Upcoming Feature and Change Feedback Center

Played with it a bit on TQ; but most of my feedback is going to be identical from when it was on Sisi.

First-person mode:
+ Fun as hell to play with, outside of combat.
- Largely useless in combat, because of the Inability to look around at least temporarily. Even a pilot in an airplane can turn his head - why can't we, as capsuleers, do the same?
- Camera forces itself to Orbit mode when jumping through a gate or using an MJD. Having to keep setting it back to first-person mode is pretty annoying if for some reason I want to stay using it.

Orbit mode:
+ Camera sets an object as its focus position for movement and sticks with it, as the old camera does. Good, except
- I still don't like that it doesn't actually focus on my ship, but some random point in space in front of it. If I wanted to do that I'd like the tracking camera to have that as an optional setting.
- I still don't like the FOV setting for this mode but it feels better than it was before on SIsi. Makes camera manipulation feel awkward, sluggish and nauseating, and I will likely not use this camera much as long as it remains in this state.
- Tracking camera, as exists, doesn't really have any easy equivalent to access that is obvious.

Tactical mode:
+ Has the FOV from the current camera, which is easy on my eyes and isn't a pain in the ass for scrolling and manipulating the camera.
- Manipulating the camera still feels pretty sluggish compared to default TQ camera, though.
- Still doesn't allow me to lock the camera focus on my ship and have that remain the center of my screen like the old camera does. Seriously, fix this. I shouldn't have to keep alt-clicking on my ship to bring it back to the center of my screen, and coupled with the nauseating FOV of the Orbit mode that actually DOES lock the camera around an object, I'm basically stuck with two largely useless camera modes because the desirable behavior from the mode with the undesirable FOV setting is not available in the mode with the desirable FOV setting. (tl;dr - lots of regression in behavior and functionality here.)


Requested tweaks from me:
* Allow me to force the tactical camera to stay locked on an object in motion rather than just snapping the focal point to where it was when I clicked on it, and then forgetting about it. ESPECIALLY my own ship.
* Toggle for "cinematic" mode in Orbit camera. Sure your FOV tweak makes the sense of scale "epic" but there's a reason I have never, EVER deliberately tweaked the FOV on the camera before: it's seriously nauseating and makes controlling the camera feel sluggish. It's great for taking pictures. It's terrible for actually playing the game.
* Ability to look around while in first-person mode rather than being locked into looking forward. Even better: seeing my ship hull, on the ships where the camera point is near where a bridge of cockpit would be.

Edit: To go into more general terms, the existing camera we've had for years has generally poor cinematic quality, but its functional quality is fairly high for most day to day use. The current state of the new camera is the opposite: it is high on cinematic quality but its functional quality is atrocious at best (imo) in that many of the features of the default camera are either missing, hard to access, or not appropriately placed within the new camera modes. Essentially, at the moment we are exchanging functional quality for cinematic quality, and that is NOT a trade I would expect many to be okay with.

We're looking at a situation similar to the beta map - it took the better part of half a year for it to really approach anything resembling the functional quality of the existing map, and it's still missing functionality that the existing map has.

Remember - just because you can make it look pretty doesn't mean you should, if it's at the expense of ease of use. Doubly so when you're ******* with something as potentially nausea-inducing as the field of view.

The orbit camera target offset breaks the quick and functional 'click target > tracking camera centres on selection > click D-scan' process many of us have gotten used to. I understand the new camera offset function and the tracking camera centre function can not coexist but maybe you guys can think of a way out of this frustrating outcome.

Right-click and drag pans the camera now.

Forgot to add that to my things I don't like about it, heh. I much prefer the right-click to pivot the camera.

Ok thanks, yeah I see that now. Now with all of that going on, am I mistaken in thinking we have lost all ability to change any camera FoV within the new camera system? One thing I REALLY don't like about the new orbital camera is having lost the ability to hold right click and change the "offset" of where my ship is on the screen. Is there a way to do this?

**Edit**

Have we also lost the entire Parent and Interest abilities as well with the new camera? Or perhaps my question would be better asked as to how we can generate a "fly by" in the camera now instead of the old way of using the Parent/Interest options...

Well I really hate to be that guy, but with the news of the new camera system I was hoping with what little info we had on it that life was going to ROCK for screenshot artists and video makers. However, as it stands in this beta form that simply isn't the case. We have actually gone a step backwards IMO... Are there any other hidden ways to achieve what we could before within the new camera system?

I always look forward new features, so I'm still hoping we get more features to allow us to continue with the screenshots and killer videos.

This does not at all apply to the tactical cam.

The orbital cam does feel 'floaty' and I also would prefer it to be sharper like the old cam. Furthermore the cam leading the ship when moving fast felt backwards to me. I was expecting the ship to lead the cam. How about when a ship is accelerating into warp the camera is trailing behind the ship, and when decelerating out of warp the ship is trailing behind the camera. When not in warp I may just prefer it to do neither.

The first person cam does exactly what its meant to do. Good fun!

I'd like to offer some feedback on the orbit camera:

I'm sorry if this is very vague, but I would prefer if the camera controls were more... "snappy".

Especially zooming in and out has a lot of floatyness around it. Normally, UI designers use acceleration/deceleration like that to make things feel smoother, and to allow better control of small movements, but because most people use the mouse wheel for scrolling, we already have a lot of precision and good control of how fast we actually want to zoom. For me personally, it simply makes zooming less precise than before.


Another thing about zooming: Instead of the wheel, you can zoom by holding your left and right mouse buttons and moving the mouse up and down. This is now much slower than it used to be, you have to move your mouse across the whole screen multiple time to cover a good amount of space.

With the old camera, you could hold your right mouse button and move the mouse to turn the camera around, while keeping it in place. It's not a very important feature, but I use it quite a bit when just idling around and enjoying the view. I'd like if that could be added back.

Also, "Look at" moves a lot slower than it used to be with the old camera. When use "Look at" in combat, I do it to quickly get information, for example "is this dread in siege?", "does he have blasters fit?", "are his X modules running?". In those situation, it's more important to me to quickly look at whatever I'm trying to look at than to get a sense of scale and epicness.


For my last point, I'm not really sure if this is just a "grr change" thing, but the dynamic FOV when you zoom in and out is irritating. It would be nice to have a checkbox to turn that off, but I'm not sure if I just have to get used to that.

I also want to note that with the new camera, the old left click + right click zoom functions are gone. They are very useful for viewing things and making videos. They also add to the immersion.

Overall it would be good if all the old functionality is preserved, because it works really well. Having both old and new features will be the best option.

A couple of things many of you seem to be wondering about:

- If you feel the new camera is too smooth, there is a brand new slider under System menu (esc) > Display and Graphics > Ship View Camera Settings > Camera speed to save the day (hopefully)
- You can achieve very similar shots to the old advanced camera set parent/interest stuff by simply performing a Look at (alt+click) and then Track (alt+shift+click). I have although noticed that there is an issue that the "Look at" entity can end up blocking the entity being tracked entirely, and I'll look into amending that.
- Due to a defect it is currently only possible to perform a Look At command on an object out of grid by doing alt+click (very useful for d-scan). The button in the Selected Item is grayed out, but this will be fixed.
- Look at travel speed will be increased

Also, those of you that say you feel motion sickness, could you please help me out and try to put a finger on exactly what it is that makes your stomachs tingle if possible?

Holy **** that first person camera is fun.
love the new work here but i do have one concern about the orbit mode

hopefully im just being a dumb ass and am missing something.

with the old camera i can turn the tracking on/off with a hotkey and then just click my target to have the screen track it,
this is important for chasing small fast things as it allows me to see where they go
my first priority is always to try and lock them up so i already need to ctrl - click, then ill be concerned with overheating points webs and so on so shift-f1,2,3 ect..
alt-shift-clicking is a little too many buttons to be pressing every time i want to see where someone warps off to,


can we have the old on/off function for this again because i will not be using the new camera for pvp because im a clumsy feck with my keyboard and im never going to be able to tell where anything goes with it.