Exitting Mouselook ... camera continuity.

Potentially, SL has excellent continuity between first and third person camera modes, because the mousewheel zooms the camera from the eyes of the player to behind the player's head --- a nice continuous sweep which almost folds the two discrete modes into one. That's a very cool model, in concept. Unfortunately it's let down badly by the attrocious camera handling that pervades SL.

The clean model collapses because when you zoom back from 1st person's eyes to behind the player's head, the place you were looking at before is lost, so instead of a very cool zoom back so that you can click on what you were looking at, instead you often lose sight of your view entirely. The dumb camera just ignores everything that went before and pretends that you're starting afresh.

If we were looking around in mouselook, it was for a reason --- we were interested in something, and we don't usually want to lose sight of it. We can always hit Escape if we want to reset the view. The head of the avatar and the camera focus should be left pointing where you were looking center-screen in Mouselook.

[Editted to remove reference to lack of fixes for camera movement problems ... Mega thanks for Edit fix, LL ]

Oddly enough, the SL viewer does go part of the way towards getting it right: if you are facing one direction in the X-Y plane when in 3rd person mode, and then you zoom the mousewheel forward into 1st person and then change where you're looking at in the X-Y plane, then on zooming the mousewheel back into 3rd person again you find that the av's 3rd-person orientation has changed to the new direction in X-Y (but not in Z).

Clearly it's starting to do the right thing in moving the avatar's body, but just doesn't go far enough and move its head as well.

What's needed is, first to orient the head such that it is pointing in the Mouselook direction in Z as well, and then when the mousewheel zooms back, the camera should move rearwards in exactly the opposite direction to that of the eyes, but looking always forward of course.

Then the mousewheel would give complete continuity when zooming between 1st and 3rd person modes.

So if you were looking straight up in mouselook, then scrollwheeled out... You'd be looking up at your own butt while you walked around?

For all that I want complete control over my camera... I like your idea for its clean transition between mouselook and 3rc person, but I can't see that it's something I'd want. I go into 3rd person only to move in an open environment. I stay in mouselook when moving in closed places, and alt-drag when just standing around talking or working.

When I swtch from mouselook to 3rd person, I'm changing because I'm about to do something different. The over-the-shoulder position of the 3rd person camera is right were I want it when in 3rd person. I don't want it rotated in Z around my head.

What I DO want is a way to move while alt-draging the camera... WITHOUT the camera snapping back to 3rd person. I want alt-drag to override everything else.

So how about this...

A single switch to couple/decouple the camera, perhaps on some unused key like L for Look-Mode or something. Click it, and nothing much is different if you are in 3rd person. Hitting ESC still sends you camera to the default position as always. Walking still moves the camera with you.

But, alt-drag your camera to orbit a rock or something, then move, and the camera stays where it is. If you go out of range, it gets dragged along too, just as happens now if something else is moving your avatar while you alt-drag. The difference here is now you can CHOOSE to move in this mode. So you could stick your camera in the rafters of a club and walk though the crowd using the overhead view.

Now, with this uncoupling turned on, leaving mouselook with the scrollwheel can do exactly what you said. In fact, it SHOULD. No auto-snap to the over-the-shoulder spot. Hit ESC if you want to be there, or recouple the camera by hitting L.

The only preference that this would then need is an option to choose whether ESC recouples the camera or not. It should, for new players. That way if they accidently decouple their camera and get confused, ESC always puts things right. But expereienced players will want to use ESC to reset the camera's position without turning off the decoupling. Sure, they could just hit L again, but a preference would make that feel more professional.

Oh... And if you alt-drag on yourself when decoupled, the camera should still move with you, but at the new fixed offset. Decoupling should also override vehicle camera positioning, treating those just like a moved over-the-shoulder point. So if you don't like where a car is putting your camera, you can decouple and alt-drag on the car (or yourself) to make a new chase-cam position.


EDIT: Turning decoupling off with the L key should also trigger an ESC reset of the camera. So maybe a preference isn't needed. ESC always recouples and resets. Hitting L twice when decoupled resets the camera then returns you to decoupled mode. Hitting L twice when coupled doesn't change anything (except perhaps to reset the camera if it wasn't already). Do something onscreen (icon, color change, something) to indicate decoupled mode. There. Clean interface.

Hooray, feedback! I thought every point was worth comment so this is a bit long. Hopefully other readers will bear with us.

Hehe no, you've not considered what your body does when you look straight up --- your head leans back and your back arches, so the line out the back of your eyes doesn't pass through your butt. As a result, a mousewheel zoom back into 3rd person will work pretty much as it does now --- the back of your head appears in the lower third of the screen, and the screen estate taken up by your av gets progressively smaller as you zoom further and further back. (Exactly as at present.) The only difference would be that what you'd see around the av would include whatever you were looking at in 1st person view instead of always being switched back to the horizon. You'll be able to click on the object you were looking at instantly.

(Btw, the camera zoom-back transit path isn't directly on the line coming out of your av's head behind the eyes, that was a simplification. Just like at present where the camera is offset from that line, this would continue to be the case. Nobody wants the av head in the middle of the screen! Instead, in 3rd person the target of your eyes is near the top of the screen and your av is near the bottom of the screen -- the view is a bridge between the two.)

Incidentally, you can almost experience how this would work right now (but only for Mouselook directions above you) by trying the scrollwheel transition when you're sitting down. The reason why it almost works properly there is that when sitting, the av's 3rd-person horizon is a mere 10% from the bottom of the screen, so you can see very high positions if you mousescroll just barely into 3rd person. Try it. It doesn't work at all when standing up though, because the 3rd-person horizon is then about 70% up the screen, and the zoom transit switches abruptly to much further behind the av, so you see nothing of what you were examining above you.

Same here, but that's because we have no option because of the extreme poverty of the SL camera system. A seamless transition makes the concept of 1P-3P camera modes almost disappear, and when that happens your whole way of working changes. It's actually easy to see this from experience in other MMOGs, since they tend to offer quite a range of different camera models -- I remember 3 types of view in one MMOG, and a whole 5 in another! A huge number of camera modes can be annoying in-game because of the long rotation cycle (though just a seamless 1P/3P + an independent camera view is never a problem), but the benefit of that experience was to see what the options are and to understand what works and what doesn't.

This is only because of the really lousy camera behaviour we have right now, coupled with the fact that we have no mouse pointer nor GUI windows available in Mouselook. For 99.9% of the time, we're switching out of Mouselook to be able to actually *DO* something useful (other than just look and travel), and the change of view direction is entirely incidental. If that wasn't so, why were you looking somewhere irrelevant to the task in hand? Because you always admire the scenary before starting a job? )) No, hehe. Usually we look around until we find a target, and then we (lamentably) have to switch to 3P to get a cursor and GUI windows. If you genuinely didn't want to be looking wherever you cast your eyes in Mouselook, there's always Escape. But believe me, you'd rarely use it, if the camera worked sensibly.

To recap, we look around in 1st person because that makes it easy for our av to peer into or enter smaller places that we can't yet see in 3rd person, or where 3P is unnatural or unhelpful, and then when we've found the target, we would like to operate on it but can't because LL have swiped away the cursor and the menus (which they shouldn't do --- but that's a separate fight), so we exit Mouselook to regain them. We don't want to lose sight of the item we've found!

Notice that I'm not mentioning Alt-drag yet, because that's a different issue altogether -- a very important issue, but a separate one. Alt-drag is independent camera navigation, which is entirely unrelated to av-eye navigation and not an alternative to it. I know that we can't even begin to separate them that way in SL because you can do so little with pure av-eye navigation here, but that's purely an artifact of the darn camera switching and the lack of a cursor in Mouselook. Other games don't have that problem, and the two types of navigation can be very nicely independent.

Now to your pure camera nav suggegstion -- with which I agree entirely, btw!

What you've just proposed is exactly one of EverQuest's camera modes, although it's not exclusive to EQ by any means. You can watch yourself run across the countryside while maintaining an arbitrary absolute vector offset between av and camera, even to extreme distances. If the av runs around a 360-degree circle, you get to see all sides of the av as she turns, because your camera offset vector is world-absolute, not a rotation relative to the av's forward direction. It's excellent. Anarchy Online's version of this camera mode doesn't preserve the angular offset so you can watch your Yalmaha flyer zooming towards you, pass you, and then zoom away (then the camera follows behind), which looks very cool but is no way as useful as EQ's offset-camera mode (EQ provides many modes). The strength of what you describe lies in its decoupling of camera orientation from av movement in everything except the origin of the camera offset vector.

And in SL it could be ever better, as in your example, because you can click on the ground to fix the origin of the camera offset vector if you don't want the on-av default. It could be tremendous.

Actually, the only reason we're talking about an "Escape" at all is because Mouselook is currently a pretty useless mode in the sense that you can only look but not touch, and we truly want to "escape". ) What we're discussing now though is independent camera modes, and you don't want an escape, you want a cyclic camera control, or toggle if there are only two. It needs to be a function key in order to continue working even when we're typing in chat. Camera control is an entirely orthogonal issue to anything else that is going on, so the actual ESC key wouldn't fit the bill. Leave ESC for escaping from text input lines. [PS. The keyboard and mouse button bindings should always be player configuration options anyway.]

Exactly, you've got that spot on. And most of the time you won't even need to alter the camera offset, because it'll remember what your preferred offset was from last time and your view will only be obscured if you're unlucky. [The number of things that the SL camera does wrong is so long it's a catastrophe in such an otherwise-excellent system.]

Yep, excellent! But forget about using text keys --- camera changes must work regardless of whether one has a line of text half typed or not. A function key is mandatory as a camera mode switch.

[This is a slightly different explanation of the 1P-3P continuity problem in terms of the av's horizon, which gets hard-clamped immediately on exitting Mouselook. This text is derived from correspondance I'm having with LL support.]

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Because the break in continuity affects only the Z coordinate, it can be discussed in terms of horizons. When you exit Mouselook, your orientation in the X-Y plane is preserved (in other words, the av rotates in the X-Y plane when your Mouselook view is moved left or right). In contrast, the Z-axis information is lost, because the 3rd-person horizon is clamped to about 70% up the screen when standing, and to about 10% up the screen when sitting.

This clamping of the horizon instantly on exit from Mouselook is what causes the loss of continuity --- it should clamp the Z-axis only when the av starts moving (if at all), and if it clamps it then it should do so in the Z-direction of the movement, which isn't always horizontal.

Until the av starts moving though, the view on exitting from Mouselook should take into account the vertical elevation of the view that the player last had (that's continuity) --- after all, that's why Mouselook was used, to find an object that wasn't easily viewable, and we certainly don't want to lose sight of it when zooming back the view with the mousewheel. (There's always Escape if you want to reset your eyes to the horizon). Very frequently we exitted Mouselook precisely to click on that object, after all.

The design concept for the mousewheel/scrollwheel in SL has the excellent property of providing smooth continuity between 1st and 3rd person views, but unfortunately the immediate horizon clamping breaks that, if you were looking high up or low down.

The effect is very disconcerting and unhelpful: one instant you're gazing at something interesting high up on the ceiling or far down below you, and the next moment all the visual context for that target has disappeared and you're looking at some irrelevant horizon. And then you have to start afresh, trying to manipulate the Alt-drag camera to find your target again. It's very poor.

I've editted my thread-starter post in response to the new config controls which allow us to switch off the old unsolicited Edit-mode camera movements. This thread now deals with Mouselook exit continuity alone.