Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.