Official Camera Feedback Thread

New camera... Love it, love it. I had to turn up my scroll speed but otherwise I love it ;-)

@UberGaf Thank you for you great work on this! I noticed the ability to rotate planet by mouse scrolling on empty space besides it got removed. Any way that could get put back in? Or it would also be enough if the rotation towards the pointer location, while zooming in, would be more aggressive (maybe an option?).

That's quite interesting as I remember having a day/night cycle. Is that just due to the planet circling the sun then?

I need to play closer attention to these things.

I believe so yes. In theory its year is equal to its day. Maybe planets did used to rotate.

@snierke kind of. You know where your base is on the first planet. So you can just find it again by looking for landmarks.

If the camera was treated as if it was a geostationary satellite (and all orbital units were actually in orbit) there wouldn't be a problem. . .

Although it kind of puts us back to square one, because at some arbitrary distance you would have to leave geostationary camera mode and go back to seeing the system view. .. hmmph.

I love the new camera.

But then I zoom out at a certain point I stop seeing Icons, I would like it if I atlease saw a blob of my team colour on the planet.

Another thing I've noticed, was that when you zoom out to system view the camera isn't at a point that gives you an overview of the star system. Maybe a button that instantly brings you to the camera view that the original camera had.

There's an option in the settings. It's kind of why an ACTUAL minimap could be cool. At that point of zoom it shows you projected surfaces on the left side of your screen in a 'tree'. Ala Sins.

After reading the thread I hopped back in to do some playing around with the camera, and I do have to say, it's absolutely wonderful.

It improved the feel of the game incredibly, and I consider it to be a huge step forward.

I personally don't use the middle mouse button for navigating,(I mainly use wasd and a tiny bit of edge scroll) but I tried it just so I can share views on friction settings. I believe that it's quite a good idea to have, and it should stay in as an option, as some, like me will like the feel of it, while the ones who don't can just turn it all the way up to disable it.

The seamless zooming is great, hopping between planets feel quite flawless now.

The only thing I would love to see that's not there is a solution to navigate the poles with edge-scroll when the pole lock is on. Possibly set up a range where if a player navigates the camera near a pole the lock disables, and re-enables when they leave?

It all depends on what the defaults will end up being in the final release. My experience is that the majority of people tend to just go with whatever is the default setting, so if edge scroll and pole lock would be turned on by the default, finding a solution for this would be a must. If not however, than it's not necessarily a high priority.

So, let me get this strait. Even when you are in System view(or what once used to be system view) you can still see unit icons on the planet? Because I have unit icons on 'Always' and I cant see them.

There is mouse wheel zoom acceleration? This absolutely must be optional. It is not conducive to competitive play having wildly varying reactions to the same inputs. I constantly get wild camera zooms when I react to things quickly.

Err.... no.

I changed it to terrestrial units ramge dependent, and confuzzled myself.

I agree with you.

I think poll lock and pole interaction still needs a bit of work.

What if the icons started to skrink at a certain "zoom-out"-level? That would give you an idea where your units are even at far distances and we also avoid the suddenly dis/apperance of the icons...

Hello UberGaf

I want to ask if its possible to extend the pole-lock that it would be possible to "scroll over the pole-point"?

Now the camera cant go over it. so you have to turn it first and then you can scroll again.
As well as zooming in and out near a pole causes fast camera rotations. these rotations are correct, so its not a bug, but it would be better to minimize the turning of camera when zooming in near a pole.

For me the camera must be alligned to my base. when the game starts and i start bulding my base i get a feeling where is the top and where is right, left and down of my base. its not really important if north is up and south is down. its more important that the right side of my base is always on the right side. and when i scout an enemy, that is in the left of my base, then he should always be there when i want to scroll there from my base.

so i think when i´m scrolling up to the northpole the camera should go over it and upsidedown over the other side of the planet until i see my base again.

An other idea, that came up to me right now is a function that automatic "presses" n after a scroll command:
Whenever you pull of a scrollkey (WASD or arrows or middel mouse) the game does this n-thing for you.
Maybe there can be several n-command while scrolling (every 10ms ?!) and smooth the transition, so that the view isnt jumping or seem to get stuck.

The latest patch has acceleration on the zoom. The faster you zoom, the more exaggerated the zoom is.

That's what I'm talking about and that's what I'd like an option to turn off.

I'm missing where the less confusion part of the camera is..... now when I zoom to celestial I have to rotate the system to see it better because it's generally at some weird angle. Looks great and all but still the same actions in my eyes because once you zoom back to a planet you still have to rotate the crap out of it to get back where you were....... also I noticed zoom speed is much slower, but I'm sure that is an options fix???

I agree that there really should be a way to keep the icons once you are viewing all the planets. You can still see the fog of war when you are zoomed all the way out, which really isn't even necessary. They could probably do it so that groups of units collapse into single icons for the group once you zoom far enough out. The size of that icon could scale proportional to the amount of units there.

OZONEX-STYLE STRAT ZOOM
so after the tidal waves the ozonex thread caused in the PA community, the uber devs decided to cave in and make a united plane for the planet view and the celestial view.

Code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SviKPpSd5WI#t=464

AND patch 58197 came out now we get to toy with it.

My final impressions are that I would never EVER go back to the view from before, this is undoutably better. but I miss scrolling around the planet with scroll wheel. Obviously I turned on fullscreen and edge panning, it's good but not a replacement as it requires you make wide gestures. Scrolling still does rotate the planet but only if the cursor is within the on-screen planet's effective surface, this is very crippling for rotation with the mouse wheel as you won't be able to operate turns without scrolling in and out and moving the mouse alot.

this feature is not necessarily subject to conflict with the zoom out feature. for one: Obviously you don't want to constantly look at the celestial view. (we may yet, but as I feel orbital combat may not become that much more intense....) TWO: there is clearly a pop-out distance (at which the planets paths appear) at that distance scroll rotating could be halted. Three: oxonex's pa does it.

lastly, as a last little feature.
I know space bar now brings you to the old top down view, but it would be neeto fajitos it you could simply center camera on the sun by scrolling in on it, just like other orbital bodies. currently you cannot have the sun as camera focusing point.

I'm going to try to address a few points here:

* I think I have a reasonable notion about how to keep edge scroll from screwing with low camera friction when the user has made a single mouse gesture that ended on the edge of the screen.

* The planets actually do rotate in game, however the rotation is pretty mild. This was to prevent shadows from whipping around the planets. The fact the the camera rotates with the planet is the source of a number of past and current "funky camera twist" bugs. It's pretty high on my list to fix.

* If you 'zoom way out', then you will maintain the orientation with respect to the planet that you had when you were zoomed in. If you use the 'zoom to celestial' keybind (currently space bar - but space bar is going to be reassigned to 'jump to most recent alert' I believe) it will simulate the old space view which is a 2dish looking-straight-down view. Right now that view stays centered on the same planet, but I'm leaning toward having 'zoom to celestial' refocus to the sun, which appeals to my personal OCD and sense of symmetry.

* I have not tested these features extensively (read: at all) with low fps. This is obviously something that will need to be addressed if it turns out to be an issue.

* Right now there are some fairly hardcoded notions of what icons are appropriate at what zoom levels. It really doesn't make sense to show unit icons when the planet icon is larger than the planet itself at some particular zoom level. I can look into way to make this a little more user configurable, but it will probably be lower priority than some of the core functional issues people have mentioned.

* The notion was that the mouse wheel zoom speed slider would have a sufficient range to allow desired zoom behavior independent of tinkering with the internal acceleration level. We did have one user in the office with wheel acceleration for their particular mouse enabled at the Windows level. This produced crazy high zoom in game, and because we have no insight into what kind of preprocessing of wheel input is being done by the OS before being handed to PA, I'm not entirely sure how to account for mice with funky settings outside of PA.

* I super hate pole lock, but I want to make it nice for people who want to use it. I suppose part of that is coming up with a fundamental definition of what is and isn't pole lock. For example: if you want to pan all the way over the top of the planet, that simply isn't a part of how pole locked is defined. Turn it off. Another funky pole lock behavior was the tendency for the camera to drift toward the pole when spinning, this is more along the lines of a polish item that is worth looking at.

* I'm surprised at how many people used scrolling off the side of the planet to rotate. This always felt like one of the clunkiest parts of the old camera. This behavior is fundamentally incompatible with zooming at far/medium range, but I guess I can see an option where it could be allowed if you're at orbital zoom or lower.

The only thing I can say is that I love the new Camera!

how else? it's the direct offspring behavior to that of sup com's strategic zoom.

I have a "Minor Issue".. i love using 0 friction but...
I have a sensitive scroll wheel, when i flick the camera so planet spins it's all good but when i lift my finger off the scroll wheel button the small amount of up/down movement of my finger when lifting snaps the camera to a stop.

Is there a way to set a deadzone on the scroll wheel (so x amount of scrolling needs to be done before scroll activates, similar to a deadzone on a joystick ??)

UberGaf: I've experienced this as well. Through testing, my finger learned to come off the button before my hand completed the mouse gesture. One thought I had was to average the input over several frames instead of using the input at the last moment before you finger comes off the button. This would diminish the impact of funky input as you release the button.