Test Server Feedback

Hello,

I also want to add my feedback and proposals to this thread as the camera is one of the most elemental gameplay tools that has to work at any cost:

• The FOV of the new orbital camera looks nice, but is, as my foreposters already mentioned, completely unplayable like this. It should be by default have the FOV of the old camera and I would recommend to add the FOV settings as an optional slider. Then people can use this for moviemaking, but the camera can be used for normal gameplay by default.


• Please add the old tracking camera options back in (Custom/centered). Otherwise d-scanning without the new beta dscan is nigh impossible. The option you added in the last patch is not enough as it doesn't provide a centered camera like the old tracking camera.


• The First person camera is nice but could be better used for casual flying if you removed the movement where the camera "tilts" with your ship when you are turning. You can show that the ship is "tilting" on the HUD in the middle of the screen still. The problem with the "tilting" is on the one hand that it is a bit nouseous. Further people coming from 6DOF controls could have problems using the FP camera because when you turn you would expect that you need to press the up-button to continue the turn instead of continously holding the left key.


• The camera should remember in which mode you have been after a session change.

I hope this is helpful! As far I have seen the rest has already been pretty much covered by other people.

Best,

Friedman

Any response from devs concerning zoom effecting the background starfield? I'd love to utilize the new camera for cinematic effect but with the zoom effect on starfield I won't touch these camera's with someone else's 10ft pole.

Hey CCP, while everyone is, as usual when you put up something new, whining and complaining, I'll just say that the new camera rocks :) that little change just makes the game sweet looking, 2015 style (with the help of new propulsion effects).
Keep the cinematic looking camera, the smooth scroll and the fact that we can wonder around grid which enables me to finally understand wtf is going on on my grid !

I've got to start by saying my initial reaction to the new camera was borderline horror; for it having actively broken or frustrated a range of control or operations. I understand it's starting its development, and some things when I first looked were known broken, including the very first thing I did on undock, being to zoom out. And I agree there's been improvements. But for fleet-eve play, situational awareness is key and there are use-cases that have to be preserved.

I hope it's not news that means lighting models, blended textures, kill marks or entire ships are entirely irrelevant to the function of displaying tactical information; with clutter management of brackets/etc. I do not even really see the eve graphics at all, and yes as beautiful as eve can look it's trying to force me to, when what actually I need is to get things done.

Which means in practical terms eve is (present TQ camera) being zoomed out 500k or more for doing nearly anything, and looking at different groups of different coloured boxes because that's what a not completely terrible fc (or any other awareness-fleet role at all) requires from a camera.

Alt+1 tactical camera
I scouted every alliance CFC ever shot but I don't see it as necessary or even distinctly useful, and this is a scouting camera. (Even with huge grids, shouldn't you have to go closer to look rather than sit at 3000k in a cloaked rookie ship?) But it's no use to use if you have a moving ship, even when people used battleships and aligned at ~100m/s for minutes - with nearly every fleet reaching 1.5 to 2k/s (linked nano bc's/hacs), manoeuvring heavily and constantly, it's ludicriously unusable during any actual gameplay:

- if the camera doesn't follow your ship, you immediately lose situational awareness because you do not instantaneously know where you are, and thus not see where anyone is in relation to you (which you'd check, tracking your camera through 120 degrees every few seconds to update your mental model of other fleet/ship vectors (add projected velocity vectors to ships on ctrl+d tactical overlay, if you want an idea of something that might impress).

May I suggest, that I'd see this as essentially an auto-button to turn on the ctrl+d overlay and zoom to 500k camera (following movement of your ship). But that could go into the existing tactical overlay button. It just kind of feels redundant, which is not exactly a great offence;

Alt+2 orbital camera
This camera being bad/broken initially (lost ship tracking and random direction on wheel zoom?) but I guess work is being done and I'm finding it (today) much more acceptable. If this is the current-camera analog, it's more or less acceptable though the zoom (out) is (still) much too slow. On tracking the camera view direction, I guess it's floaty and tracks with too much mouse movement, but I'd get used to it.

What improvement would I like to see - well it is irritating enough in live-TQ to have to zoom out after every jump and it would be nice if you solved one of my problems. Either zoom faster out to large ranges, perhaps even add a default camera range option (for the account, and not ship, like was done with ship custom orbit etc ranges, but I digress).

One essential existing feature is overlooked (so far) - new dscan/probe interface aside, the target tracking camera added some time ago (with center through ship) is not reflected in current-sisi and it needs to be present. This is the one useful camera change for dscanning/recon, or simply highlighting location of and target selection in possibly forever, - 'c' to toggle camera track is possibly the button I press most after left click, because it quickly ((except when it doesn't)) highlights target direction in space. I do not want to see this ignored/removed, it is important.

Alt+3 first person
For what I do, it is non-relevant but i'll comment because for a new, clearly experimental feature, what application it might have right now (much like the keyboard nav controls themselves) doesn't have to apply to me; and I do think there's potential to design, through this a new vision of a possible flavour of eve experience, and that I'm very positive about. It doesn't need to exhibit the most amazing flight model, just some help to look more like it has one, and I think that experience is one that can offer a lot, being the difference between 'flying' and 'commanding' a ship. It was nice to fly around an asteroid belt (like elite). Main observations -

- it's possible to do 'hands-on' flying (rather than classic orbit control/etc), despite slow/sluggish control on, for example an interceptor at 5k/s, but to be realistically passable as a feature - allow the keyboard nav controls to roll over from maximum "up" and "down", so positive or negative loops can occur, and cancel the auto roll to level (or add a lag from last input to that)

- allow for (say) the normal lclick camera drag button to drag camera, and the ship then tracks to that direction according to its stats (maybe add rclick drag and for camera pan look, snap back on release). This implies adding a velocity vector indicator but should accomplish a lot (as well as allow gamepad/joystick psuedo-control..).

- target lead indicators? I can select from overview a target behind the camera, but it's less than clear what direction that is (remembering you'd normally look down on it from 500k). From first person, those offgrid brackets need to be more pronounced to be visible.

I'm not horrified of the new camera after a few days', and maybe after I have a better understanding of what you're going for with each mode. It is improving, but please do not restrain, or especially remove functionality. Thank you.

I'm not sure if this has been stated/asked already but here goes:

In Orbital Camera mode when you zoom in the FOV obviously goes down, because of this almost every Nebula looks pixelated/low res/blurry and this is only a 1080p monitor too.
Are there any plans on redoing/sharpening/modifying/whatever nebulas? It simply looks weird, ugly and almost like something in the installation stage went wrong or something.

Played around with the new build for a bit: Much improved!!

Here's a few additional tweaks I'd make:

1) The camera when undocked in your pod still has too much going on. It needs to relax.

2) Zooming in/out with center mouse button has a funky feeling to it. Not sure what to call it -inertia, whatever, but it's like the background and the object your camera is focused on are out of sync during the zoom. I'd turn that effect off if given an option.

3) When looking at another ship, the camera would always spin around to the engines if the ship was moving. I had to click and hold the camera if I wanted to look at another angle. Would rather it didn't do that, and would hold position where I leave it.

4) The default setting for camera speed on the new camera is sluggish compared to the old camera default setting. I had to increase camera speed by 1.5 to get it to a similar spot. This is minor since people can adjust the speed, but for the sake of easing the transition to the new camera, it would help to match the default speeds to be as close as possible.

Other than that, I really enjoyed the changes that were made - making each camera mode a toggle instead of seamless was a huge improvement in the experience.

I tried the new camera this evening and have the following thoughts...

So I'm one of those players who always has the tactical overlay on, with the camera zoomed out quite far. None of the new camera modes are useable for me. The tactical camera has the overlay with distances, but it doesn't follow my ship and it doesn't zoom out far enough. (Scratch that - I've discovered that while right after selecting this mode, I can't zoom out very far, if I then move the camera position, I can zoom way, way far out. With the camera's pivot point being changed during zoom based on my cursor position, I think? Putting the camera's position where I want it in this mode has proven to be very difficult for me.) (Further edit - oh! The zoom wheel in this case actually moves the camera linearally to/from the cursor position. Seeing how the nebula FOV doesn't ever change in this mode, I realize there's no actual zoom at all - it's pure camera positioning.) (This is the sort of 3D movement that a mouse just isn't good at, especially when dealing with chunks of often empty space that has no reference points. I think only a VR glove that can "grab" the scene to move it around would really work here.) The orbit camera tracks my ship and zooms out properly, but doesn't have the overlay with distances. (I'm not sure that I think about the orbit camera's feature of slowly being drug to a position behind my ship while it's moving...) Finally, the first person camera doesn't tell me anything at all about the special relationship between my ships and the other ships on grid.

I like the idea of being able to decouple the camera's view from my ship position while in tactical view (looks like it can move about 2000 km from my ship?) but it needs an option to couple it as well. A toggle button, say. Also, since I play zoomed out, zooming in when I hit Alt-1 again to reset the camera position is bothersome because I have to zoom back out again.

Or orbit view with the tactical overlay would be a step in the right direction for me as well.

Looking forward to the next iteration. :)

(Oh also, I've a crude paint of a suggestion for the tactical overlay. A way to show distances for objects that are over or below the plane of my ship. Instead of drawing a selection line straight vertical to my ship's plane, curve it along the surface of a sphere to intersect the plane at a distance from my ship equivalent to the distance between my ship and the object. Not sure how well this would work with multiple mobile objects, though. Kinda like this, but the intersection should be at 21 km of course. I messed that up. :) http://i.imgur.com/9qLBAe3.png )

One thing that's really bothering me is the 'Look At' button doesn't return your view to your ship after you look at something. On TQ you can quickly hit the button, look at a ship then hit it again to center your view back to yourself (you get the red 'X' over the view button). On Sis you have to go back down to the radial menu to reset your view on your ship. Seems like this just takes away functionality for more searching and clicking.

In the latest build i have found a very annoying bug, you can moved the camrea around when in warp or when you jump though a gate the camrea cant move if you are in orbit veiw. Bugged reported.

Please for the love of Bob let the orbit camera actually orbit the center of the ship, rather than drift forward and back depending on what speed you're going. Shifting camera positions end up also shifting which vector your mouse is pointed at if the center keeps changing, ruining manual piloting.

Also please reduce the amount of smoothness/inertia in changing camera angles. PVP requires both precision and quick reaction speed, and fighting the controls while your camera is taking its sweet time drifting around not knowing when to stop makes it far less usable than the current responsive orbit camera. This is the worst kind of form over function design choice you could make. It was bad on previous iterations of the new map, and it's still terrible now.