Fly navigation: Safe zone, scroll wheel acceleration

I find it hard to get good results with fly navigation because of the large-ish “safe zone” in the middle of the camera frame, inside which movement of your mouse (or in my case, tablet cursor) has no effect.

So if you want to change direction, once you get inside the safe zone, you coast along in a straight line until your cursor exits it, which can ruin the desired camera movement.

I understand the need for the safe zone, because you need to start your navigation in a stable position, but there should be an option to make it much smaller.

In fact, the safe zone is only needed at the start of the navigation. After which it should change to a different functionality, which should have a couple of different modes of operation:

Mode #1 should be a simple center (of viewport or camera frame) marking, but there should be no safe zone.

Mode #2 should be the old safe zone, but independently re-sizable from the pre-navigation safe zone.

Mode #3 should be a resizable safe zone, but with a soft fall-off, all the way to the center, in the same way that the proportional editing area has a soft fall-off. In fact i imagine the same code for defining the area for proportional editing could be re-used, and that would give access to the various fall-off curve shape options.

It’s specifically a problem for animating some kind of vehicle, be it a car or something flying, where you need to change direction quickly and smoothly without that dead spot coasting you get now in the safe zone.

One other change i'd like to see is to change the way mouse scroll effects fly acceleraton. As things are now, if you scroll up, you get progressively faster. But if you scroll down even a tiny amount, you come to an immediate dead stop. This makes no sense. Scroll down one click should take you back to the previous speed before you scrolled up one click. And the resolution and range of this scroll acceleration should be tweakable, to account for various different scene scales. Because as it is, in massive scenes, you need a lot of scolling to get up to speed and there's a limit on how fast you can go. And in tiny scenes, a couple of scrolls, will shoot you out the back of the scene!

Thanks!