Compass Rose Cam Controls

[Romaq]

Based on my current play with SCS, it's awkward at times to get the camera angle I'm looking for. Perhaps I turn too much, or my attempt to turn has me spinning around with a straight-down view.

I really *really* like the GoogleEarth Compass Rose control. I don't know what patents they may have on it or what problems TM would have in implimenting that sort of camera control, but I really wish I could just use the mouse to 'grab' something on the screen and spin it for more fine-tuned control of the Caesar IV camera, and I'm guessing this will be awkward with SC:S as well.

Part of the awkwardness, I believe, is that the camera is forbidden from crossing over the boundary of the building area. For that, I would suggest having the camera boundary extend somewhat further to allow you to get the view you want of border areas, but perhaps slow down to a stop for a more intuitive effect. I can't 'see' the wall there that the camera won't let me beyond. Instead of a wall of invisible 'unobtanium', perhaps the wall could be made of foam that does two things to the camera as I attempt to go past the building zone:

1) The further afield I stray, the slower the camera goes in that direction until it stops and goes no further.

2) The further afield I stray, the more the camera will turn and direct the view back towards the play area.

3) If I 'hit an invisible wall of unobtainium', it would be helpful to have audible feedback if I don't have visual feedback. Some sort of 'thump' when my camera hits the wall so I'll have a better idea my camera won't go past the hard limit.

The 'rubber wall' is a better idea than the 'solid wall', in my opinion. I may still wish to look at something in my field of play that I can't see as I wish from within the play area.

Anyways, ideas for consideration. Thank you.

--Romaq

[deathtopumpkins]

I've played COTN, and I didn't have any problems with the camera. I think the camera for TS2 is good, maybe EA will have them implement that. It should satisfy you Romaq. But, yeah, I hated the SC4 camera.

[Herodotus]

Go to User Interface and reverse both rotations and, (only) when composing screenshots, move scroll speed to slowest (but this is not good for normal gameplay). All these can be done on the fly (without stopping game play)

[Romaq]

It's the gameplay bothering me. GoogleEarths floating compass rose is reassuring to me, and I really like how they managed that. It wasn't the 'precision gameshots', it was 'how does this damned building place and do I have it facing the way I'd like?'

I really preferred to have the front door to the street, and I learned to place things 'just so'. Control over the camera would make that 'just so' much better for me.

I'm still annoyed to see diagonal roads in C4, but not yet in SC:S, but having diagonal roads did make placing things more touchy, and camera control didn't help on that.

--Romaq

[Need_Help]

But you need to make it clear, GoogleEarth is mainly just looking at Earth, and its the Earth itself rotating, not the camera rotating. If you want to have that kind of 'dragging a thing to rotate camera' option, where are you going to put that navigational bar? There will have many buttons in a game and usually used up 1/4 - 1/3 of the screen. Actually the camera option in Caesar IV is not so 'hard to understand'. Its like, focusing on a building and you are rotating the camera itself, but not the target. Thats why, the further you go, the less rotation will happen when you move it.

Thanks :)

[Romaq]

Google Earth's compass rose shrinks when your mouse cursor isn't near it, and it's transparent. I don't find C4's camera hard to understand. I find it hard to CONTROL. When I back up to an edge or corner of the build area, I keep accidently flipping the camera into the straight-down view and spinning like a top trying to get out of the box. Then it's "Where the hell am I now and what direction am I looking at?" C4's camera control, for *me*, is not as pleasurable an experience as the ability to control the camera for Google Earth. If I 'get lost' on Google Earth, I can always be sure of orienting the camera north and zooming out until I can find my landmark features and get back where I meant to go.

Part of that 'getting lost' aspect is the camera hitting the hard limit of the view area, getting stuck in a 'straight down' viewpoint and spinning around while I'm trying to point the camera in the view I was trying for. That does not make for a happy experience with camera controls on C4.

--Romaq

[Romaq]

Back to the camera controls, I believe there's room to make boundary events better. I do hope TM is testing this issue with people who don't normally play 3rd person games to ensure they have a good experience with seeing what they want to see and looking around.

--Romaq

[Need_Help]

There is a 'back to default view' button at the minimap (the little arrow). (I'm sure it will back to the direction of the camera as you just loaded the map, but I'm not sure whether it will also adjust your camera 'field of view')

Thanks :)

[Romaq]

In C4 it does reset the view, and it looks like it's the same position and field of view every time. The problem I keep hitting is where I want to view something just inside the boundary from just outside the boundary. I'm not necessarily focused on where that boundary is. I simply hit it like a mime in a glass box attempting to escape the Men In Black. And that's the part I find terribly annoying. I'd rather have more freedom to 'be on the outside looking on the inside', for one. And for the other I'd really prefer to have more 'cushion' in the effect of stopping the camera angle rather than attempt to turn and have the camera view get knocked around in the process. I'm getting more used to it as I play, but I'd rather not have so much to get used to when trying to look at something for placement.

--Romaq

[Romaq]

I've played around more with the camera control for C4. It seems as if the camera is on a stick. If you move backwards and bump the back-end of the stick against the 'wall', it turns the camera to point down even though you are pointing TOWARDS your city. That's 'buggish' behavior. If I'm trying to focus on something in the direction of the city, I shouldn't be 'punished' for it by having control of the camera taken away from me. If anything, I should be encouraged to get a good view of my city from a bit of distance away from the city. Perhaps you have a boundary area. The further away from the city I go, if ANYTHING, make the camera point BACK towards my city the further into the boundary I go. I really want to get shots of 'my city skyline'. It's rather difficult to do something like that if my attempts at that sort of shot point the camera at the ground.

Another camera control issue is one of oblique projection shots from directly above/ center of the city. I don't necessarily want to see the city 'running' in this mode, though I wouldn't complain. But I'd really like to be able to get map shots in oblique perspective as aids to planning my city, and so on. Satelite view and 'maps' view, please. Consider the CJs and effort put into SC4. C4 doesn't have a good way to make anything like maps, for what I can see. Maps are staples of CJs, even as hard as it is to create them in SC4. It would have been particularly delightful if I could have printed out a map directly from within Caesar IV, but no-can-do. Please don't make that mistake with SC:S.

Thank you.

--Romaq

[elebit]

Camnera controls are what ruined Sonic the hedehog 06 and archlord. Archlord was terrible it was a waste of 2 hours trying to get the dammed thing to work. Then another hour playing it and it was hard to get to log into the server. Then I was faced with really bad camera and made me die several times becuase you could not see enemies behind you and the camera did not follow you. You had to lug it around and also it did not move sideways with you when you turned and that made it hell to play. It was not meant for laptop users and the zooming was controlled by a mouse wheel (dont have I have trackball!) and the keys on the side of standard keyboards. I gave up and deleted it. I am so glad they made it free if I would have bought it I would be demanding my money back.

[King Faticus]

my two cents are that I HATE the Google earth camera :eek:
I prefer Cotn's camera:D

[elebit]

Google Earth camera is wierd.

[Romaq]

Maybe Google Earth's camera isn't quite the way to go. Unfortunately, I don't have CotN to reference, only Caesar IV at this time. My main problem is that when I want to back away from the city to look at something from the edge of my view towards the outside of the city, if I 'back away' too far, the camera quickly rotates to point straight down. If I'm spinning the camera on an axis, the 'back end' of the camera smacks the outside wall, the camera points downward and then SPINS. This is not good behavior for the camera. The reason I mentioned Google Earth is having a reasonable reference I can work with to manipulate the camera for the view I want. If the butt end of the camera did NOT do the tilt & spin thing, camera orientation wouldn't be such an issue.

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

cotn has a demo as well
Edit: but I cannot find it

[elebit]

I can prolly pick up COTN at ebgames around here for less then 10 bucks they sell alot of older pc games real cheap that they can't sell. I did see it once for 8 back when I didn't know about TM and thought it was a generic value game. It was in raleigh... it's funny how I thought it was a generic value game back then. I feel wierd about it now. LOLz.

[Romaq]

I had no idea Tilted Mill existed until SC:S was announced.

--Romaq

[elebit]

Wow I guess I heard of them sooner and didn't know it! I still think it's funny that I thought that cotn was a value game. Hell I have played some value games that were better than some of the crap some companies put out. EA has thier lives on the line with spore. ...If they screw it up they are toast... speaking of toast I'm hungry!

[Romaq]

EA has lots of money coming in from other games. Though, I should note, monthly subscription games like Ultima Online ALSO require the most money to keep going, so it's hard to find a net 'win' on the profit margins with MMORPGs.

EA has EAGames, EASports, EASims and various products with which to compete against other companies in the business. Just like Microsoft is NOT depending only on sales of Windows OS. If you go to www.ea.com (http://www.ea.com), you are asked to pick a language from a sizable language base. Though, of course, I would have suggested they negotiate with the browser to determine language of preference and offer a means to change manually AFTER making an automatic selection, but I digress... Multiple languages, International player base. UO is rather popular in Asia as well, on the basis of dedicated Asian shards.

Ok, so pick English and see http://www.ea.com/home.jsp, note the 'Medal of Honor: Airborn' movie, at least what came up. There are also sports games. LOTS of sports games, lots of various non-sports games including games geared towards kids. Look at the platforms EA produces games for.

I really REALLY don't think Spore will make or break EA as a company. I do, however, think that the words 'on time and in budget' are significant to ANY game being produced, and the more games currently in production are 'past schedule/ over budget', the more that indicates problems within EA. These would be problems that shareholders and The Board would take note of, and want answers for. It's the exact same thing as where I work if we consistantly shipped our product late and spent as much money as we had coming in as going out to make the product with no profit. If it happens once, it happens. If 'overdue and overbudget' becomes the norm, someone responsible will have to answer.

That Spore has become 'overdue/ overbudget' has direct impact on SC:S. TM does NOT want SC:S to ALSO be overdue/ overbudget. UO's Kingdom Reborn client is still being tweaked to convince people to actually USE the client. The KR Client has to be good enough to convince people to buy UO:Stygian Abyss which EXCLUSIVLY uses the UO:KR client. I think it's safe to say Ultima Online's current development cycle is overdue and over budget.

I don't have enough background data, but as a guess I would say EA isn't faring so well. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ao?s=ERTS appears to be a bit undervalued (people are selling the stock for less than it's really worth). All in all, I don't think Spore is make or break for EA. But the string of overdue/ overbudget projects (the few noted here) isn't doing favors for their stocks or impressing investors.

--Romaq

[elebit]

Spore is prolly THE biggest title to come from them since the sims. Thier reputation is more at stake then thier financials. Lots of people will prolly not by and EA game again if spore sucks. Just like people refuse to buy sonic games or any game pretty much from sega after the sonic next-gen crap. sega is going downhill with thier reputation. I think they need to give sonic a rest for a few years IMO. Come up the a really kickass game and that will revive him.

[Romaq]

Reputation drives financials.

--Romaq

[King Faticus]

it is also that same reputation that creates religious Zealots :eek:
hardcore brainwash-ees will buy the game no matter what and tell themselves and everybody else they love it and will defend the title from any criticism and swear by the brand
I like to call it 'brand loyalty'

Basically Im saying people will buy it no matter what just because the 'brand'

[Romaq]

Uhm... ok. Lessee... camera controls, camera controls...

--Romaq

[Tinkerbell]

Basically Im saying people will buy it no matter what just because the 'brand'

It didn't work so well for new coke. ;)

[King Faticus]

Spore flavored coke... sounds great o_0
actually I haven't drank any cola for months now and the last time I did was only a single cup at a party :p instead I drink cranberry-raspberry and apple juice and other similar stuff... like.. umm ... idontknow... water... I used to drink whiskey but I tend to drink way too mych so I decided not to buy it any more (Im more depressed now lmao)