Suggestion: player camera improvements

#1 - Aug. 20, 2014, 9:25 p.m.

(1) When player’s char goes to sleep or sits, the look-at point of the camera stays up. Making it impossible to take screenshots of the sleeping char; nothing else than above.

The rests are for screenshotting:

(2) Add finer dolly. Creation Kit editor of Skyrim game does have the coarse scroll dolly, but also finer dolly when user keeps key v down and moves the mouse pointer. Oblivion game has this too.

(3) Ability to dolly closer.

Note: two below may be used for cheating, making the game unfair. Don’t implement if you suspect that too.

(4) Ability to dolly more away. Some buildings are big; aerial shots.

(5) Ability to move the camera, and rotate its orientation. Like how Vistas are doing.
(5b) If you have only look-at point in the camera, then allow movement of the look-at point. Camera already rotates around look-at point.

Branden Gee

#3 - Aug. 27, 2014, 1:59 p.m.

Thank you for these thoughts. If these ideas have already been brought up before I did not seem them and so I am replying in this thread instead of the possible past threads.

(1) If we want the camera to point down at a sleeping character we would need the camera to know about the emote happening. On top of this right now, from my understanding, most players who do screenshots use /sleep in order to get their character out of the frame. If we were to change this functionality we would want to give players another alternative to hide their character.

(2) I personally like this idea.

(3) How close is closer?

(5) Camera orientation changing seems like it would be very jaring when in combat. I would be curious to hear your ideas for a control scheme for this.

(5b) Would this be like a ‘lock on target’ look-at?

Branden Gee

#19 - Aug. 27, 2014, 4:34 p.m.

Alright just trying to get all of these thoughts into a single concise list. (Please note this does not mean that any of these things will happen)

First person camera
Increase max dolly (camera distance) distance
Decrease min dolly distance
More finite dolly control
Automatic camera height adjustment on /sleep emote
Manual camera height adjustment
Stop ‘random snapping’ from happening
Look at camera
Free orientation movement
Fix automatic camera height so that the over the shoulder camera works as it would be expected to work
Manual FoV adjustment
Look acceleration toggle
Keep drawing mouse cursor when right clicking toggle

Please let me know if there is anything else I’m missing.

Edit: Added more features to list.

Branden Gee

#63 - Aug. 28, 2014, 1:56 p.m.

Firstly I want to thank all of you for very clear and well thought out constructive feedback it is always a pleasure interacting with players.

Secondly I would like to reiterate that me posting on this thread does not mean that changes to the camera will or will not happen either now or in the future of GW2 development. Please assume everything in this post is purely hypothetical.

Thirdly I’d like to focus this thread onto a single possible feature for the camera at a time so we can talk about it, discuss technical limitations, and potential solutions to these limitations. Feel free to silently judge those who post before reading everything else discussed so far. :P

So, for the first feature to discuss let’s start with the ‘smart pivot.’ I have chosen this one first as it is one of the more technically challenging features, and seems like it would interesting to talk about.

Rengaru.4730:
Currently when you look up the camera slides along the ground towards your character which gives you a very limited field of view (really noticable when attacking enemies on walls in WvW).

I would like an option to always keep the camera at the same distance, so when the camera touches the ground it starts pivoting on the contact point instead of the character (in other games usually know as “Smart Pivot”).

I made a quick sketch to visualize what I mean:
[img]https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/164988/Pivot.jpg[/img]

So for the first technical challenge, how could we get this to work when the camera doesn’t know what ‘ground’ is.

Branden Gee

#109 - Sept. 3, 2014, 4:32 p.m.

It was a busy weekend and we’re making sure everything is ready for 9/9 so thank you for being patient with the delay in responding to this thread. As always this thread is completely hypothetical and nothing in it should be interpreted to say we are or are not working on mentioned features at the present time.

Firstly I’d like to call out ShadowDragoonFTW.3418, wwwes.1398, Lytalm.5673, nagymbear.5280 and a few others who attempted to think up a solution for ‘Smart Pivot’ and being able to figure out what ‘ground’ is. I think it’s awesome that you are trying to solve this problem, but I think that I wasn’t as clear as I could have been in describing the problem. In GW2 and most video games there is a separation between what you see in game and what exists in the physics simulation. I have included a screenshot of what the physics looks like in game. My hope is this will help you understand what is actually going on a little bit more. Essentially when we are doing calculations for the camera in the world we don’t have a concept of ‘objects’ it’s all just ‘collision’. The only thing that we are guaranteed to know is where the player is and where we want the camera to be. From there we have a special tool that is called a raycast to figure out more information of what is going on in the world. A raycast takes a starting point and an ending point and it will tell us if there is any collision between the two points as well as where the raycast collided with the collision is if we hit anything.

Also I really wanted to give the gold star of participation to ConfusedDave.4271, and Makovorn.1706. You two are really on the ball with this and I feel like I should address a bit about current camera functionality that was mentioned a bit between the two of you. As you play GW2 you may notice that when you look ‘straight’ down or up you the camera’s target point is offset a bit. I think you may be on to something with modifying the offset based on a different calculation. Right now it’s linear offset based on angle of the camera. Think something like sin( cameraAngle) * maxOffset.

Hopefully this helps with the discussion of figuring out how to do ‘Smart Pivot’!
Any thoughts on the ‘Pivot Offset’ are also welcome!

Branden Gee

#125 - Oct. 17, 2014, 1:22 p.m.

Updating the list and necroing the thread all in one go!

(Please note this does not mean that any of these things will happen)

First person camera
Increase max dolly (camera distance) distance
Decrease min dolly distance
More finite dolly control
Automatic camera height adjustment on /sleep emote
Manual camera height adjustment
Stop ‘random snapping’ from happening
Look at camera
Free orientation movement
Fix automatic camera height so that the over the shoulder camera works as it would be expected to work
Manual FoV adjustment
Look acceleration toggle
Keep drawing mouse cursor when right clicking toggle
Keybind toggle for holding right mouse down / click once to toggle option

Please let me know if there is anything else I’m missing.

Branden Gee

#132 - Oct. 17, 2014, 11:52 p.m.

The death cam spinning bug should be fixed. It will go out at some point.

Branden Gee

#145 - Oct. 20, 2014, 3:15 p.m.

Shockwave.1230:
Is the harsh camera zoom when encountering walls/obstacles covered anywhere? Would love transparency on objects/walls or something to help with that.

This is covered by “Stop ‘random snapping’ from happening”. It’s actually a pretty interesting issue due to how guild wars 2 handles objects in the world. In order to do something like transparency you would need some way to either ‘tag’ objects as being able to be transparent or detect in real time that the objects can be ignored. To go back and tag each individual object in each map would take quite a long time and there is the possibility that some things could be missed or other objects end up getting tagged that shouldn’t have been.