is that many of the cars in R3E have the safety device wrapped around the players head so the new glance views would give us players an unrealistic advantage over real life drivers. Personally I think the enhanced situational awareness in-game would be worth the trade-off against absolute realism - but I'm sympathetic to the opposite view.
personally i look at the track map , position the car parallel to the track and look back... it aint hard and involves no extra coding ..... and your angle you offer isnt realistic , as you would be looking in the head rest i would prefer to see cars rejoining the track being ghosted , code that exists already as whatever you put in place will be beaten by a better type of idiot that actually doesnt care ; so for me ghosting is the solution Andi
I agree that to return to track, the minimap is enough. But I think an in-game spotter would be nice to avoid people not seeing you overtake or driving side by side. I use Crew Chief but on public servers not everyone does. A spotter like an arrow indicating the position of the other car, with a color indicating the distance would be a help in making online games cleaner. The code triggering the spotter depending of the other car's position is already open sourced in Crew Chief so there's less work to do.
Virtual mirror and "rear view" key binding works for me, if I'm joining at an acute angle then looking left and right works just fine. As @Andi Goodwin says, track map helps too. Combine all 3 and I've never had an incident rejoining.
All that plus I also need something like an IV that will inject a mild sedative directly into my brain. And a big sign across the screen that says "slow the f#{€ down and think!"
Crew Chief is ideal but something like helicorsa is in my thoughts not wrong also for RaceRoom. I used this with AC.
Honestly it never even occurred to me to use the track map - I've never used it. It's one of those HUD elements I instinctually turn off before I've completed my first lap in any driving sim.
Mistake. Sure it doesn't help the immersion but adds some infos you can't get actually unless you're using VR.