Hail fellow Commanders.
I have seen a lot of confused posts with people frustrated at the complexity of setting up the new camera suite included with The Commanders release so I thought some explanation based on my own findings may be helpful.
First of all forget the free camera is a camera and think of it as flying another ship or drone with your own ship as its target!
With this concept in mind everything else should be relatively straight forward.
The Camera
The camera can be in one of two states -
fixed or free.
A Fixed camera is static and does not move from its subject...as such you can really only look at what it is pointing at and any movement of the controls will affect the ship itself rather than the camera. There are 5 internal fixed camera
positions and 3 external fixed camera positions.
The Free camera is just that - you can pan it around; roll, pitch, yaw and slew left and right, up and down. You can roll it around it's own axis and zoom in and out and then lock it in a new aspect creating a bespoke external fixed camera.
The free camera can be accessed from any of the 5 internal or 3 external fixed cameras.
Caution: If you access the free camera from any of the 5 internal fixed camera's it is best to be gentle with the flight controls because they do cause some ship movement as well as moving the camera - you are better off sticking to the zoom and blur functions on the internal cameras.
When you access the free camera from any of the 3 external fixed cameras you are essentially piloting a drone with your own ship as it's target, although this can be changed by detaching the camera. When you detach the camera you are locking it in a fixed aspect and are then free to control your ship from a distance - again caution is advisable here as your ship can quickly disappear from the field of view and you will not be able to see where it is headed unless you change to the regular fixed camera's or exit the suite entirely.
After a bit of practice you will quickly get to grips with this...it's pretty cool watching yourself pilot your ship as a spectator. At this point you can lock your camera back to the ship and it will become a new temporary fixed camera.
Distance Limitations
The camera will allow you to zoom out from the point of focus to a limited range. Whether in your SRV or your ship on a planet surface the distance is restricted to 250 metres. Once clear of a body the distance increases to 3000 metres. Once the camera reaches either of these distances it is dragged along with the point of focus as if it were tethered to it.
The Controls
Ok, so enough explanation of the
what, here's the meat and tatties of
how:
In free camera mode you can bind the controls using exactly the same keys and controllers you use for flying your ship - these do
NOT affect the ships controls or indeed even tell you that a key or axis is already in use!
This is important because many of you think that you cannot use these functions as they are already assigned to controlling your ship.
Obviously there are going to be a lot of different controllers in use but as a guide here are the settings I have used with my X56 Rhino HOTAS controller.
The main control actions are boxed in blue for the throttle (camera travel forward and backward with the throttle X-axis and camera left, right, up and down using the H3 analogue stick).
The main control actions are boxed in green for the stick (camera pitch on the Y axis, yaw on the RZ axis and roll on the X axis).
All other functions are made with various buttons and hat switches on both stick and throttle as I find natural to me. The main thing is to use the flight stick and throttle to manoeuvre the camera exactly as you would your ship, once you
have these in place and are comfortable you can tweak the buttons and switches for the other functions as you see fit.
My X56 HOTAS settings for the camera:
Edit: Using the camera for exploration video added.
[video=youtube_share;yQtOZ7XB_hM]
]Source: https://youtu.be/yQtOZ7XB_hM[/video]
Youtube Link - Ship Camera
[video=youtube_share;502GBZudxPQ]
]Source: https://youtu.be/502GBZudxPQ[/video]
Youtube Link - SRV Camera
[video=youtube_share;gE0JJuKE37Q]
]Source: https://youtu.be/gE0JJuKE37Q[/video]
YouTube Link - Using the SRV Camera to Explore
I hope this is of some help to those of you struggling with the camera suite.
Fly safe Commanders
Rardain
