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

missed point/ camera wish list

[musikit]

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.

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.

Re:Control affected by camera

[Neon Spiral Injector]

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.

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.