Game Cameras Prone to Problems?

Moryath writes "Ever wonder how to quantify a game's camera, or why some videogame genres tend towards problems while others never see it mentioned? Glide Underground has some basic attempted quantification up in their Weekly Musings column for this week - they break possible game camera views down to six categories, and go over which are the most likely to have issues." Are there obvious steps that can be taken to improve some game cameras?

Comments

Control affected by camera

[Digital_Quartz]

One critical area which wasn't mentioned is the problems involved with having a camera which affects your controls. For example, consider Onimusha, or Resident Evil, where pressing "up" makes your character run forward, vs. say Mario Sunshine where "up" makes your character run away from the camera.

The first style of control can be done very well (although Resident Evil is obviously NOT an example of this :), and the second can have major problems.

The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction. Mario64 suffered from this a great deal; you'd be running along a beam, and the camera would pan around you. In order to stay on the beam, you'd have to continuously and slowly rotate the stick to counter the camera movement. Of course you may argue that the designer did this intentionally to make "walking along a beam" more challenging. There are plenty of examples of similar platform games where similar problems impede game enjoyment.

The original 3D Spiderman game for the Dreamcast and PS1, and the Spiderman: The Movie game both tried to overcome this problem in a novel way; if you were pressing a direction, and the camera moved, spidy would just keep going in whatever direction he was going; the axes the controls operated on would not change until the button was released.

The problems here is that there are situations where you'd, say, climb up a wall pressing up, have the camera swing around to a below-view, then try and run away from something. You'd go from "up" to "down", but since the camera had changed, your character would stop moving forward for a moment, then keep on going. The worst areas where were spidy got up near a corner. You'd press in a direction, he'd move onto a new surface that you didn't want him to, the camera would swing around 90 degrees to show the new surface, you'd press a different direction, and spidy would move in what felt like some random direction, usually onto another surface, swinging the camera around again. It felt very clumsy, and I recall being extremely frustrated with that game on several occasions.

I prefer the 3rd person soft, 1 vs 2 player issues

[cjmnews]

As the article states the 3rd person soft is the most popular of camera angles in games today. Though I am pretty sure I saw an article yesterday that said First Person view was the most desirable. Don't ask me why the conflict, I just read the articles.

Being a player of PC games (Diablo II, Neverwinter Nights) and PS2 games (Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance (1 & 2), Champions of Norrath, Lord of the Rings) I have experienced the 3rd person cameras and their issues.

On the PS2 the Lord of the Rings Return of the King game seems to have the most difficulty when switching to multi-player. The camera angles for single player were great. It adjusts for the terrain and keeps the important stuff on the screen. Once you go into multiplayer though, it is a different story. For some reason, less of the screen is visible with multiplayer. I would have thought more (or even the same) would be visible as the additional character takes up some real estate. Many of the angles prevent you from seeing paths (the run out of the Paths of the Dead) and traps (tiny spiders in Shelob's Lair) as well as some enemies. The lack of control of the camera does not help. The testers needed to test more with multiplayer to identify these issues and do something like expand the real estate seen in multiplayer.

The Baldur's Gate and Champions games on the other hand require you to manipulate the camera. This is fine for me, but not great for my kids as they have not figured out the fine art of directing the character with the left hand while turning the camera with the right hand.

Neverwinter Nights also has full control of the camera, with 3 different 3rd person view points built in. If I remember correctly, you can download a hak that allows for an almost first person view, that is particularly liked with the jiggle hak. These controls are pretty good and you can turn on the feature to have obstructing objects (2nd floors) automatically disappear when they obstruct your view. There are times when you can accidentally turn the camera so you can't see the battle that you are in, which can be quite deadly. Some module writers also force the camera view on you which I find frustrating. I set up my system the way I like it, don't change my settings.

Diablo II has the 3rd person hard camera. They did a good job to prevent most obstructions, but there are places where you can't see. NWN has spoiled me and I try to turn the camera in Diablo II.

All in all the cameras I have seen are pretty good, though there are others that need some work. Bionicle forces the camera to point a particular direction, Harry Potter SS and CoS have no camera controls, Harry Potter PoA has controls, but they are not as responsive as the Baldur's gate ones.

Re:missed point/ camera wish list

[American AC in Paris]

This is easily fixed by overlapping the zones somewhat. When you spawn in the new zone, have the spawn point be at least two seconds' worth of movement away from the zone border, and make the direction you need to go reasonably obvious.

Of course, the best solution is to take a page from Naughty Dog's playbook and pretty much do away with load times entirely.

Re:The cause is quite obvious

[DeadScreenSky]

Console games haven't always been able to afford complete freedom with the camera

You couldn't be more off here on what the problem is. With the exception of a couple of gaming genres (only forced first-person perspective games, really), gamers don't want full freedom of the camera. It doesn't make the games any more fun, it just serves as a frustrating distraction to the core gameplay. Unless I purchased a game about using a camera (whether welded to a gun or not :D), I really don't want to constantly mess with one.

Why would I want full camera control in a 3D third-person action game, the genre which gets most camera complaints excepting platformers (which has similar problems)? A quick camera reset button in Ninja Gaiden is more than enough - I don't have enough hands or fingers to play a serious, fast-paced, difficult action game and still worry constantly about a camera.

Sure, some minimal control can be nice (to look around at some parts of the artwork/environment, or a quick 'behind-the-back' re-adjust if the automatic camera isn't working as well I would like it), but full camera control is usually terrible.

The real game camera problem is just that many developers still aren't any good at making them. Part of that is that the 3D gaming artform is young, and we are still learning what works well and what doesn't. It is a hard problem, with only a few known 'perfect elements' (that many developers still don't seem to even be aware of - imagine if only a quarter of working cinematographers knew how to use a camera correctly!).

EX1: Too often in games the non-player entities aren't aware of the camera perspectives (it should be part of their AI), so they attack from positions that the player can't see from, etc. This is obviously pretty stupid, but it still is a hard problem (you want a little surprise, after all). The enemies need to be aware of the what the player can see, and be pretty fair about that knowledge.

EX2: Zooming in the camera too far is a big problem - developers need to have the discipline to let their characters look less impressive (because of the bad resolution of the TV, though this is getting better) to fascilate better gameplay. Ninja Gaiden does this pretty well - the environments and character models are gorgeous, but Team Ninja still keeps the camera zoomed far out so that the situation is clear. Team Ninja could have zoomed things in like their Dead or Alive series, but that would have been stupid beyond belief. Many devs do just that, though (Devil May Cry is pretty bad with this.)

EX3: Probably the most obvious important technique, and the easiest, is that the player shouldn't be running towards the camera for any significant length of time. There are a couple of exceptional situations for this, of course (like running away from something, a la the whale in Sonic Adventure, or during some parts of horror games), but it is shocking how many games get this completely wrong. Devil May Cry is another bad example of this, though there are far worse cases.

EX4: Almost as obvious an issue - the camera needs to automatically track threats to some extent. You don't want the camera doing quick crazy 180 degree turns or the like (PC FPS gamers are fairly rare examples of people who aren't made sick by this, and their kind is almost completely unknown in places like Japan), but it can't require the player to constantly fiddle with. Otogi is an example of how not to do this - the camera is almost completely static, yet enemies swirl around the player from all sides (including above), oftentimes with fast charging attacks or projectiles that are completely off-camera. It has a rudimentary lock-on system, but it needs to be manually trigger and is paired with a pretty stupid combat tracking system (you basically won't attack a non-targeted enemy unless you are completely touching them). The camera will not look up or down at all.

So we know to some extent what makes a good camera in games, but too many devs seem ignorant of these elements. I suspect it will get better in the next few years (it already is), but I wouldn't be surprised if the early third-person 3D games are nearly unplayable to future generations.