Just got an idea for the camera. Hope it wasn't already said... What if wherever you started became for you an equator, camera-wise? That is, the camera's north pole would be different for each starting position, and would be fixed by defaut? Wouldn't that fix the problems with fixed cameras and poles? (Similar to some music teachers who teach sight-singing with a movable C)
We considered this actually and it kinda helps but still has issues. This might be a good addition to the pole locking system we are putting in though.
Are you lot thinking about making it possible to use WASD to pan around along with QE for twisting? For those wondering about A being attack move it's easy to switch to R/F as I've done it in the past for MOBA, & if you're doing hotkeys for buildings I'm pretty sure it's easy to make it so if you have an engineer selected it'll overwrite the camera binds. Arrow keys/side scrolling is less productive & imo WASD is the nextevolution of camera panning as it's near number keys/high priority keys.
Arrow keys are just horrible. I believe the best system would be the following: wasd for movement (equals mouse to screen borders) spacebar to change the camera angle at low zooms (like in supcom but without flipping back when released) and to rotate at high zooms by moving the mouse.
Im all about fluidity the whole holding down space to change angle is annoying when micro'ing two-three armies
If the camera would just Keep its orientation instead of rotating, then I would be happy. (Hold the middle mouse button and move it in a circle and you will see what I mean. Yet I have a good feeling that this is a known issues and will be eventually fixed.)
Well you could just not change the angle then. That is just a feature for people looking for eyecandy footage of their army from a non-birdseye perspective.
seems like a good place to talk about this i like using mouse 3 (mousewheel button) to move the planet around, but sometimes it sticks is this intended, or is it perhaps my mouse? also, an idea for the camera is to do it similarly to how 3d modeling programs move models around in space. Such as alt-right click or alt-left-right click to zoom. hell, even pan if you want, but that's probably not going to work lol i think my favorite rotation system is from Zbrush though. if we could left or right click off of the planet to rotate it, that would certainly feel more intuitive
Hum but wouldn't wasdqe take away precious space for the hotkeys? Remember guys that this is a RTS, and you should use hotkeys instead of clicking for most stuff.
Well they're not implemented right now but if you want to be competitive you're going to use hotkeys to build and use certain abilities (patrol, hold fire, etc.)
I agree that hot keys are needed, but you have to be able to move around the planet and eventually the galaxy as well. I think all the hot keys you need can be mapped near WASDQE quite nicely. They just might not line up like TA people might have remembered like A for attack command. you might use R or something instead. But moving is for me the single most important thing to be able to do well, if you can't get around you have already lost the battle.
Currently the camera set-up is pretty disorientating; as you look around the planet and return to a familiar spot everything's rotated which throws off your sense of positioning. The equator idea is nice but I think the biggest problem is rotation of the camera. I think the N key should be changed to orient you to the first orientation you had when you spawned instead of pointing to the north pole. On-top of that, perhaps you could reset the camera's viewpoint the N key 'remembers' by holding it down for a couple of seconds (which is accompanied by a audio or visual aid to let you know it's changed)?
Agree, having WASD for moving the view instead of the arrow keys would be much more ergonomic. I don't know about rotation though. I was kind of thinking it'd be nice to have Q&E mapped to change the mode to attack and move (respectively) for when I give the next order.
