Genth wrote:Why does a free camera work on say third person RPGs like Skyrim then?
silvaril wrote: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.