Test Server Feedback

Personally I dislike the new camera. Very disorienting and doesn't feel natural at all. I'm glad that we at least get to have the opt out once this hits Tranquility. It's very sluggish to zoom in and out and then it jumps out to I guess a panning grid experience. In that I lose sense of direction to where my ship is located on the battlefield . I don't feel as though I would be able to adequately manual pilot around the environment which is huge in a small gang. Sometimes I gather that things are simply made to look pretty and that those developing these "features" have little to no experience actually playing the game. I don't feel as though these different perspectives will be utilized like intended. More than likely people will use the POV one for the good bump line up and ignore the other ones.

While you are at it can we PLEASE have the option to reduce/remove that awful white lock range ball from the tactical overlay? I'd love for it to be replaced with a small tick mark at the appropriate distance.

Right click in space - move camera to look around - release right click to return to previous view. This functionality is removed. please don't remove it.

Right Click in space - move mouse up or down - super zoom! Please don't remove this.

Current camera controls have function that is super important to D-Scan, that's center tracking position.
Please don't remove this functionality.

Basically please don't remove anything that we already have and have fun playing with.

Do not like. The changing FOV and angle on zoom/offset is seasickness inducing, and I'm struggling to keep up with what the camera is trying to/wants to show me.

Maybe a changing FOV is a nice cinematic trick for a trailer, it's not useable for gameplay. Especially when zooming in/out, rotating lots is the common thing to do in EVE to get a sense on bearings and overview of the battlefield.

Out of the 3 new camera modes I see the Tactical Camera as the interesting addition.

I've tried to give some feedback of the Tactical camera mode after some play with it on SISI. My perspective is one of a person who enjoys RTS games, from Starcraft to the total war franchise.

Camera Controls:
For the most part the mouse camera controls feel intuitive, the panning and rotation seem natural and zooming to mouse location was great to see. I did look for and check the option to invert my zoom as the 'left+right mouse button' zoom and and scroll wheel zoom, as the default seemed backwards to me.

Perhaps an option to change the mouse scroll wheel zoom sensitivity might be good, as I find speed of zoom a bit slow (left + right mouse button zoom) gives much faster response), although I could simply modify my mouse config to increase the amount of scroll per rotation to compensate.

The system would benefit from some additional keyboard shortcuts for panning, rotation and elevation, similar to total war. These keyboard camera controls would be also great for film makers allowing them to pan and rotate at the same time.

Perspective:
The new tactical overlay proposed in the 'REWORKING CAPITAL SHIPS: AND THUS IT BEGINS!' devblog will be important to get right to allow users to understand the perspective of what they are looking at.

Camera Transitions:
When going from Tactical camera to Orbit camera the camera pans to recenter, zooms to the the Orbit default zoom and maintains the current camera angle, it works great. Though switch back to Tactical Camera sends you to a default camera angle and zoom with no transition which is disorientating. The transition is very important but whether or not you maintain current angle or direction when entering the Tactical Camera should be looked at to help maintain a the player's perspective.

If you decide to keep the camera direction but change the angle I would suggest you allow for both a default positive and negative angle depending on the cameras current angle. If the enemy is above me I probably want to keep myself in the foreground with the target behind. If you transition to a camera angle above I will have to take significantly more time to readjust my perspective to correct for the situation.

Selection Hotkeys:
I know this is a bit on the more abstract side but as a lover of strategy games and MOBAs I would like the ability to assign hotkeys to friendly units and myself. In most games a single press selects the units and double tap centers the camera on the unit. This will be important to quickly switch perspective.
On sisi you can use 'Alt + 1' to remain in the tactical camera and recenter yourself. This is an important function to have in case you need to quickly get back to being focused on your ship. The problem with this function is it resets your level of zoom back to the default rather then just centering.

Misc:
When engaging the Tactical camera and then just zooming out with the mouse wheel it stops allowing you to zoom out at specific range. If you pan the camera slight or use the mouse button zooming it works as expected but every time center with pressing the camera button or use the hotkey (Alt+1) you can only zoom to certain level with the scroll wheel.

If I am look 'upwards' instead of defaulting to
When warping to an on-grid location the camera returns to the orbit camera, this is disorientating. If the camera must recenter, I would suggest the camera to pan quickly pan to your ship but maintaining the current level of zoom.

The Orbit camera is absolutely horrible.

1) The zoom is nauseating. I'm guessing you've put an Field of View shift during zooming. Get rid of it. It's bad enough that I had to stop trying after about 40 minutes because my stomach was doing flips.
2) The offset makes it difficult to click on icons in space, and makes it harder to figure out what's going on in space during faster combat
3) The extra momentum the camera has makes it feel laggy and unresponsive in the EXACT same way the 'Old' New Map camera that had so many complaints about.

Once again, you've gone with what looks good visually, and what looks cool and flashy, without thinking about how useful it is as a tool.

It's great as a fancy camera option, but there needs to be an option for the current camera. The current camera is much more responsive and useful.

EDIT: Jumped on SiSi to try the new grids (Which are amazing, BTW), so a second thought on the camera.

Still horrible. Instant nausea while warping a Naglifar around. The bobbing and weaving, along with whatever effect you're using for zooming, is making my stomach do flips. I'm forced to using the Tactical Camera to play the game.

EDIT2: Just attempted to use a mid speed frigate (Afterburner Succubus, max speed 2,500m/s) in combat. I have absolutely no idea what was going on, the camera was spinning and juking all over the place. I never felt confident in where I was, where I was going, how fast I was moving, where the enemy was, or where they were in relation to me.

And I felt ill after the fight was over.

A few issues with the orbit camera

- Camera is very sluggish (tested yesterday)
- the new FOV is good and gives a sense of scale. However the spacescape (background stars/planets) is now horribly burred/zoomed and ruins the look of eve. The spacecape (background stars/planets) needs to look like the old FOV/zoom level. Keep new fov for objects/ships but decouple (unlink) the spacescape from fov change.
- Make sure dscan works with these new cameras.
- Please make the tactical overlay default to off. Its a ugly piece of ui that ruins immersion. (I do use it for specific situations))


Improvement ideas

- Provide a option to hide the red brackets/icons on targeted ships. We have this great new fov but still cannot see the ships we are shooting at because they are hidden by giant red icons.

- Add a window showing a close zoom of the ship you are shooting at. With new shield effects that are coming it would be immersive and cool to see impacts and explosions against a real ship instead of just a zoomed out red icon. This would also be helpful now that grid sizes are huge...to actually see what we are shooting at... not just red icon.

Just to summarize here in the "official thread" what I've said much less coherently here and elsewhere in other threads...

The background maps (stars etc) should NOT be effected by the camera zoom. If you zoom in on an object thats 50 ft away the visual effect on objects 1 mile away are so minimal that you can't even tell the slightest difference. If I'm zooming in on a ship in space thats 1 km away I should absolutely NOT notice a visual effect on stars that are 10's of light years in the distance. When this happens it completely decimates the immersion and sense of scale/distance, makes the environment textures look horrible and the fact that it is simply physically and optically "wrong."

1. Fix what ever change you've made that is causing zoom on distant star field textures.
2. Give us an adjustable FOV so that ppl on wide screen and multi-monitor setups don't get such extreme distortion towards the screen edges.
3. Give back true center on ship and align to selected object control.
4. Rearrange all the buttons so that they aren't obscuring the readout percentages for hull and structure.

and call me a happy camper.

(And of course all the other changes that you've already said are in the works such as removing the transition between modes when using zoom, it just causes soooo many problems and is just entirely undesirable.)

All that said... yay for the hard work, interesting changes and new idea's in a game that's been active since '03. Although I'd really liked to have seen some new models for all these new ships instead of just recycled old ones with skins. Especially with the new skin system that essentially renders those "new" skins moot.

I can't offer anything new and I don't know what is going on (just on Sisi to help Succession Trials team), so read the other feedback, but I must say:

New camera is nausea-inducing, unusable, and unacceptable.

Having the orbit camera not centered on ship is simply ridiculous. Ships shoot each other in this game. See Bienator II's note on kiting. Ship-relativity seems an apparent goal from reading the OP, but especially on the most zoomed out view it will be at an all time low as you have no frame of reference (outside of using the tactical overlay) as a bunch of ships move at a bunch of vectors, including your own ship.

Having the camera mode switching by zooming is uncalled for.

The functionality that we call "the old camera" must continue to exist, at least until the functionality called "the new camera" is significantly different/"corrected" via various options.

Tested some of the new camera


The camera bounce, even when my ship isn't moving, is really fast and annoying. Gets way worse when coming out of warp. I was getting motion sickness and turning away from my screen. The old camera was much more subtle, I enjoy it much better as it is on TQ.

Agree with a toggle to go to first person. Often I will zoom in hurriedly, but now it goes straight to 1st person so I have to be super careful. A toggle or a s electable option for seamless zoom is preferred.


Camera inertia was awkward. When centering in on something it wasn't precise, the inertia would make the camera move slightly after I finished moving my mouse, which was annoying. I prefer it to be precise.

I also got a fishbowl effect when the camera wasn't anchored on my ship. Not sure if intended or not, but it made me want to always be anchored on my ship instead of looking elsewhere.

When I'm looking at a ship on TQ I can watch it warp cleanly off the grid. When I was looking at a ship on sisi warp, the camera freaked out a bit and spun around and I couldn't get a good sense of watching the ship leave the grid. The camera also hung around a bit too long after the ship left.

Overall I found the experience to be disorienting, but think it will be a positive for the game with some good tweaks.

Thanks