TL;DR: I want zoom to take me where my mouse is pointed, not just up or down. Dear Uber, I think it's time to have a chat about strategic zoom. I've waited to start this discussion because back in alpha, the game just wasn't done yet, and in beta, there was still a lot of other broken stuff in the game. But now that we're in gamma this is starting to be limiting factor of on the fun of the game for me, so I think we need to have a chat. To give you context, I'm a heavy user of strategic zoom in SupCom. In fact it's the only way I navigate the map. Typically this is what I do when I want to go from point A to point B on the map: 1. Start from point A, zoomed in. 2. Zoom out. 3. Move mouse to hover over point B. 4. Zoom in. Strategy zoom in SupCom is awesome because it completely subsumes panning. Zooming isn't just up/down or in/out, zooming takes you to the location where your mouse is pointed, so you can quickly get anywhere with a flick and zoom. This use case is broken in current gamma builds of PA: EDIT: Note, the following are just my observations about how PA appears to work, and may not actually be how the code is implemented. 1. Zooming to the mouse location only appears to work out to a certain distance from the planet, after which zooming only takes you in to the planet or out into system view. I tend to overshoot this distance and have to reorient myself to get back into the action. 2. Sometimes, zooming only takes me in/out from the planet despite being close up to the planet. I'm not sure what's going on here; might be a bug, or might be that I'm misunderstanding the zoom algorithm. I fully realize this is a tricky feature to get right in a spherical system. But I still think it can be done better. What I'd really like is for zooming close to the edge of the planet to take me around the planet instead of out into system view. If I want to go into system view, I'll scroll out with my mouse in the center of the screen. As more features of PA are receiving polish, this is quickly becoming the limiting factor in how fun PA is for me. This is enough of a show stopper for me that I don't think I'll want to play PA seriously after release if this isn't fixed. Thanks for constantly improving the game. I sincerely hope we can have a productive discussion about zoom. P.S. It's notable that professional drafting software works this way as well. Part of the reason the first SupCom clicked for me was that AutoCAD has been doing this for years if not decades. P.P.S. I've seen threads to the effect that "strategic zoom isn't that great, TA didn't need it". I respect that, so no need to start a flame war here. But I still think we can have a fully-working strategic zoom for those of us who want it and keep panning/mini-maps for those who don't.
It works fine as long as the mouse is over land. Once you get to the other side of the horizon it breaks. Older versions of this game allowed you to zoom in even when the camera was pointed at the space around the planet, but they took it out when they re-did the camera.
This would be a nice feature as I have played a lot of SupCom and Sins of a Solar Empire, both of which use zoom to mouse cursor.
Zoom to cursor position is a must for proper strat zoom. Didn't know it wasn't like this in PA... kinda wtf.
PA does zoom to cursor position, though it's not perfectly accurate as I believe the camera actually zooms to a planet radius sphere instead of the planet surface. Similarly the fully zoomed in camera focuses on that sphere and not the planet surface. If you put your mouse on the side of the planet, but still over land, and zoom, does it not turn the planet when zooming?
The current behavior is this: - Zooming out -> no zoom pan -Zooming in - Mouse off of planet -> no zoom pan - Mouse started off planet and came on to planet as you zoomed in, in a single 'zoom motion' - > no zoom pan - Mouse is on planet at start of 'zoom motion' -> pan to cursor while zooming The same logic is used for switching focus planet on zoom. If a different planet passes under your cursor *during* a zoom motion, you will not switch focused planet. If your mouse is over another planet when you start the zoom, then it switches to that planet. If you are zooming slowly, then there is some "art" involved in determining what is all one 'zoom motion' vs several small independent zooms.
I am constantly fighting the UI when I want to zoom to something near the horizon. We normally don't need precise mouse placement before we start zooming, so I have trained myself not to worry about it. The problem is that when I want to zoom to something near the horizon, I often overshoot by a few pixels with the mouse and end up zooming straight in.
Maybe I should record a video of what I'm doing because this is not really working for me. Sometimes when it try to zoom to a point the camera pans, but just barely; sometimes it doesn't pan at all.
