Before diving into any HUD designs, research must come first. For the 2-seater jets, there were new challenges. I needed to determine how the overall HUD should look for the second seat, as well as for some of the new weapons available. This meant taking a look at past Battlefield games as well as other realistic simulators to see what HUD elements may be reused. The goal was to provide the fantasy of military realism, while maintaining an easy-to-comprehend HUD for a more casual player-base.

The initial challenge was creating a new HUD for the passenger seat that matched the immersive standard of the first-person Pilot HUD. The final design, inspired by Battlefield 3, resembles a helmet visor HUD to maintain an immersive perspective for the passenger seat.

The ARH-7 Missile, a new weapon for both jets, operates like the IGLA launcher, requiring players to lock onto enemy aircraft and maintain their sights for a successful hit. To keep the weapon behavior intuitive, I adapted our common Anti-Aircraft lock-on crosshair and added an inner diamond/cross to the need for manual targeting, inspired by real F14 targeting systems.

The new jets introduced a challenging passenger weapon, similar to a TV Missile, which disoriented players due to its slow steering. To address this, I enhanced the HUD by adding a compass and a box under the crosshair for better orientation, along with a moving rhombus crosshair to indicate the missile's true direction. This transformed the TV Missile HUD into a mini-game, requiring players to align the smaller crosshair with the larger one for accurate targeting. After these updates, playtest feedback improved significantly. And since release there have been lots of fun compilation videos of players mastering the new weapon.