Let's talk about the Feb 2016 Update! - ### Ship Combat ###

Well, I'm just gonna repost my stuff here then:

Perspective ISO is the worst possible view for this type of combat I could ever imagine. It is super restrictive for ship weapon design too.

    How am I supposed to aim my weapons in this? Not only it's isometric, but it's also perspective!! Say bye bye to one shot/long recharge/long range/"slow" projectile weapons. There's no way in hell to be effective at aiming in this view. Add motion to both ships, planet gravity and you'll be spraying bullets all over the place trying to hit your enemy for ages (just like in the vid) unless it's lasers or some sorta mini-gun with uninterrupted fire or homing missiles or if you're really close to each other, like in the vid. Also, it'll be hard to judge the velocity of any ship or object (especially fast ships coming at you from a distance). The "space dust" creates point of reference to help you with that, but it won't help you with aiming and I feel like it makes the space way too busy looking/unbelievable. It should be more subtle. It also feels like the view needs to be zoomed out a bit more too. The ships and planets look too big. Tested on a 27" 1080p screen.

Top - down view, like original, for combat, please. I don't want to fight the view in combat, I want to fight my opponent.

I see two potential problems with this view for space combat:

1. You can't see behind your ship. This limits the ship design to front facing guns only. Can't "lay mines" or "poop homing plasma clots" intelligently either.

2. If you only have forward thrusters and front facing guns you are forced to rotate the enemy out of your view to make any 90+ degree maneuvers.

The advantage of this view is that it could feel more dynamic due to constant need to engage and keep the enemy in your sight; where blowing up your opponent infront of you while flying through the blast can feel extremely satisfying. And yeah, you CAN actually aim effectively in this view unlike in Perspective ISO. Still, i don't think this outweighs the disadvantages.

Vaelzad, can you post a better video showing off the camera versatility of the engine (max angle, max zoom, top-down mode, etc)?

Otherwise, this thread will fill up with "I hate isometric combat!" messages.

Well CAN you rotate the camera? because Hunam_ has many valid points.

- Shade A.I

To quote someone quoting me on the Iso vs Top down camera. 

I think the feature that would please everyone is to be able to set what the default position is for your combat camera. I know there are going to be people who are equal parts top down vs Iso. 

To talk about the Isometric view for a moment. Isometric works fine in a number of games for combat and figuring out distances because the player has a unit of measurement for scale reference. (Diablo for example) The player can see how far something away is and know which way to face and target it. Now I know what you guys are thinking, this works great in a room because you can see the floor but it sucks in 3D space. How are you supposed to figure out how something is away when you don't have a floor for reference? I'm going to just add to that, how do you visualize gravity in 3D space?  I think it's safe to say this is where "the game that shall not be named" (Star Control 3) made its major mistakes with its combat. When you did do combat in that space it was extremely difficult to gauge positions and figure out where to aim because of the lack of references. However if these references exist, the combat and gameplay no longer suffers and has a better level of immersion. 

The video you saw of space combat is a WIP of what the combat is going to be. But regardless of Iso or top down view there is still a problem that needed to be solved. How do you visualize the distance AND strength of a gravity field around a planet, especially when you have multiple planets and gravity fields in play. The solution we are going forward with is similar to the image below and isn't represented in the video. The ships themselves will be traveling along a gravity field plane, that will then get distorted by space objects. One of the interesting side effects is that when you actually go to a top down view you lose the ability to tell the strength of the gravity field because you lose vertical depth, which makes it a less optimal way to play. When we have the game in a better state I'll put some screen captures and a new video into the vault of the different views. 

Yes. Thank you.

• Set the default camera angle (0° 1st/3rd person to 90° top-down).
• Set the default camera rotation (360° available).
• Set the default zoom (up-close to full solar system). (Don't skimp on zoom. I've hacked games to add better zoom.)
• Enable/disable auto zooming based on enemy ship proximity (ala SC).
• Enable/disable auto isometric-to-top-down transitions based on enemy ship proximity.

Bonus: Make these per-ship settings, let us bind different views to hotkeys, or give us a hotkey to cycle through our defined views. So my Spathi-esque ship can start in rear-facing isometric and my Arilou-esque ship can be top-down proximity zooming.

Thank you in advance for posting the video.

With regards to top-down being a sub-optimal view due to varying gravitational pulls, I disagree. As long as the gravity strength is tied to the visual size of the planet or star, players will get a feel for how gravity works. (After all, we had to get used to the gravity of planets in SC.) If you violate this rule and make a low-gravity giant worlds or high-gravity tiny stars (even if these are realistic), it will confuse the players looking for visual cues.

Here's your top - down gravity representation ANIMATED even, Andrew. I don't see any issues with learning to feel it from top - down view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im9PuBdIjMY

The problem with ISO is the vertical:horizontal visual:actual distance discrepancy. Add perspective to it, add ships motion and gravity and I don't see how a player can aim effectively when there are so many factors in play. Unless the controls are a-la SPAZ where you point where to shoot with your mouse cursor and your ship auto aligns with it and shoots at the pointed direction you can't possibly do it. Who wants all of their combat to be Spray'n'Pray?.. Not me.

I'll be honest: the combat video gave me immediate traumatic flashbacks to SC3's failed 3D melee camera mode. I know that's exactly what is trying to be avoided and it's still in development, but in addition to Andrew's comments about the lack of a bottom plane being confusing, I also feel a reason SC3 isometric combat failed was because it was a fixed perspective that was too far away from the action, making combat disjointed and difficult, but I think it's entirely possible to make a view like this work with more development and refinement and I'm appreciative this is something being addressed up front by giving players many potential viewing options.

I believe it could be improved by zooming in closer to your ship and positioning it at the bottom of the screen with a wider field of vision, both to your sides and far ahead to the forward horizon. I refer to it as a "command view", basically directly above and behind the aft of the ship to allow you to see well ahead of you. It is essentially similar to the view being portrayed in the planet lander concept art landscapes. The ability to have this view rotate with the nose of your ship would make sense so that you are generally always facing forward, and the ability to quickly rotate your view to wherever you want to go would be great so that you could see behind you or to the sides would make it less restrictive.

Take a game like Tomb Raider as an example. It's fairly successful and uses a third person view that basically defaults to an over-the-shoulder "command view" but does not limit the player to it as a fixed perspective. You can move the camera in an orbit around Lara Croft with the mouse to get a complete view of your surroundings and it is fairly simple to get a sense of what's around you without having to turn completely around to face where you're trying see. It's a typical control scheme in many titles that gamers are already used to because it allows both freedom of movement and vision of your surroundings, and I think something like this could work really well as one possible viewing option in addition to all those being proposed. I can genuinely envision playing melee that way with one hand on WASD to control ship movement and the other on the mouse to control vision just like a conventional shooter and think it would be very easy to adapt to.

So that we have a frame of reference of what SC3 did...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLoANR3MURs

No perspective, no controlled zooming, fixed camera, can't see the front of your ship (which made mycons suicidal). Essentially, it was top-down 3D-ified rather than true 3D. When was the last time you played a modern game with these limited camera controls?

Compare that vid to the SCR combat vid, and you'll see a night-and-day difference.

Added to my feature request...

• Set the default camera angle (0° 1st/3rd person to 90° top-down).
• Set the default camera rotation (360° available).
• Set the default camera height & offset. (Overhead, over-the-shoulder)
• Set the default zoom (up-close to full solar system). (Don't skimp on zoom. I've hacked games to add better zoom.)
• Enable/disable auto zooming based on enemy ship proximity (ala SC).
• Enable/disable auto isometric-to-top-down transitions based on enemy ship proximity.
• Enable/disable camera lock - when engaged, the camera turns as the ship turns.

That's not going to work well visually or aesthetically. Sure it shows a gravity model in 2D, but it's hardly clear or understandable and doesn't allow for other aspects of combat to be communicated. 

^ You don't have to visualize it for the player at all. SC2 didn't, SC3 didn't and it was absolutely fine. Why do you think there's a need to visualize it? The problem of SC3 isn't the gravity. It's the view.

Kavik_Kang is coming with a bang and I have a feeling I'll agree with him 99.127% Hold on.

As long as a pure top down view is an option, then there is no problem.  You will find that the vast majority of players choose the top down option, and those that honestly like 3D isometric view all share one thing in common... they suck at the ship combat part of the game.

This very much like a 3rd Person over the shoulder view in an FPS game, it sounds great on paper but nobody actually wants to play that way.

Gears of War sales disagree with you heavily. 

^ it's not an FPS game. As in: it has cover, dodge mechanics. FPSs don't have them. It was built to be played in TP only.

Fallout on the other hand...

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/11/the-big-question-do-you-play-fallout-4-in-first-or-third-person/

More than 50% play it strictly in FP view.

Since I like both, I'll have to prove you wrong once SuperMelee comes out. The camera is a weapon. I'll choose the right view for the right ship. 

If I had a very fast long-range linear attack, it would be easier for me to aim in an FPS mode or in a camera-over-the-center of the ship mode than it would be with a top-down mode.

Then maybe we should play SCR in FPS, too. /s

Edit: also, I prefer my fallouts to be in isometric.

Actually it wouldn't be easier for you to aim, unless you mean the range is so long that the target would be off-screen in top down mode.

The aim is a big issue, but there is another huge issue with this beyond just the aim and feel to the player.  The top down view is "gods view".  In military terms, you have "100% situational awareness."  A precise, all encompassing, non-distorted vision of all aspects of the combat environment.  This only exists in a pure top down view and is something that is very critical to why top down space combat games have always been wildly popular, very few such games have failed... but because of their inherent 2D nature very few are made.  This is also related to something I've mentioned here before, a psychological phenomenon called "Pattern Regocnition Addiction", which is at the core of what makes this genre so popular among so many people.  All of this, which really would take me several pages to fully describe, is lost the moment you angle that camera so much 1 degree (that is a slight egzadderation to make the point, you probably need to go 5 or 10 degrees before you actually destroy these aspects of what makes this genre so wildly popular that what was meant to be a network test like Subspace could explode into over 5 million registered users).  There are actually physiological reasons why this genre is so popular and addicting... it literally is medically addicting.  All of this is lost as soon as you leave "god's view" of 100% total UNDISTORTED situational awareness.

It's easier to look down the barrel to aim certain weapons than it is to aim radially like a clock. Again, it's situational. There are times when I'd use different camera modes. Being locked into just one view is a disadvantage.

Ahh... but it isn't.  Top down space combat is, at it's core, all about Pattern Recognition Addiction.  You, as experienced gamers, have all experienced this effect before in other games.  It's that feeling of having achieved perfection, performed a certain maneuver or sequence of event in a way that, to your mind, was absolute perfection.  This triggers an actual endorphin release in your brain... it is actually physically addicting.  The top down space combat genre, due to its very nature, greatly magnifies this effect.  No other game comes anywhere close when it comes to satisfying the instinctive human desire to recognize familiar and successful patterns.  Top down space combat is, in reality, a "dance" (so appropriate a word for Star Control) of patterns in motion, that your brain is designed by nature to be excellent at sorting out.  When you are "in the zone" of this "dance" your aim is... superhuman.  When "in the zone" you will hit on shots that, were you to stand back and think about it, would seem impossible too you and far beyond your abilities... and yet you just did it.  Because your brain had all of the "patterns in motion", the "dance", as a reference point for the aim of that shot you took.

You could never make that shot "looking down the barrel".  You didn't make the shot because you have great aim, you made theshot because your brain was subconsciously tracking the relative motions of all objects on the screen, making it a simple shot for you to make when normally you would never hit such a complex"deflection shot".  It was your subconscious tracking of all objects in motion that that shot possible, it cannot be done by just aiming and shooting... the "dance" is where your reference information to make that shot connect comes from... and when you achieve this to perfection you are "rewarded" by an actual chemical reaction in your brain. And you want to do that same thing again.

Agreed, don't lock the user into one view, give him choices or the ability to customize, especially given ships with different movement and weapon mechanics. IBNobody, your feature request list is a good summary.

I'm sure some ships would be fun to play in Iso vs Top-Down, vs even First Person, especially given the possibility of different rules of momentum/physics.  An Arilou type ship could be fun in FP.

TBH I think the video is too short to give a deep opinion... but one problem I can see that might occur is 'blinding' by the star (or planets) if it's too big and the ships are battling on the far side of it, possibly obscuring the camera.  Or if the enemy is on the far side of the star, in the distance.  Maybe there should be other HUD displays (like a simple radar) to give the player a general awareness of objects.

It's easier for me to recognize that I'm going to hit you when you are in the pattern of my cross-hairs. How's that for Pattern Recognition?

I understand your stance, even when you are misapplying it. You believe that locking the player into a top-down viewpoint would make the game more addicting, and thus more popular, right?

If we lock the viewpoint down just to increase the physiological addictive properties of the game, can we rename it Star Control Candy Crush, please?

(And Hunam, are you still agreeing 99.127%? Are you a SCCC proponent?)

I dislike it as much as  (if not more) than some of you, but to its credit, there WAS a feature in SCNot 3 to add a grid to Isometric view so you had a sense of space and distance. I forget which key it was, and there was even an option to change to top-down view. (F9 I think...? Can anyone confirm? I'm not reinstalling that )

No, there is much more too it than that.  Changing the angle of the camera changes the genre.  As I said, this doesn't appear to be an issue as Vlad seems to have said pure top down will always an option, so I can play it that way and others can play it how they want.  This is not my game, it won't be made with my style.  I am happy as long as I can lock into top down view and keep it there for combat.  However. if this were my game being made with my style I would not provide the option of angling the camera.  In fact, I would probably go with the compromise you mentioned in an early post and have the mothership in 3D isometric when exploriong but have the camera raise up into pure top down for combat.  That gives the artists more freedom to create a better look for the flying around part of the game while retaining the necessary pure top down view needed for this genre to function in all its glory.

Changing the angle of the camera literally changes the genre of the game.  It really does.  Once you tilt that camera more than a few degrees in any direction you really have changed to a fundamentally different game of an entirely different genre.  It is no longer a top down space combat game.  You can stop making comparisons to Space Wars, Star Fleet Battles, Asteroids, Defender, Stargate, and Star Control.  What you are doing has nothing to do with those games anymore, and the past success of those games is not relevant to the totally and completely different game you are now making.  You are not among that line, you are not that type of game, the popularity of those games is no indicator that this completely different kind of game you are now making will share that popularity as your 3D Isometric view has no relation to a top down shooter, which is a totally and completely different game.  This view, of course. was THE THING that made SC3 suck so badly that most SC1&2 players never even bought it to try it when it was new.  One glance at the 3D Isometric view was all we needed to see to know that one our favorite games had been ruined.

Pattern Recognition Addiction is just one of the many aspects of the equation that makes what I just said true.  The popularity of this genre is mostly attributed to patten recognition addiction, which in this case is caused by tracking multiple objects gliding along in a predictable pattern on the screen.  When you fire a shot in this environment you are not leading the target, you are introducing a new object into the pattern that is intended to meet with the intended target at a further point in the pattern.  You are not shooting, leading, and aiming in this genre.  You might think you are, but you aren't.  You are recognizing, tracking, and altering complex spacial patterns... something your brain loves to do.  Changing the angle elminates all this and you are now doing a completely and fundamentally different thing.

This conversation, btw, is the EXACT reason that this genre died.  I know, I was there.  The insistence on "modernizing the view" while failing to understand that the view *IS* this genre is EXACTLY what killed this genre.  This is not the game that the programmers and artists want to make, but it is the game they must make if they want to join that Space Wars/SFB/Asteroids/Star Control club.  "Moderizing the view" doesn't modernize the view, it just alters the genre resulting in a completely different type of game that does not possess the critical qualities that made those previous top down space shooters so popular.

It's a much bigger issue the you might think a simple change of camera angle could create, but simply changing the angle of the view in this type of game literally changes the type of game that it is and you lose pretty much everything that made previous top down space combat games so popular.  You are not leading the target in top down space combat, you are introducing a new object into the pattern.

NORMAL SPEED/LIGHTNING MODE: Press F4 to toggle between playing at normal speed or in hyper-fast lightning mode. 

ISOMETRIC VIEW / OVERHEAD VIEW: Press F5 to switch views.

ISOMETRIC VIEW STAR PLANE: ON / OFF: Press the F6 key to toggle the star plane in isometric view.

OVERHEAD VIEW SCROLLING: CONTINUOUS / JUMP: Press the F7 key to toggle scrolling in the overhead view.

ZOOMED VIEW / COMPLETE VIEW: Press the F8 key to toggle the zoom level.

ORDER AGGRESSIVE COMPUTER ATTACK: Press the F9 key to make the computercontrolled ships attack aggressively for a short time. Use this to break up long fights where the computer-controlled ships are acting too defensively.

So, yes, it did have an overhead view. And I do remember using it. I even think I toggled it back and forth to get the advantage of a farther up-screen view.

I agree. I feel like UI elements could make the camera angle irrelevant, if done correctly.

I don't think the gravity well issue is as bad as you think it is, unless I am misunderstanding something.  The only actual relevant information is the radius of the event horizon, the edge of where the gravitic effect begins.  This can easily be represented in top down, in fact some type of "band of blur" might even look cool.  It isn't really relevant for the player to see how the effect strengthens closer to the planet, they know that, all they really need to know is where the effect begins. Unless I am misunderstanding something about this...