Tippia
Sunshine and Lollipops
26653
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Posted - 2016.01.07 20:36:16 -
[1] - Quote
By popular request, I repost my previous comments (along with some further observations) here:
Could you explain what the purpose of this replacement is? What is the goal you're trying to achieve and how does the (presumed eventual) removal of the current camera achieve it? As long as it's opt-in, it's fine but for how long will it remain so?
GÇó First person is neat, but ultimately pointless. It also means you have to implement more control options to allow the exact same level of personalisation that everyone expects from an FPS. I know you guys hate options, but this is non-negotiable.
GÇó Tactical view is an interesting idea and I suppose it came out of the (very) old idea of having more of a 2D presentation of the battlefield. That idea was cute; this implementation is not it due to how you keep losing track of where you are, and yet does not offer any more of an overview of the battlefield than what the current camera + tactical overlay offer. In fact, since it's so easy to move off of your own ship, it arguably offers less, even more so with the lacking persistence of settings others have already pointed out. If you want to keep this mode, the paradoxically right thing to do is to remove it and rework it from the ground up as something that doesn't even use a regular camera view. That might offer something better than what's currently available.
GÇó The orbital view could conceivably be interesting for movie makers if you stopped trying to make it so dynamic GÇö at the moment, it's not dynamic, just heavily inebriated, uncontrollable, and not showing anything of interest. You might be able to catch a neat fly-by every now and then, but it's just too chaotic to be reliable and is almost completely useless for actual flying. Again, more options (which you hate) could solve this: allow the user to turn off each and every automatic effect individually to the point where it reverts to the old system.
And again, this just leaves the core question unanswered: what are you actually trying to achieve? What are your use cases and how do the different camera modes correspond to and solve those use cases? How do you plan to handle the case GÇ£none of the aboveGÇ¥ in the long term? Asking for feedback is all well and good, but without knowing what you are actually aiming for, it is almost impossible to say whether what you're doing is of any use or any good.
That last point about picking GÇ£none of the aboveGÇ¥ is very very very important, because it seems to be the most common use case and one you have forgotten about completely. Right now, you're missing the option having the orbit camera, only without all the cumbersome controls and without the cinematic stuff. A view that just shows your ship and what you're looking at and nothing more fancy than that. Yes, this means you have to retain the old camera because it is simply better for almost every practical use than the fancy modes you seemingly want to replace it with. In doing so, you could even improve the current camera some more: switching between directions should be near-instant, very precise, and snap sharply with absolutely zero wobble GÇö i.e. the current tracking mode but without the smoothness. Such a camera mode is by far more critical and infinitely more important than any of the three options the new camera has because they it is absolutely irreplaceable for combat tasks such as manoeuvring and quick scanning. It also offers vastly better situational awareness than anything these new modes offer for the simple reason that it defaults to always showing your ship. With the old camera, you have to struggle a bit not to have your ship at the centre of the screen and show everything going on around it GÇö this is a good thing and it must be retained in some form. Anything that inverts the struggle is inherently bad and ill-conceived and must be removed.
GÇ£If you're not willing to fight for what you have in GëívGëí you don't deserve it, and you will lose it.GÇ¥
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