Hi all,
In the current MMO Uru, you can't change the camera view, with the exception of going from third person to first person and back. The camera appears to be, mostly, behind you, though sometimes the view changes, for what I would call special effects.

I find this to be annoying, and it's also rather old fashioned. In other MMOs (Guild Wars comes to mind and it's not that recent a game), you can change the camera view. I can even change the camera view in Guild Wars so that my avatar is facing the camera! I like this feature a lot.

My question - this is part of the client, right? If so, is anyone out there interested in working on a change so that we can change the camera view. Aside from being more interesting, I think it would make Uru more contemporary, in a good way. People from other games are used to changing the camera view. I personally find the way Uru does it to be annoying. Although I want to keep Uru, for want of a better word, "Uru", I think we can take some ideas from other games. I'd love to be able to change the camera view.

Comments?

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Retired forum mod, mszv, amarez in Uru (KI 89257), other online games
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It shouldn't be too difficult... As far as I've seen Uru uses camera rails so the camera behaves as if it was a real camera on a dolly, but you should be able to detach it and rotate around the avatar. (When Cyan isn't under snow, that is... )

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I was thinking about it being optional. Hold down shift and move the mouse to rotate the camera, let go and it slides back to its defined position...

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I know the Offline KI makes it possible... perhaps it's possible on-line as well?

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I'd like to see this done in Uru. As well as making things like strafing smoother and quicker. It'd help out the people who like making films about Uru.

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In URU you are often in close spaces, the worst probably being the Cleft, and from that viewpoint it is a necessity to have a fixed camera. It is also a way to give the player exactly the view that looks best for a specific location. A comparable game is Tomb Raider (Anniversary) which I recently played, because the Lara character clings at vertical walls most of the time. The camera control must have been a nightmare to set up. On the other side are mostly open space MMOs where there is no forced 3rd person view camera except clipping the camera distance against walls. Spaces are made artificially large, like in World of Warcraft where the environment is oversized 2-3 times so that even hallways are large enough that a free 3rd person camera works.

But I guess if you don't specify any fixed camera regions then there is no forced camera in your Age.

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There may be areas of the environment, or even puzzles, where arbitrary camera views could show the age's "naughty bits" (i.e., areas of the age that are not meant to be seen) or spoil the puzzle. It would be nice if camera view permissions would be settable by the age developer to prevent this from happening - and better yet would be a way to set this by region of an age. Best practices for this sort of thing would be to allow any camera views that don't cause problems, so that people don't get annoyed at not being allowed to use certain views.

Of course, there should at least be some ages where you can use arbitrary camera views (Relto and some of the other non-puzzle Uru ages, for instance).

I would see an approach like the Unreal Tournament 2003 + games use, where your ghost camera can fly anywhere except for through solid surfaces (walls) and past parts of the skybox (such as through the ceiling or sky) where you would start to see areas without built details. The problem with this is that the existing camera seems able to go over player-blocking barriers. Maybe the solution would be to model how far the original camera could get from the player even when it's detached, and prevent it from going farther in that radius, or maybe adding a second clipping / blocking plane to prevent the camera from flying out of bounds.

Don't really see what the flap about seeing your character's face and the like is...you-are-you, remember? And you see your character's portrait every time you log in.

I can only think of a few places in the original content (Uru + PotS + GameTap released Ages) where you could move the viewpoint over a wall to view another one, but that won't help solving the puzzle you're in currently. In any case it seems a moot point since it's just a tool and using it to spoil your own experience doesn't ruin anybody else's experience - you know what you're getting into when you fly around with it (especially if you've played the Ages before).

If we were able to stop our camera like the offline KI allows us to do in Uru CC, I can live with that

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KI#46415

See, this is why I use first person only/always. I completely avoid the pure annoyance caused when in 3rd person and I want to see a different angle. You're locked, or alternately if you're not you carefully pan your camera about by turning your avatar, then find it clipped a wall and drastically spun a good 90 degrees at once and refuses to look at what you want.


I play first person not for immersion but because I can't stand a locked camera I can't pan about to investigate with. Change the camera so we have the option to move its panning about our avatar and about the area, and I'll... ok, I won't use it, because it's impossible to run accurately in 3rd person anyways.

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Welcome back all!

It seems to me that part of the charm of having an avatar is that you get to see your avatar interacting with the environment, and you get to control your view. Else why have a 3rd person view? Neither view is like "real life" anyway. In real life I can look at my body, and I can't do that in first person view. I also can't look at my own body as if I wasn't in it!

Anything you want to do with changing that blasted 3rd person camera view - that would make me very happy. I'll be cheering you on!

Please don't feel you have to do it, but if you want to, that would be great. I figure you can't know what we want unless we humbly put in a request. So, that's what I'm doing.

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Last edited by mszv on Thu Jan 08, 2009 1:52 am; edited 1 time in total

Just to be contrary here, I've always thought the way the camera moves automatically to different views as you run around, was one of the neater features of the game. I think there were a couple of options relating to the camera, smoother transitions was one of them if I remember correctly, and if these were turned on, I found I had little to complain of. It made me feel like I was watching myself running around in a movie

If I did need to look at something in particular and the camera wasn't playing ball, I'd switch, briefly, to first person view. I've no objections to the facility to move the camera around at will, as long as this is purely optional and easily toggled on and off, but someone must have spent a lot of time creating the various camera 'pans', and I for one, appreciate all that effort

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