External View [A definitive discussion]
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Would be great to have !
I'm not a fan of being able to jump out of your ship and have a look from the outside.
I would like to admire myself and stuff but I think it should remain entirely 1st person.
I would accept a few techniques. Only in pause mode so you cant control your ship. Being able to space walk. A drone thing.
But I dont think any of these things would be good enough or satisfy the need of people who want a freelook or 3rd person camera. So I dont even know if its worth the effort adding such a feature.
People who want to make videos are managing to do it. Maybe theres will be a sight seeing tourist ship which a nice huge unobstructed window to look out.
I would like to admire myself and stuff but I think it should remain entirely 1st person.
I would accept a few techniques. Only in pause mode so you cant control your ship. Being able to space walk. A drone thing.
But I dont think any of these things would be good enough or satisfy the need of people who want a freelook or 3rd person camera. So I dont even know if its worth the effort adding such a feature.
People who want to make videos are managing to do it. Maybe theres will be a sight seeing tourist ship which a nice huge unobstructed window to look out.
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Just to say, there's already a sizeable thread, discussing all of this.
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=12464
And don't worry - based on what FD have delivered already, I feel confident that an option that satisfies just about everyone (including opponents) is more than within the devs abilities...
http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=12464
And don't worry - based on what FD have delivered already, I feel confident that an option that satisfies just about everyone (including opponents) is more than within the devs abilities...
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Third-person view outside of combat is a good goal, but harder than it seems. For example, by allowing drones when your weapons are retracted, you encourage players to group up and have one person act as an unarmed scout. I actually had a chance to chat with Sandro about this at LaveCon, and as I recall he was leaning towards a mechanism for recording video and playing it back some time later. Perhaps more importantly, he acknowledged how tricky all these problems were but said he'd be surprised if they didn't have something for the release.
If the camera drone shone brightly on everyone's scanners, then it would be immaterial if the 'scout' was using one, or whether he was just sitting in space without one.
With or without one, a single player could be communicating with friends. I don't quite get the difference.
It is good to here that there will be something, apart from anything else externals are a valuable tool for movie makers and the more ED YouTube etc clips out there the better.
An external view in combat would be of no use to me anyway, I cannot stand 3rd person games of any description. A nice rear view camera that you could bring up on that redundant screen between your knees would be very welcome though!
An external view in combat would be of no use to me anyway, I cannot stand 3rd person games of any description. A nice rear view camera that you could bring up on that redundant screen between your knees would be very welcome though!
What's clear, is FD are not keen to elaborate on the feature
I suspect due to the issues of how any external view fits into the game itself from an immersion/functionality point of view, and even more importantly, how it should ideally not introduce any exploits and game play/balance issues.
So personally, although FD have repeatedly mentioned external views via camera drones and the like, I'm not counting anything as a given until I'm using the feature in game
I've never understood how people consider this (external view) as some sort of advantage (for scouting)? If we assume they have no HUD in external view, all this individual (scout) has in external view is a bunch of unnamed dots moving around in the distance?
Meanwhile anyone in the same position in a cockpit has a full HUD system giving them far (useful) more information?
If I had someone sitting out on the edge of an area, feeding me information, I'd much rather they were in cockpit view with a HUD.
This view point is... silly. We're in beta. Put it in the game, test it out, see how the playerbase exploits or doesn't exploit it.
If it works well, stick with it. If it's exploited against design intention, rethink it.
Griping about possible exploits that may or may not occur while dismissing the opportunity to collect live data is a poor design ethos.
I mean... exactly.
In practice, how would a guy looking through 3rd person view and reporting on enemy locations actually be more useful than the full spherical radar where we can cycle through targets ourselves, especially when that guy's scouting is coming at the opportunity cost of having another fighter in the group that can *actually* help to sway the course of battle.
This discussion and griping about gameplay balance of a third person view quite closely mirrors the discussion that occurred in Mech Warrior Online. Basically the developers were foolish enough to promise that they'd never have 3rd person view. And a while later when they realized that 3rd person view could actually add value to the game, especially for more casual users, they added a 3rd person view system featuring some drawbacks and a drone. Much to the dismay of the player base.
And now months later, the complaining has subsided, third person is in... and competitive players play from first person view, because it's tactically advantageous to do so.
I'd rather quite honestly avoid the gripping from the community over a bunch of non-issues and just have the ability to admire our ships from the get go, rather than go through a whole kerfuffle over what really amounts to nothing.
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Robert Maynard
Volunteer Moderator
Gifted pilots appear to be looking out of the top of a sidewinder for these shots - there is no external view in the game at this time.
There is no external view, the videos you have seen will have been someone filming their friend through the roof of a sidewinder.
There is no external view.
What you probably have seen is a player looking up through the cockpit of a Sidewinder while filming another player flying around.
Edit: Whoa! That's a lot of answers out of nowhere!
Ninjad!I was ninja'd whilst ninjaing somebody
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