Suggesting a Free Roam Camera

[Darknote]

Greetings to all! This may be my first post, but it is a post I really thought I would see more often than not. However, I searched this section and I cannot find anything about a free roam camera. I believe such a feature, however complicated it will be to implement, is very usefull and awesome to have in such a deep game. So here it is!
Please PLEASE! Add a free camera feature to the strategy map ! Its so awesome (given the fact that I got used to it from the SoaSE games).

Thanks for reading!

[silvaril]

Heya

This is actually a request that pops up from time to time. Has been popping up since the original game and earlier with titles such as Star Control, Ascendancy and even Homeworld.

The issue is that there are three axis of movement, and a free roaming camera usually only gives two axis, with the Zoom function acting as a third axis in many games.
Which is why most games only implement 2 dimensional space, such as the aforementioned SoaSE.


Free movement camera was tried, and tended to result in folks losing focus and spending way too much time regaining it. ( refer Homeworld )
There are further issues with trying to determine distance and points of reference when viewing a 3 dimensional object such as the map in only 2 dimensions such as on your computer screen.
Consequently the implementation became focus then rotation, where you select the primary focus of the camera, then rotate the map to view relative distances and directions.

[Genth]

Why does a free camera work on say third person RPGs like Skyrim then? Not a game developer, so please excuse me if it's an obvious question! Couldn't one use WASD and mouse for direction? Having said that, I'm fine with the way it is, but might ask - is there a way to increase the 'tolerance' for focus shifting? I almost always have to end up pausing the game to change focus as it's very difficult to get your pointer directly on the target, especially when they're a distance away.

[Lucian]

Solution > a radio button in the options menu.

Free Roaming Camera________________ o Yes/no

[silvaril]

Heya

Sadly, radio buttons like that are easier to place in the GUI than to program the back end that the option then turns on and off...

[Lucian]

Yeah I thought it might be a bit late in the day for such a change. Oh well maybe we'll get free roam camera in SOTS III . It would be very useful in both the tactical and strategic layers.

[ForceUser]

Why does a free camera work on say third person RPGs like Skyrim then?

The issue is that there are three axis of movement, and a free roaming camera usually only gives two axis, with the Zoom function acting as a third axis in many games.
Which is why most games only implement 2 dimensional space, such as the aforementioned SoaSE.

Even though you can go up and down (3rd axis) in games like skyrim, a few very important things differentiate it from a game like sots2

1) It has a natural focus, aka the ground. The ground acts as a 2d plane and everything of interest happens on this plane. This makes the 3rd axis very narrow and so reduces the amount of focus loss you'd find in sots2. Basically it doesn't 'really' have a 3rd axis as there are limits how far you can go on that axis. It's also easy to find your 2d plane again as the ground is pretty big.

2) It has a lot of terrain that can be used to gauge scale. Trees, house, people, animals. All of these things our brain naturally identifies and intrinsically know the 'size' of. With the abstracted sizes present in sots2 and the sheer scale of somethings like an entire solar system etc. you can easily get lost without a focus anchor of some sort (aka not a free roam camera). A simple example I can think of is in eve you have the ability to 'free look zoom' that is pretty cool (used in space movies a LOT) but it is super easy to lose track of what you are trying to look at. without a focus anchor it'd be impossible to find anything again.

3) space is big, spacially, while the ground with a limited 3rd axis is less so. There is an awefull lot of space in three dimentions.