First-person camera view

Khamon recently posted a question in the Hotline to Lindens forum which is very close to my heart:
Yes indeed, I second that. A proper first-person camera view is the key to immersion, simply because it mirrors reality. After all, in RL we usually see the world in first-person view, since out-of-body experiences are not all that common ...

Mouselook certainly has some of the features of a proper 1P camera view, but it also has some unhelpful baggage thrown in, like unconditional disabling of pretty much everything in the UI when in that mode.

MMOGs tend to strive for immersion much more than SL, and so it's no surprise to find many different camera modes available in some, and a 1P camera mode always occupies center-stage. Many people would like greater immersion to be possible in SL as well --- it's certainly the key to participatory sports, theatre, and other interesting passtimes.

SL could be given a proper 1P camera mode really quite simply. All that's needed is for each of the items or facilities that are disabled in Mouselook to be maskable on/off from LSL, perhaps using a bitmask type of approach, and their default values configurable in Preferences. This would allow the current loss of desired UI features on entering Mouselook to be avoided while retaining backwards compatibility.

An event received on entering and exitting Mouselook would then allow players to set up their UI environment as they require for each different type of game or event. It would be a great start, and a relatively simple thing to do since it merely requires conditional disabling of some actions that are already being performed.

I would also highly recommend what I will coin the "Planetside" first person interface. I call it that not because the title was particularly close to my heart (it wasn't, even though it was fun), but rather because it had a first person UI that was both intuitive and extremely easy to use.

Bear with me. This is a far more radical redesign than what's already been suggested.

The Basics:

The Planetside UI focused around two basic modes that allowed for complex interaction. The first was view mode - basically, what we have now in mouselook - and a secondary mode toggled with the Tab key. This secondary mode brought up the mouse, made the interface selectively more visible, and allowed the user to quickly handle dialogs and chat interfaces.

This setup also allowed for a more "immersive" experience by giving the user the feeling that they were fluidly moving with a decent amount of jitter from walking, animations... etc. Fortunately, Second Life has a lot of that already; it's simply more subtle. Along these lines, the ability to tweak these default options without using an animation overrider would be great.

More Advanced Concepts and Add-Ons:

A few new UI additions then follow from this idea:

- Contextual "Hotkeys"
- The ability to differentiate Mouselook from First Person
- More advanced UI settings for First Person Mode

Let's start from the top. Contextual Hotkeys are pretty much a mainstay of any popular MMO besides Second Life. This is a statement of fact, though I'm sure exceptions exist. What I mean is already readily familiar to users of other programs, but would be a major boon to Second Life. Perhaps this has been suggested before?

Basically, I would love to see the addition of a "hotbar" which could have several, user-set options embedded into it at the UI level. The resident may then simply click items off the bar to perform common actions, much like MMORPGs use them for casting spells, performing abilities... etc. Heck, this might even help games like Darklife and Simcast.

Oh, and the ability to set the texture for each button is pretty much given.

I would also like to propose INVENTORY_HOTBAR - a new database set to allow users to pass along these settings to others. Hell, I'd love INVENTORY_INTERFACE as well, but this is probably less realistic in the current timeframe.

Moving down the line, the ability to differentiate mouselook from First Person Mode would also be required. I think this would be relatively easy.

Finally, on "more advanced functionality" - basically, just more widgets for interaction that are difficult to implement with scripts alone. For example, the ability to set mouse sensitivity when using a vehicle in first person (instead of mouselook), the ability adjust for yaw/pitch speeds, selection threshholds, first person rotation tracking for scripts (much like mouselook)... etc.

Obviously this is a pipedream. But eh... could be nice.

Don't lose hope ... a pipedream can turn into reality very rapidly if SL goes open-source as Philip suggested was inevitable.

Unfortunately, I don't understand your distinction between 1st person mode and the other mode which you don't name, but which brings up the UI with the tab key. Other than the camera bobbing etc in your 1P mode (which *must* be configurable OFF anyway, because some people suffer bad nausea from that), it sounds like the camera mode is plain 1P in both, isn't it? In which case that UI on/off control you mention ought to be factored out and made available in 3P mode as well, it seems to me. After all, that's the key design problem we have with Mouselook, the fact that it denies access to facilities for no good reason, and we don't want to repeat that mistake again.

Camera mode and UI windows and keyboard controls should be decoupled from each other, otherwise one is not merely providing a mechanism, but hardwiring in a policy a well.

One should be able to bring up any UI window regardless of camera mode, and likewise keyboard and mouse controls should not disappear when switching camera views, unless you turn them off on purpose with a programmed action. Separate issues need separate controls; scripts can easily enable one or more separate controls together if required, whereas if they come precombined together then it is much harder to separate them.

With regard to hotkeys, I agree 100%. However, given the immense flexibility provided by scripts in SL, I would implement it very generically: for example, as an uncommitted multi-bank dock, to each box of which you can assign arbitrary messages to be sent as hotkey events to arbitrary objects.

This isn't hugely different from what we can do already by clicking on objects worn as attachments; we just need some way of affixing the objects to the UI frame, and a generic way of binding keys to trigger events rather than always using the mouse.

Note also the 3 thread links in my sig ... all concerned with extending the UI.

Basically, a distinction between standard mouselook, as it is now, and something like this.

Too much fun with the GIMP and MS Paint, but it gets my point across far better than words. Aspects there are purposefully subtle, but that's what one should see in first person.

OK, well that image looks to me like a Mouselook perspective but with the minimap and UI menus available plus a hotkey dock on the left. And that of course is identical to saying that a 1P mode should be merely our normal 3P mode but with the camera view switched to 1P, nothing added and nothing taken away. I agree entirely.

Put another way, LL lumped too many changes into Mouselook to make it a usable standard 1P-view interface to SL. You can't do anything in it except navigate and apply a left-click to whatever is center-screen. That's largely unhelpful except in a very limited role.

Mouselook would of course have to stay as it is for backwards compatibility, but we should also get a "straight" 1P mode without all the lost functionality. Ie. hitting the 1P key should apply only one change, the change of camera view from 3P to 1P, and do absolutely nothing else. (Any other changes that people want, they can switch in themselves.)

The method used for switching in and out of Mouselook navigation once you're in 1P camera view is also worth mentioning, because SL provides no such switch at all (it's lumped in with camera view mode) which is extraordinarily cumbersome (ie. moded) compared to some. In both EverQuest and Anarchy Online, for example, once you've switched your camera into 1P mode then you can trivially either use the UI or perform Mouselook-style camera movement simply on the basis of whether you have one of the mouse keys held down or not. You're never moded in!

It's extraordinarily transparent --- for example with right-mouse held down (you can configure which mouse button does it) moving the mouse pans the view around the character as in our Mouselook, but the instant that you release that key then you can click with the mouse on any object or UI item. You don't even realize that there is a Mouselook as such, because it's so well integrated or transparent to use. It's totally natural to release that "navigation mousebutton" when you want to click on something, since trying to navigate and click on something both at the same time makes almost no sense.

It's worth getting a free Anarchy Online account merely to experience the above! If we're trying to head towards interactive immersion in SL, we need that kind of immediacy in our controls. We are exceedingly poor on that front at the moment.