Minimap Needed + Planetary Zoom

Is that supposed to be a troll?

Please give a similar diagram of what happens when the camera is on the underside of that first planet. Note that end view should be the same, so the camera would do a very weird and jarring 180 degree turn. You would then not be able to see the underside of the planet, so you couldn't zoom back into the same spot, either.

You can't see the underside of a map in Sup Com, so Sup Com never had that problem with zoom. But it's a very real problem in PA.

Assuming that is even an issue, I don't believe that being able to zoom straight back to the same place is as important as the view giving you the information you need. It is not a tradeoff worth making.

There are a couple of behaviours that could remedy it. For example, if the camera zoomed towards the side of the planet you were pointing at (intuitive!) then the underside would become visible as you zoomed towards the equator, allowing you to adjust your zoom to where you need to go easily while zooming.

The second is to just zoom out towards whichever side of the solar plane is closer, this would give a mirror image of the system instead but I'm not sure that's a big problem either.

Perhaps a combination of both.

Overall point being, the current zoom view is not useful. It needs to present some level of consistency, and it needs to not require manual adjustment. It really isn't my job to design a camera that meets these requirements, I am only pointing them out and graciously offering ideas.

But given that supcom pioneered the concept, and did so really well you have to look at where your implementation differs, and why. And what negative effects that might have.

Judging from this thread and the reactions of when Uber made the change to the camera, most people do not agree with you on this. I would suggest that at most, this should be an option, but not default.

The behaviour you want used to be in PA. They changed it because it simply wasn't as good.

what is the point in that then?

I prefer the 3-D system personally.

have it as an option and non-default

It's not really a matter of opinion. Either it presents useful information and navigation or it doesn't. I have described the problems that it has in a factual manner. My suggestions aren't necessarily the only solutions or the best solutions but it is better than to simply say the problems don't exist. I don't appreciate having feedback misconstrued as unreasonable demand to discredit it.

"Most people" don't appear to be qualified to make a judgement on this as "most people" conflate my suggestions with some other system that I never made mention of and apparently bears no similarity to. Thus making an invalid comparison and deriving an invalid preference thereof.

Sorry, to be perfectly honest, I really, really struggled to understand what exactly you were trying to convey there for awhile. I think I understand now. Basically, the idea is you zoom straight out until a little past celestial view, and then the camera smoothly curves upward (or downward if you're south of the equator) the further away you get to give you a nice perpendicular view of the solar system. Is what I think you mean. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I think I would actually have to use this a bit to see how I'd feel about it. In my head it doesn't sound so bad, as long as once you'd zoomed out, it would remember to curve back in to exactly where you zoomed out from originally. But as there is a working way to see the solar system now (although a bit more clumsily via the space bar) I highly doubt this will be addressed soon.

I agree on this, the problem does exist.

Your suggestion howerver is not a valid sollution, in some cases it makes the problem worse.

It really doesn't matter how it does it, maybe what I've suggested has problems. But it needs to frame the information (planets, asteroids and orbits) in a way that is easy to see and unobscured, and it needs to give a level of consistency in how it does that so you can remember things in terms of locations and directions which is intuitive.
The top down view is simply the easiest way to do that.

And also of course it needs to have minimum overhead in what the user needs to do to make it work so they can focus on the information instead of struggling with the system. The minimum interaction of "zoom out" "point where you want to go" "zoom in" is ideal.

Alternatives really don't matter because they aren't the ones you are going to be using.

hud overlay could do that.

I don't want to kill the 3D view over something like this.
I like that the zoom takes you straight back to where you where.

that's the FA way

In FA the zoom would take you to where your cursor was on the screen, this position would move as the camera repositioned while zooming out. If you zoomed out and didn't move your cursor, zooming back in would end you up in a different location. You don't notice this because the concept that zooming in takes you to where you are pointed is so intuitive that you unconsciously move the cursor to compensate.

The only consistent way to get that top-down view would be to snap to it. We have a keyboard shortcut for it.

And overlay would be very cool. I love this idea!

That is patently false. And as I've stated about 5 million times now, using a keyboard command is not the same as zooming, and does not replace it. Only supplement it at best.

yes and while we wait that's what we have, but it was he first part of the fight to have a camera control just like that of FA to ask for consistent zooming from system view to planet view. perhaps we'll get the edge scrolling back down the line.
but this is what the strat zoom translates to on a 3D map first and foremost. taking the 3D element ou of it is not the correct response.

yes, but we HAD edge scrolling and the 3D system view brings us closer to a modern take on strat zoom.
so all we need now if for edge scroll to make it's way back in and we're good

The system view is not currently "3D", and probably never will be as planets tend to align to the solar plane.

UberGaf here, current resident camera technician.

I think I understand what you're getting at.... In the general case it's not terribly useful to have an edge-on view of the celestial system when you're at maximum zoom. So why not have it ease into the top-down view the further you get from the planet? It's not a bad idea; the main sticking point being that you might lose information about where you were if the camera worked that way. (though to be fair, the spacebar already throws away that information...)
I think it would be possible to keep track of where you were and be able to zoom back in to that spot. The fine tuning required would be to decide if the camera thinks you meant to zoom back in to where you were, or whether it thinks you mean to zoom to a new planet/location. This sort of tuning can be pretty time consuming.

The spacebar is not a kludge, it's currently the simplest and fastest way to get information about what's going on in space. (It's the *only* way to get a perfect top down view.) However, if there were a space minimap (as title thread suggests there should be), that wouldn't even be the case any longer. One of our goals is to support multiple cameras/views. And if/when we have that kind of functionality, you could just park a camera in space, move it's view/window to the corner of your main view and voila - instant minimap.

There's no doubt that the camera still needs some love and polish, but I also think it's a far cry better than it used to be. Some things that are on my hitlist for the next pass on the camera are:
- Soft stops at different zoom levels
- *maybe* looking at whether there is a sane way to allow some kind of off-planet edge scrolling
- More configuration of zoom speed and acceleration.
- Over-the-shoulder commander cam
- Improved free cam
- Other assorted odd and ends.

That being said, I have a few items on my plate that are higher priority than the next camera pass.

There's no rush as far as I'm concerned. Just that the issues are one some kind of to do list somewhere.

I'm not sure what you mean by "edge scrolling". The kind that moves the camera? I typically turn that off if I can because trying to hit buttons on the side of the screen accidentally moves the camera. (As an aside, I don't typically like click-and-drag navigation either, you can't go very far using it. But the implementation of friction makes it much easier to go far distances with it, which I appreciate a lot.)

One of my major concerns though is that the things I want to look at are properly centered too. So zooming away from a planet centers the local orbital system, and the farthest zoom has the whole system centered instead of some planets being offscreen to the side.

And also as I said before, I think it really is important that when you zoom out you can remember where things are. If the view is different each time you zoom out you have to mentally reorient yourself, taking up valuable time. While reorienting on a planet is easier because of your natural sense of direction this doesn't quite apply to systems because they move while you aren't looking, and the change in orientation you've internalized from the surface does not apply to your new orientation in space.

The spacebar is not that useful as a replacement, currently it is bugged with the polar view, causing insane spinning. The sudden jump does not help with orientation. And it just is not the same kind of natural interface that zooming is. V had much the same behaviour in supcom and was used by exactly nobody. Ever.

Dude, if it zoomed out to the same place every time, either north or south, you would never be able to zoom back into the opposite side of the planets.

Seriously man, if everyone is telling you something is wrong, there is a good chance that you are looking at it the wrong way.

Being right isn't a matter of probability nor of public opinion.