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Games Entertainment

Game Cameras Prone to Problems? 52

Posted by simoniker from the let-me-see dept.
Moryath writes "Ever wonder how to quantify a game's camera, or why some videogame genres tend towards problems while others never see it mentioned? Glide Underground has some basic attempted quantification up in their Weekly Musings column for this week - they break possible game camera views down to six categories, and go over which are the most likely to have issues." Are there obvious steps that can be taken to improve some game cameras?
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Game Cameras Prone to Problems? More

Game Cameras Prone to Problems?

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  • I remember playing Oni, an otherwise great game (well, it entertAINED ME ;) ) : but the camera angles could get really annoying, ifnot plain spilling the fun of the game.

    Sometimes it would 'see through' the wall(when standing with your back towards it) and you would unwillingly get valuable information of how many enemies were in the next room.

  • Wow, I can remember when I used to be a newsie for GU... ...back in 1999 This is the first mention of them I've heard since I left. Sad
    • It's great to see a domain name with a dead product name in it is going on like this :) Maybe next time they should choose a name with broader appeal... In a similar vein, I've seen a website with "riva" in its name but don't recall where.
      • I tried to convince them to keep the abbreviation but change the name a couple of times during my year or so there, since Glide wrapper appeal (and inherently the focus of the site) had already shifted, but alas.
    • Their content keeps going... and they got a mention on Slashdot [slashdot.org] for their first Weekly Musings article last month too.

      Just because you left somewhere doesn't mean you have to talk down on them.

      • I was a former writer for GlideUnderground as well, and I would tend to disagree with you. Being on the inside at one time and seeing how things were done, yes, I can look down on them =P
        • Looks like things are done differently these days.

          If you haven't been in for a while, you wouldn't know - feel free to hold grudges if you want, however.
          • That may be the case, but the last time I checked, it was still run by mostly the same people (unless the About page is just severely out of date). So, excuse me for having some doubts, hehe. It's nice to see that, although the content has gone downhill on the site, some things have stayed the same-- proofreading still isn't a common practice =)

            All joking aside, though, I take it that you at least somewhat remember who this is. I've got a few ideas for the site if the guys have any interest in hearing the

  • missed point/ camera wish list (Score:4, Interesting)

    by musikit ( 716987 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @11:47AM (#9770861)
    please if a game developer is reading this one missed point about 3rd person cameras and a wish list for me is the following...

    when you change areas, or "zone" (MMOs) or anything that would require the screen going all black or all white or requiring a CD load (time where player usually releases all controls) PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE place the camera in a position so pushing UP would not move the character out of the zone/change areas again/require an additional CD load time.

    too many times have i played games where UP entered the building and then got in the building and UP exited the building. so annoying.
    • This is easily fixed by overlapping the zones somewhat. When you spawn in the new zone, have the spawn point be at least two seconds' worth of movement away from the zone border, and make the direction you need to go reasonably obvious.

      Of course, the best solution is to take a page from Naughty Dog's playbook and pretty much do away with load times entirely. [jakanddaxterlegend.com]

    • To add to this wish list, related to the screen going black, is cut-scenes.

      When you force the player to stop fighting for a cut scene, then the enemies MUST also stop fighting. This was especially bad with the Pelenor Fields section of Lord of the Rings Return of the King on PS2, where the cut scene is played every few minutes and directs the player where to go next. The number of character deaths there in single player were countless. A lot of them caused by health loss during a cut-scene.
    • Devil May Cry had a good solution to this. Holding down the control to the right would make your char run right. Sometimes the camera angle would swap, as you were running right down a hall, the angle would all of a sudden have you running to the left. If you kept the direction held to the right, the character would still keep running down the hall, to the left, on the swap. Once you let the controler sit in neutral, the directions returned to normal. This was a very nice feature.
      • I finally got the article to load and read it. Funny the author had issues with devil may cry. Whatever difficulties he had must be from lack of experience. I managed to play through games like alone in the dark and estatica, so perhaps it was just easier for me to deal with the fixed camera angles like that.

        Although you have to worry about off screen enemy hits, the camera angles like that really lend itself to a better atmosphere for the game.
  • Cameras in games screw up in one of three ways. They can overcomplicate the game, they can become unfixed, or they can withold vital information at exactly the wrong time.

    FPS/Side View cameras have very little of this; by their very nature, they tend to give all the information available in a scene.

    I disagree, I've played a couple games that let you switch between first and third person perspectives (Theif III, The Suffering) and both were less frustrating in third person mode. The problem with first p

    • OK, i know where your coming from as far as prefering third person for stealth games, it does help you see more of the area and possible enemies and the like, but personally i prefer using the first person when i can and mostly tilting the camera(when in third person) to see directly in front of me. This helps me see a lot of details and objects (or enemies) that would have been harder to catch in the the normal third person perspective.

      Even though the higher angles can reveal more around the player doesn

    • I agree on that, UT2004 with a third person camera mutator (yes, there's a built-in third person perspective, but you don't have a crosshair in that and can't aim up or down) somehow plays much better than in standard first person. Quake 3 was a bit harder since it wouldn't rotate further if you aimed higher or lower than +- 45, but in general third person helps with seeing things going on around you. Aiming at long distances can be an issue, especially since you can't see whether you really have a line of

  • Control affected by camera (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Digital_Quartz ( 75366 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @12:19PM (#9771217) Homepage
    One critical area which wasn't mentioned is the problems involved with having a camera which affects your controls. For example, consider Onimusha, or Resident Evil, where pressing "up" makes your character run forward, vs. say Mario Sunshine where "up" makes your character run away from the camera.

    The first style of control can be done very well (although Resident Evil is obviously NOT an example of this :), and the second can have major problems.

    The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction. Mario64 suffered from this a great deal; you'd be running along a beam, and the camera would pan around you. In order to stay on the beam, you'd have to continuously and slowly rotate the stick to counter the camera movement. Of course you may argue that the designer did this intentionally to make "walking along a beam" more challenging. There are plenty of examples of similar platform games where similar problems impede game enjoyment.

    The original 3D Spiderman game for the Dreamcast and PS1, and the Spiderman: The Movie game both tried to overcome this problem in a novel way; if you were pressing a direction, and the camera moved, spidy would just keep going in whatever direction he was going; the axes the controls operated on would not change until the button was released.

    The problems here is that there are situations where you'd, say, climb up a wall pressing up, have the camera swing around to a below-view, then try and run away from something. You'd go from "up" to "down", but since the camera had changed, your character would stop moving forward for a moment, then keep on going. The worst areas where were spidy got up near a corner. You'd press in a direction, he'd move onto a new surface that you didn't want him to, the camera would swing around 90 degrees to show the new surface, you'd press a different direction, and spidy would move in what felt like some random direction, usually onto another surface, swinging the camera around again. It felt very clumsy, and I recall being extremely frustrated with that game on several occasions.

    • Re:Control affected by camera (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @12:59PM (#9771644)
      I can't play Resident Evil because of the controls. But Shenmu has the same controls, yet I play it fine. The difference is in Shenmu the camera is almost always centered behind your back. So up does usually mean walk away from the camera, left turns left, and right turns right. Even down does a quick 180 like in RE. But because Resident Evil started with the prerendered backdrops they had fixed room cameras. Though one would think that a fixed camera like that would lead better to a camera-relative control scheme.

      I've played games where the stick direction was the direction of movement on screen relative to the camera. I remember thinking as the camera slowly panned and my thumb adjusted the angle of the stick, how odd such a compensation was, but how natural it felt. Now if the camera would have just snapped to a different angle I couldn't have delt with it.

      Phantasy Star Online wasn't too bad when it came to player controlled cameras. A quick flick of the left trigger would re-center the camera behind the charater's back. It became so natural feeling (perhaps because of how often I had to do it) that when I was playing another game later with a poor computer controlled camera I kept finding myself pulling the trigger trying to fix it.
    • Yeah, I hated Mario 64 the few times I tried it. I like 3rd person games but in my opinion control should be absolute and not based on where the camera happens to be at the time. Maybe I would have gotten used to it eventually but it was just to confusing on a basic level for me. If I press up, my character should walk forward in a straight line no matter what the camera does.

      I played most of Oni, besides looking though walls the moving camera was fine for me. I prefer games such as Alice though, wher

    • The advantage of camera-relative motion is that it allows the player to instantly react to the situation and move in any direction. I have yet to play a joystick-controlled game using player-relative motion that didn't feel like I was driving a tank, regardless of the camera system. Therefore, in my opinion, player-relative motion -- with a joystick, mind you -- is an automatic lose, whereas camera-relative motion can be a win, if the camera is done well.

      Unfortunately, doing a good soft third person cam

      • I really liked the camera in Mario Sunshine until Pinna Park. The combination of the cages, invisible Wall, real wall, and the jumping was a enough to make me want to smash my Cube and everything associated with it. That single expirience is probably the reason that Mario sunshine is the only game that I haven't played more than once.
    • One critical area which wasn't mentioned is the problems involved with having a camera which affects your controls. For example, consider Onimusha, or Resident Evil, where pressing "up" makes your character run forward, vs. say Mario Sunshine where "up" makes your character run away from the camera.

      I strongly prefer camera-relative movement to player-relative because you always know exactly which way your character is going to run when you press "up." If the camera moves a little as you're doing it, you n
    • The big problems with the second one come from poor automatic camera controls; if the camera swings wildly or suddenly, your character suddenly starts running off in a different direction.

      Interetingly, the Sonic Adventure games did the opposite. The camera would go wild, and in order to proceed, you had to trust the system and just keep pushing up. Anything else and you typically fell to your death.

      Understanding this makes the games much easier, and it is the basic reason I never shove this game in front

  • I prefer the 3rd person soft, 1 vs 2 player issues (Score:3, Insightful)

    by cjmnews ( 672731 ) <cjmnews@yahoo.com> on Thursday July 22, 2004 @12:35PM (#9771377) Homepage
    As the article states the 3rd person soft is the most popular of camera angles in games today. Though I am pretty sure I saw an article yesterday that said First Person view was the most desirable. Don't ask me why the conflict, I just read the articles.

    Being a player of PC games (Diablo II, Neverwinter Nights) and PS2 games (Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance (1 & 2), Champions of Norrath, Lord of the Rings) I have experienced the 3rd person cameras and their issues.

    On the PS2 the Lord of the Rings Return of the King game seems to have the most difficulty when switching to multi-player. The camera angles for single player were great. It adjusts for the terrain and keeps the important stuff on the screen. Once you go into multiplayer though, it is a different story. For some reason, less of the screen is visible with multiplayer. I would have thought more (or even the same) would be visible as the additional character takes up some real estate. Many of the angles prevent you from seeing paths (the run out of the Paths of the Dead) and traps (tiny spiders in Shelob's Lair) as well as some enemies. The lack of control of the camera does not help. The testers needed to test more with multiplayer to identify these issues and do something like expand the real estate seen in multiplayer.

    The Baldur's Gate and Champions games on the other hand require you to manipulate the camera. This is fine for me, but not great for my kids as they have not figured out the fine art of directing the character with the left hand while turning the camera with the right hand.

    Neverwinter Nights also has full control of the camera, with 3 different 3rd person view points built in. If I remember correctly, you can download a hak that allows for an almost first person view, that is particularly liked with the jiggle hak. These controls are pretty good and you can turn on the feature to have obstructing objects (2nd floors) automatically disappear when they obstruct your view. There are times when you can accidentally turn the camera so you can't see the battle that you are in, which can be quite deadly. Some module writers also force the camera view on you which I find frustrating. I set up my system the way I like it, don't change my settings.

    Diablo II has the 3rd person hard camera. They did a good job to prevent most obstructions, but there are places where you can't see. NWN has spoiled me and I try to turn the camera in Diablo II.

    All in all the cameras I have seen are pretty good, though there are others that need some work. Bionicle forces the camera to point a particular direction, Harry Potter SS and CoS have no camera controls, Harry Potter PoA has controls, but they are not as responsive as the Baldur's gate ones.

    • Re:I prefer the 3rd person soft, 1 vs 2 player iss (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "As the article states the 3rd person soft is the most popular of camera angles in games today. Though I am pretty sure I saw an article yesterday that said First Person view was the most desirable. Don't ask me why the conflict, I just read the articles."

      Lots of games are based around some kind of character the makers are trying to promote, like Mario, Spiderman, Lara Croft...
      A first person camera means that this animated advert isn't on the screen all the time, and so it's not an option for many modern g
      • I disagree entirely. First off, 1st person is not an option at all for some people. These people, myself included, get nauseous in just a few minutes time looking at first person perspectives.

        Secondly- first person is much HARDER to move around in. You can't accurately see your sides or rear. Without that view, how can you avoid things behind you/to your sides?

        Really, I don't see anything good first person brings to either controls or game fun at all.
  • I read the section where they say that there are no problems with FP cameras, completely missing the common complaint that they're very difficult to use in jumping puzzles. Then I saw the complaints about the article here and didn't bother reading any more.

    Rob
  • Quit talking trash about my EyeToy!
  • The article says that Super Mario 64 is widely pointed-at as a near-perfect example of a game camera. I have to disagree.

    Someone else here has already pointed to what happens when the camera decides to pan when crossing a narrow beam. Since the controls are tied to the camera, you have to match the direction you're pressing to the camera's motion so Mario doesn't end up falling to oblivion.

    But I don't think that having the controls relative to the camera viewpoint is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, i
  • The root of the problem is console and console conversion games. Not a troll, hear me out. As the article suggests, the key problems with camera angles in games are all control related - unpredictable controls, and camera angles that don't show you the most useful view at the time.

    The consoles are getting better, but initially, there are two problems that caused developers to *have* to make bad decisions with regards to camera.

    Firstly, resources. Console games haven't always been able to afford complet
    • Sands of Time had a horrible camera- what a shame for a beautiful game. I ended up trading it in because of the camera.

      But consoles don't necessarily have to have crappy cameras. In fact, I find it easier to control third-person games on my Xbox controller, over a PC mouse/keyboard. (Try GTA 3 on both, and se which is better.)

      A game with a *great* camera- Psi-Ops. Great camera, awesome game.
      • Psi-Ops had a very nicely arranged camera. Not perfect, but definitely up there on the scale.

        As far as Sands of Time, there were spots the camera wasn't bad, and there were spots it was. A lot of times a bit of preplanning with the camera was all it took.
        • Ahh, but if you gave the user full control with the camera, much like in GTA 3, the game would have been so much better!

          Of course, third person camera is really better for combat against multiple opponents, whereas first person camera is better for interacting with your environment. So third person is better suited to console games, which tend to be simpler, faster, with more twitch action than in a PC game.
    • Console games haven't always been able to afford complete freedom with the camera

      You couldn't be more off here on what the problem is. With the exception of a couple of gaming genres (only forced first-person perspective games, really), gamers don't want full freedom of the camera. It doesn't make the games any more fun, it just serves as a frustrating distraction to the core gameplay. Unless I purchased a game about using a camera (whether welded to a gun or not :D), I really don't want to constantly me
      • That's an interesting point you make there. I never considered it would be awkward having full control of the camera, because I'm a PC gamer. In PC games, especially first person shooters where camera control *is* the game, mouselook is the most intuitive interface into a gaming environment. Usually on a PC, if you have a game that doesn't use the mouse correctly, it's a console port.

        When you consider that consoles don't generally use the complete analog freedom of mouselook control, camera control woul
  • The previous game I worked on required a free roaming camera, and what I found was that players DON'T want anything fancy. Don't try to second guess what they want, because what they want is for the camera to NOT swing around while they're moving forward. Minimisation of changes in the yaw of the line of sight is far more important than the designer setting up some 'cinematic' looking swoops as far as our players were concerned. If the player ran in a direction not parallel to the line of sight, you cou

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