Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Good day.

As some of you may already know, we have been hard at work updating the in-flight camera of EVE. As this is one of the fundamental systems of any game, we want to take good care of treading lightly and get as much player feedback as possible to make sure we get as smooth a deployment as possible when we finally get around to replacing the current camera. Today, we’re taking a step in that direction by allowing you to try out a BETA version on TQ for the next few days. To enable the new camera, simply open up the System Menu (Esc) > General Settings > Experimental Features and tick the Try the New Camera checkbox.

Instead of the lone space camera that you are all familiar with, the updated version comes in three flavors; Orbit, Tactical and First person.

The Orbit camera (alt+2) is the default one, and is always attached to a ship or structure in space. This camera is designed to give the player a more cinematic feeling and try to emphasize things like scale and speed while behaving pretty similar to the old camera in other regards.

• Field of view decreased as you zoom in, giving a much more epic sense of scale.
• Ship position on screen is offset based on the speed vector of your ship, giving a much improved sense of speed and movement.
• When looking at other ships, camera is allowed to drift, making it very easy to set up super cool fly-by shots. Drifting can be temporarily disabled by holding down the left mouse button for a steady view. When looking at your own ship, we allow an almost unnoticeable amount of drift to achieve a subtle parallax effect as the nebula moves by ever so slowly.
• Tracking camera is now activated via Alt+Shift+click and deactivated by left-dragging. The object tracked is now always offset a bit based on the direction of flight of your own ship so it doesn’t disappear behind your own ship all the time.
• New chase mode is activated by tracking the ship you’re already looking at, locking the camera straight behind your ship. This mode works amazingly well with manual flight!
• Look at is now allowed for items far away, but instead of the camera travelling, we just turn it in place so the object is centered at the screen, which is very handy for, say, directional scanning.
• Smoother zooming/orbiting, accompanied with a new camera speed setting in the system menu (this applies to all camera modes).

The Tactical camera (alt+1) is designed with more practicalities in mind and is more similar to an RTS camera. It allows for panning around the battlefield as well as rotating. In this mode, we don’t have any of the cinematic effects of the orbit camera.

• Field of view is fixed at a wide angle and none of the cinematic shenanigans of the orbit camera is present.
• Panning is achieved by right dragging.
• Camera is attached to an object by doing look at and detached by panning (NOTE: this feature sadly didn’t quite make it to the BETA but is close to completion, so you’ll just have to use your imagination for now ) .
• While detached, the camera zooms toward the cursor instead of the center of the screen.
• The Look at command preserves zoom distance, so we essentially just pan the camera. This way battlefield overview and awareness is preserved as well.
• Tactical overlay is on by default.

The First Person camera (alt+3) is probably the least practical, yet most awesome (IMHO) of the triplets. It is highly recommended that you try it out with the not-so-long-ago-introduced manual flight feature that is mapped to the keyboard arrow keys.

• Fixed first person view with wide field of view
• Military jet style roll and pitch indicators overlay for orientation
• 3 level stepped zoom
• Precision titan bumping
• Makes you crave for joystick support

In addition to this, we have implemented marquee-select (mouse drawn rectangle selection) in space, which can be incredibly handy for those of us who enjoy interacting with the 3d scene instead of the overview whenever practical and possible. To activate marquee selection, simply hold down one of the combat shortcut keys, such as ctrl+left drag to target, ALT+left drag to do Look At and a new SHIFT+left drag to just select, making it possible to select even the fastest of drones. Note that this feature is still not quite finished, so it currently only selects one of the brackets under the marquee at random. Once it’s finished, you’ll be able to do things like target multiple items at once.

The reason we release a BETA feature is so that we can collect precious feedback and iterate before we turn it into the actual thing. We’re really excited to hear which of those features/changes you love or hate and don’t be shy to suggest improvements.

Bonus Challenge: Whoever creates the slickest YouTube video using the new camera gets a … free high-five, delivered by me at next Fanfest. GO!

Known issues:

• Camera does not attach to target in tactical mode
• Jump effect is borked
• Camera mode preference is not persisted on jumping
• Marquee select only selects a single item

o7

Looks nice, smooth and brand new.

However, I think that the tracking camera in the Orbit mode has changed too drastically. Old tracking options give a sense of immersion - turning to a selected object. The shortcut of Alt+Shift+ left click is too complex when you just want to turn the camera to the selected item - something that was done with a single click before. Not to mention that the sudden shift of view makes a player lose sense of their position. In that field I think the old camera tracking is just fine. Don't change it.

I miss the regular camera radial menu where options like "Center Tracking Position" and "Custom Tracking Position" were present, along with the other two options. I think it would be nice to have them back - the radial menu with these options should be available just for the Orbit camera.

And maybe we should be able to turn the First Person camera to some degree (with a mouse drag).


Other than that I think a good proress is made, well done guys!

Still cannot get used to the up/down in first person being the opposite to almost every other game in first person.

Some very cool changes to the camera. I enjoy the new FOV, smoother camera movements, and it's actually neat to be able to see my ship from a first person perspective.

One option I wish had remained was the ability to "Toggle Point Camera to Selected item" without the need to use a keyboard shortcut every time. I may well be a minority user of this feature however, I've found it extremely useful to be able to simply see what I want by having the camera point to the item in space that I select. After opting in, I can no longer use this feature even after opting back out it at this time it appears. (even after resetting the keybind).

Excited to see where this new feature goes, thanks for putting it out there.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=577342181

works great for screenshots

This is my problem. It's far too floaty. Let me be precise with my camera positioning.

While pretty much everything else is both good-looking and not (too much) impractical, this particular point is the only thing that bother me. Because i managed to loose a ship as it went offscreen (and/or it goes hiding behind windows, which is as annoying). No kidding. (It may have been way too fast...)

But that's not the only problem, as i also find it way harder to do manual piloting because i cannot use my ship anymore as a reference point on my display when trying to adjust my course.

That, too.

The look-at option for far away object seems useful. Would be nice if Alt-click would allow to center the view on anomalies too.

Not sure if this is related to the borked jumps, but when I jump/undock using the beta camera my next out-gate is never selected by default like it would be when using the old cam. This is very inconvenient for travel.

Edit:
The zooming in the orbit camera mode seems a bit broken. It takes a few turns of the mouse wheel to zoom out but just one turn in the other direction zooms in all the way. This makes it hard to adjust the camera distance.

Thanks for all the great feedback! I've already started making fixes and adjustments based on it