EVE Information Portal

TLDR:
- Tracking camera, with a steady focus on what is clicked on the overview is _essential_.
- Unsteady camera modes are clearly making players sick.

[edited] At first I was horrified by losing right-click pan, but I later realised it's not a feature I use a great deal. However:[/edit]

Please take seriously the need to restore the tracking camera, so that we can five degree dscan things by clicking on them in the overview. I'm sure that many thousands of your players do this every day. I don't want to hold 'C' down every time. I don't have that reflex and shouldn't have to learn new, clunkier ones.

While the old camera code may be difficult to maintain, as a player it is not broken. I don't want cinematics: I want things to work, and not get in the way. I don't want my camera view to sway, move around or have 'inertia'. I want it exactly as it is because as a player it is not broken and does not need fixing. By all means add 'cinematic' new features but please: I don't want them shoved down my throat.

Many thanks,

Calima

[Edited once I realised click-click pan wasn't as essential as I'd thought]

I tried to wrap my head around this and it seems to work like the old tracking. So that´s a plus only drawback for me with this new system is, there is no switch to enable it. You always have to use a hotkey to "look at". Another thing I realised is, that "look at" doesn´t work on the map at all using the hotkey. So I have to click the object, click on "look at" on the selected item window and than I am able to scan.




Please don´t implement this. I am not sure who thought it would be a good idea but it is totally not. You want to track stuff from the PoV of your ship not from some undefined spot in space. Again, I am not sure who´s idea this was but I really like to get an explanation why this would be useful for anything? I need to track another ship in relation to my own ship. So I tried this "chase mode" that even if it would work like the old tracking is way too much stuff to do for a simple command.

Look at --> track --> camera is getting locked on the ship I am looking at and follows. And now what? I am not seeing my own ship, I can´t interrupt the other ships pathing, I am losing complete sense of where my own ship is. Maybe it is useful with the new fighter squadrons or so but for our everyday usage it´s completely useless.
The description in the devblog says I can trigger it by using orbit mode. Well, I am getting triggered for sure but nothing else. I also tried this thing with looking at my own ship, tracking myself and see if it is and it is totally not the case. When I am manually piloting I am moving the camera all the time, I don´t need to track my own ship instead I like to track the hostile ship while adjusting my point of view in relation to the enemy ship and the course. But again, maybe I simply missed some "features" so enlighten me and while you are on it please provide meaningful explanations of your features because I am starting to think you guys are over thinking a lot here and implement features that work against the player. Just as a hint, you reach perfection in coding when you can´t remove anything anymore while keeping the whole thing functional. Easier said than done especially with legacy code but if you rewrite something from scratch keep it simple man. I spend a lot of time now trying to figure out what you guys are trying to achieve with these features and most of it while sounding great is so much hassle to get around that it is no fun. Again, keep thing simple and functional.
Your chase mode thingy is a really good example of good intention but bad implementation. I have to "look at" and "track" to have the old tracking mode. Aside from the fact that it doesn´t seem to work it is too much. Why can´t I simply "track" sth as I am used to? In what world does it make sense to unlock the camera from my ship when I am tracking an object? I am not playing Homeworld here, where this point of view made a lot of sense because I wasn´t flying the ship by myself I played and RTS. We don´t play a RTS game here with the exception of fighter squadrons where it may or may not make sense to have such tracking features.

Maybe I expressed myself a little too unclear, sorry about that. :)

With the old camera you could track objects correct? So let´s say you are flying around with me and I am tracking you then the camera will follow your ship in space. You can "draw" a line from my ship to your ship so my ship is the center and you are "flying" around me. With the new camera I am tracking your ship from an undefined (for me undefined) point in space instead of using my ship as the centerpoint. So instead of being able to draw a line from my ship to your ship and getting a good understanding of distance, speed and your course in space I am getting lost. I made a quick .jepeg to show what I mean. Again, maybe there is a way to use tracking like we are used to with the old camera but if there is it seems to be a little too hidden for my taste.
Tracking


edit: I made a screenshot to show even better what I mean with the camera getting "unlocked" and put to an undefined point in space. I tried all kinds of angles and whatnot but there is no way to get a proper point of view. If I would play a RTS game - hello homeworld - in space this new so called feature would make sense but in EvE it´s no use.
new tracking camera

I do all of that, but I do it with normal camera movement, except possibly looking for killmarks. I just prefer for the camera to stay in the position I moved it to even after releasing the button. That also keeps my ship at the center of the screen, allowing a better sense of where I am relative to other stuff.

And no I didn't get 75 responses of no. I did get at least 50 though. Still a very small sample in the grand scheme of things, but reasonable evidence that it's not as widely used as you seem to think.

To each their own though. I do believe CCP should remake that feature unless they come up with something significantly better for the right mouse button, but nobody else I know would be devastated if that feature were gone.

I think a lot of people are missing one thing: The new camera is required for many of the new things in the Citadel expansion, so continuing to use the old one won't realistically be possible for much longer. They really should focus on making the new one work more like the old one though.

I do understand that the new camera is required for the way the new capitals will work. However, capitals aren't going to be doing the scouting that needs the tracking functionality. How about a secondary solution until a full tracking solution can be implemented in the new camera:

1) Reset the opt-out function on the camera with the new patch.

2) Leave the ability to opt out of the new camera in the next patch.

3) add some code that requires a person getting into a carrier and above to enable the new camera or force its enabling while disabling the option to turn it off while in the ship. Same goes for any other structure (assuming Citadel defense) that may need the new camera.


If this really is a time crunch issue to get the camera ready, this is an option that will buy the developers time to implement some very important features without delaying the new capitals. This is probably an easier coding solution than making the whole tracking fix by the time of the patch. The quick and dirty way around it tried on SISI this weekend is really not a good workaround.

It really doesn't seem that hard to implement the old tracking system. There would probably be a couple complications, but it's mainly a matter of changing C to a mode toggle and then initiating tracking mode every time the selected object changes. I don't know how messy their code is, but I could probably get that working in a day or two at most. I think what's holding it back is that someone higher up the chain of command has decided the feature shouldn't work that way.

Removed some off topic posts.

Not sure there, I think having a fixed point for your ship will be very important for using the new fighters and the new AOE Titan mods. No point detaching your camera and selecting an area that is out of control range, is there?
New fighters, will be able to be placed anywhere on grid, you should not have to detach from your ship to place them or they could end up in entirely the wrong place because you have no idea where you placed them in relation to your ship.
Try it in SISI (doing it on TQ will get you killed) and see what sort of tactical view you have when your camera is detached. Nice for video makers (and doing pretty screenshots), all but useless for tactical reasons.

Just to pile up on the thread and repeat what has been said numerous times.

The custom tracking position & center tracking camera (& toggle feature):

It is not only an issue of d-scanning. It is, of course, really useful for d-scanning and I'm sure a significant part of people d-scanning things on the regular are accustomed to it and using it the way it is.

And for good reasons; pressing C to toggle tracking and then clicking once on things in the overview / in space to start tracking and then choosing to d-scan is pretty straightforward, efficient, and hard to improve. Those are simple one-step one-click one-action processes.
That's where you are going with your 'V' / 'refresh directional scan' aka 'd-scan things without looking at it and camera adjusts automatically', and I get it, because it has the potential to be faster in plenty of situations.
That's great, and by all means, keep it there as an option. But that's a new shortcut to add into the game, for something that we could already do (maybe half a second slower) with the toggled tracking centered camera and the d-scan.
In this use case, there is no practical reasons to remove the way the old toggled tracking used to work.
Yes it is slightly faster with that new thing.
Guess what ? You could increase the speed of the old tracking camera and it'll wield the same result without people throwing their **** around in anger everywhere, and keep the new one 'V' feature around because some people will like it better.

It's not just about d-scanning. The custom tracking position, although I'll admit to not use all the time, is very useful to grasp position of things relative to your ship and quickly check for several targets while toggled.
The fact it is customizable is nice, because people will have their UI arranged differently, and they know better where the focus of the camera should be.

General unresponsiveness of the new camera:

I do not feel nauseus using it, but I can understand why some people do.
On a general note, all the fluff and fancy stuff is nice, please do give options to people of want to have a fancy camera the way to customize it to their likings. That's great.
Your top priority should however be the UX, and give people a tool that does not feel slow in any way and mimics what they were used to.
Want an example? Just look at what the old one did, and mimic it. I'll admit that the old one can be improved upon, but the new one isn't an improvement of the old one on several topics.

Right click pan / pivot:

No reason to remove it at all. I rarely use it, some people do more often than others, and you're stripping them of a simple yet useful feature (no I don't think they want to switch camera mode every time, thanks).


There are other things, and more people have made more useful comments than I would on them, so I'll cut it there.

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I don't mean to be rude or agressive in any way, but I have a hard time figuring out the thought process of the people making the call on these changes.
You have to re-write old code, I get it, and that's great, because it means an easier time to add new features and tweak them in the future, super cool.

However, you're working with an old software and people have grown accustomed to how things worked and got it working for the most part; I never heard people being actively vocal about how the old camera needed a rework because it wasn't working great, etc. Of course, there were bugs, it wasn't neither perfect nor the best solution, and there were quality of life improvement as well that made it the way it is today. Remember the no centered tracking camera days ?

Thus, the first thing on your list when reworking something that was in most cases working great should be to replicate it to how it was before.
Once you're done with that, make people test it for bugs and to make sure it is working the way it should.
And then, after all that:
- you can add all the fancy effects you want ,
- you can add new camera modes, because why not, the first person camera is utterly useless for day to day use, but I'm sure some people will make cool videos with it,
- you can ask for feedback / propose new cool changes and tweaks (like your 'V' things, I think it's pretty cool and a nice addition).
And make sure to add some sliders and stuff so people can get close enough to the old look and feel without spending 2 hours fiddling in the options.

Well, it doesn't have to be exactly that way, but you get the idea.
/rant off
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Overall that's some good stuff coming from you guys, plenty of new functionnalities and cool things all around, but disregarding some basic old camera things and habits 'just because' isn't particularly useful for anyone.

TL;DR: Don't reinvent the concept of the wheel when there's no need to. Don't fix things that aren't broken and that nobody was complaining about. Give people what they're used to if there's no reason not to, and iterate upon that / improve from there. Thanks.