Camera controller

Hit "M" in the game and use WASD to move around.

I just want to be able to rotate in a circle while sitting still =[

Instead i have to do some small math and zoom out of the planet do a 1/4th turn this way and a 1/4th turn another way to get my camera back to how it was lol. Because if it gets off from how i started the game and i zoomed out to look at something and now i return to my base and my view is backwards.. i hate that crap.

Just let me be able to rotate in a circle in place please =[


Edit - And have it STAY in my rotated position instead of "snap" back to the view it was.

press "N" when you want to reorient your camera to the north pole. You can also turn pole locking on in the game options. The only camera additions I can think of are maybe an orbiting mode as you suggested and an alternative custom axis camera lock to the pole locking, useful for players who are based near poles. Orbiting mode could be something like a camera movement macro that saves what you've done and repeats it. It would likely be useful in a minimap viewport capacity.

From my current feeling I would say that it needs some kind of fix point that can be used to help players orientate. Currently I myself use my commander for this. Basically I press C and N every time I lose track of where I am or when I want to go back to my base). That way I get a known position back from which I know which direction to take. This does indeed work not very well at the poles. Maybe it would be a simple help to be able to tell the game to remember the current cameraposition and planet orientation and put it on a button. So I can quickly go back to a known orientation that works even on the poles.

Basically it boils down to hotkey the current camera position.

The only problems I had with the camera were;

> Moon getting in the way on occasion.
> Getting the orientation messed up.

Some elements of the SC camera are good: proportional zoom and orbit target

But forcing people to orbit target ALWAYS is a terrible mistake

A good camera will support both Orbit and Look modes in a way that makes looking at anything and moving anywhere a smooth, friction-free operation

I managed to achieve this in Unity in 6 lines of code in 30 minutes ... just using common sense

PA: please think deeply about the camera controller and don't spoil the game

I like the idea of setting a custom axis as it would not need to be a arbitrary position. Rather you could make the "poles" the centre of enemy bases (its a bit more maths, but poles don't need to exist on a axis, just look at Earth's magnetic poles). It could be an advance strategy to always orientate yourself the same way towards your goal on every map. A bit like "the enemy's gate is down", only its "the enemy's base is South".

I can't remember off the top of my head what any of the WASD keys currently map to, but surly they could be changed so there isn't the intermediate step of pressing M (it also would also free up M for other commands). As it is I'm highly conditioned to use the mouse in my right hand and any buttons on the left of my keyboard instantly, however M is so far right I might as well just use the arrows, but they are awkward. Moving the keyboard off centre from the screen to the left is not a option either as I use a high performance laptop 90% of the time.

I would like the camera advanced enough that with the use of it and the chrono-cam people could easily make a machinima movies equal in quality to the Kickstarter launch video, not that I would make them myself but I would watch them all day long if they existed... I just realised that I forgot about the chrono-cam controls, but since time controls are less important in a real time game maybe they could use less used keys, like the F-keys (since these normally control saving, a obsolete feature in multi-player, they would be a good fit).

Its not a required thing by any stretch, but the ability to go into first person from the commanders perspective would be, while useless, totally awesome, especially if the player could control it with standard FPS controls and still issue commands (also it could allow expressive "acting" for machinima) ... Some games manage to exist purely for first person giant Mech views, but this would be even better.

I work in Maya all day and I really wish I could just use full maya control style camera in PA.

Company of Heroes had a very well done free-rotate camera, it encouraged you to swing around into cinematic angles whenever something cool was happening.