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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?
please if a game developer is reading this one missed point about 3rd person cameras and a wish list for me is the following...
when you change areas, or "zone" (MMOs) or anything that would require the screen going all black or all white or requiring a CD load (time where player usually releases all controls) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE place the camera in a position so pushing UP would not move the character out of the zone/change areas again/require an additional CD load time.
too many times have i played games where UP entered the building and then got in the building and UP exited the building. so annoying.
It's great to see a domain name with a dead product name in it is going on like this :) Maybe next time they should choose a name with broader appeal... In a similar vein, I've seen a website with "riva" in its name but don't recall where.
I can't play Resident Evil because of the controls. But Shenmu has the same controls, yet I play it fine. The difference is in Shenmu the camera is almost always centered behind your back. So up does usually mean walk away from the camera, left turns left, and right turns right. Even down does a quick 180 like in RE. But because Resident Evil started with the prerendered backdrops they had fixed room cameras. Though one would think that a fixed camera like that would lead better to a camera-relative control scheme.
I've played games where the stick direction was the direction of movement on screen relative to the camera. I remember thinking as the camera slowly panned and my thumb adjusted the angle of the stick, how odd such a compensation was, but how natural it felt. Now if the camera would have just snapped to a different angle I couldn't have delt with it.
Phantasy Star Online wasn't too bad when it came to player controlled cameras. A quick flick of the left trigger would re-center the camera behind the charater's back. It became so natural feeling (perhaps because of how often I had to do it) that when I was playing another game later with a poor computer controlled camera I kept finding myself pulling the trigger trying to fix it.
"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."
Lots of games are based around some kind of character the makers are trying to promote, like Mario, Spiderman, Lara Croft...
A first person camera means that this animated advert isn't on the screen all the time, and so it's not an option for many modern games.
I think it's quite clear the best thing that can be done for all third person games is to provide a first-person mode for navigating crowded areas (and for shooting), and preferably a way of controlling the camera as well - although this is not to say that camera AI and selective transparency are useless, they are never going to replace a human hand on the controls, and should just be there to ease the job and keep the game flowing.
However, given the within-game advertising and the tendency of designers to oversimplify the controls where possible, to enhance the kiddy-appeal if nothing else, I don't see third-person-only games leaving the market any time soon.