External View [A definitive discussion]
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heh same here - lately I want to just fly around and look at my ship and epic spacescapes
Put it like this. If you were in the middle of a battle is your first thought going to be "Wow, I'd better get some external shots of this epic battle. Now let's deploy the external camera...hmmm...yeah, almost there.....right and now for the perfect....oh, I'm dead!"
Erm, well if it was (like in most games) as simple as hit F6, center the view, hit screen shot key then F1 and back to the action then yeah, I'd do exactly that pretty often
In fact I've found most battles in ED so far offer plenty of time for such activities, only you can't actually do it so you just have to sit there staring at space.
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You can do that now with a single keypress, or two if you want 4k resolution. You could bind this to a HOTAS button if you wished but it would simply be a shot from inside the cockpit. I thought this was referring to an external view of your ship, with an external camera drone where you have no flight control of your craft while it is un-docked.
I`m not happy with camera drone solution - its overcomplicated. Another mods will be probably needed to control the drone, plus some kind of a drone bay. We propably will have to look for the mods and drone, buy em fit em at the cost of something else etc.
http://elitedangerous.com/media/
Seems to have worked damn well for the DEVS! There are all of what? 4 images there showing combat/weapons?
Yes it would be wonderful to have a non limited screenshot system...but the devs (for no logical reason I can truly understand) want to limit it in various ways with drones and crap....therefore making it non combat or a system that won't allow it being used in an advantageous way in dogfights etc is likely to occur.
The logically easy way to do that is link it to hard point deployment
Agreed, the whole drone thing sounds like its going to be so handicapped it won't be worth having at all. Honestly I cannot understand what is wrong with the tried and true OOC external camera we get in every other space/air/car sim. It doesn't need to be explained in the context of the game, it never has needed to be, I am not my character, I'm me playing a game not my character himself, I'm telling his story and that of his environment and I'd like to be able to view it from different viewpoints just like I could in a movie or book or indeed most other similar games. It seems like Frontier have decided to enforce a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and in the process nerfed (or outright removed) an important capability. The people objecting seem to be doing so out of a misguided loyalty to the Devs "vision" and/or because of this whole advantage thing in PvP which is silly when weighed against the multiple advantages already catered for.
It is as significant (and ridiculous) to me as if they has said we're not going to support joysticks because its our vision that future space fighters will be controlled with a mouse and keyboard and anyway supporting joysticks would give an advantage to some players.
Once we can walk around outside our ships and EVA this will all be solved. I don't see any reason for FD to implement a third-person camera when they've stated that you'll be able to walk/float around outside your ship in an upcoming expansion. I think doing it that way is by far the best for Elite. Star Citizen already lost sooo much by allowing third-person.
It actually reminds me of the failed idea of Black and White 1 to not have any UI at all. It's one of those ideas that is just stupid. Just like limiting the view to the cockpit in a space game / flight simulator is stupid.
Word!
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Actually you'll probably have helmet borders around your view and lens effects on your visor when EVA.
Great so if I want to take a moment to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of my ship hurtling away from a systems primary at superluminal velocity I've got to get my character up from his chair (leaving the ship unpiloted) wander over to the nearest airlock, open the door, cycle the airlock, go outside (exposing my character to the effects of warped space) fly away from the ship avoiding the edge of the warp bubble, take in the view then do all the above again in reverse to get back to the pilots seat and resume control. Likewise if I want to take in the beauty of my ship cruising through a station letterbox with an earth like planet in the background for a few moments, or if I want to snatch a panorama of my ship blasting its mining laser at an asteroid, or indeed watch as my lasers break through an enemy ships hull and cause it to explode in a spectacular fireball just as my ship whooshes past.... Sounds wonderful... I'm so thrilled, this will totally all be solved...
It gets even better if I want to watch my ship enter hyperspace..... Might need some sort of programming interface and autopilot so I can tell my ship to turn around and come back for me though.
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the easiest solution I can think of (for dogfights at least) is a playback system that allows you to rewatch your dogfight from third person and multiple angles, and than being able to take screenshots. the only problem is that all the playback footage would have to be saved somewhere...
Not too difficult tbf, War Thunder does this.
Obviously WT does it automatically as games only range from 15-30 minutes usually but all you would need is a *F12 to start recording* and wham-bam you can stop recording whenever and go into the recorded footage and take photos.
Halo 3 did this also, worked well.
While I really don't understand why there's a debate over such an essential feature in that sort of game, I'm personnaly more than ok with the idea of a fully controlable, unrestricted external camera view in solo mode (like in any other sim, in fact), and no external camera view at all in MP. I would rather have an unrestricted camera in all modes, but it's obviously not to the liking of everybody here. But the game needs that feature.
I may be wrong as I've not played it since launch but I think X-Rebirth might not have had them, except in the form of a drone type thing which was a pain in the rear and mostly pointless.
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I played Rebirth for about a day before giving up so I can't recall if it ever had an external view option. To be honest even if it didn't that would have been the least of its concerns.
I like Vayles idea of a "battle camera" feature. It records all of the details of an encounter and stores that to disk. If it also knows all of the objects in that scene you don't even need to record it as video, you just have pointers to all the assets such as ship A and B are in such and such a place in this orientation and travelling at this speed. It could "replay" this encounter from the data.
This could then be used to generate the scene and record this as video. This would give those that want external views the footage they want to do whatever they want to do with it and also offer absolutely zero advantage to those looking to exploit said external viewing mechanisms.
I like Vayles idea of a "battle camera" feature. It records all of the details of an encounter and stores that to disk. If it also knows all of the objects in that scene you don't even need to record it as video, you just have pointers to all the assets such as ship A and B are in such and such a place in this orientation and travelling at this speed. It could "replay" this encounter from the data.
This could then be used to generate the scene and record this as video. This would give those that want external views the footage they want to do whatever they want to do with it and also offer absolutely zero advantage to those looking to exploit said external viewing mechanisms.
That may be what some folks are looking for but it certainly isn't what I'm looking for. I want to play the game, not save footage and watch replays. I want to punctuate my internal gameplay narrative with different views of whats going on.. Like you would see in any space movie or tv show. I don't want to make videos and I'm only secondarily interested in taking screenshots. Primarily I want to actually play the game, the game has frequent quiet times in when I would be most interested in being able to switch views precisely because I'm a little bored and some external view goodness would help keep things interesting and visually stimulating. Being able to save replays and watch them back is pretty much useless to me.. sorry
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