Game Development: Salem & Haven

[sabinati]

Sabinati lost mod status in Salem forum: did he "quit" or was he fired?

quit

[TeckXKnight]

Sabinati lost mod status in Salem forum: did he "quit" or was he fired?

quit

We were all really sad about that. Sab was the best mod. =(

[painhertz]

And now they made some random pogue fucking noob a mod and Sevenless, neither of whom were even in alpha. Fuck that shit. (you're alright though teck)

[Oddity]

Also by Christ the camera is probably the single most obnoxious camera I've ever encountered in a videogame. I can tell whoever implemented the auto panning is really proud of themselves. It's a technical marvel. It's also absolutely hideous to play with. Give it an off switch.

Yes, this. It's making me seasick....

We've been saying this for about 8 months now.

Obviously putting your fingers in your ears and going "NA NA NA NA NA NA NA" is much easier than addressing the most glaring issue in the entire game.

Code: Select all

[22:49:22] <Oddity> Why does the camera constantly rotate while I move?
[22:49:27] <Karl> Yeah it's annoying
[22:49:47] <loftar> Because I like it that way. :)

gg loftar doesn't care about the default client being user-friendly.

[rony]

And now they made some random pogue fucking noob a mod and Sevenless, neither of whom were even in alpha. Fuck that shit. (you're alright though teck)

+1
Forum trolls being mod on salem forum.

[TeckXKnight]

And now they made some random pogue fucking noob a mod and Sevenless, neither of whom were even in alpha. Fuck that shit. (you're alright though teck)

<3
No seriously though, I miss Sab being a mod. He's a much higher quality mod than me.

[DDDsDD999]

And now they made some random pogue fucking noob a mod and Sevenless, neither of whom were even in alpha. Fuck that shit. (you're alright though teck)

+1
Forum trolls being mod on salem forum.

Staxjax is a troll?

[cobaltjones]

gg loftar doesn't care about the default client being user-friendly.

Gonna go ahead and repost this since they won't stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

We listen to our tester base. More so than most, I would argue. That does not mean that we pander to its every whims, however.

Oh......

I hate the camera. Since it's 3D and all, could we have a proper shoulder cam please? Nothing else works with all these trees around.
Also, compass please. I can't walk in a straight line with this automatic camera rotation.

I told them the same thing. Loftar responded that Salem has the same view distance as Haven so there would be clipping issues, to which I replied "yea doesn't really matter if you can actually see what's going on"

The camera suffers the same problem as the one in Neverwinter Nights 2; when you zoom in, the camera focuses on the back of the character's head instead of what is in front of him. Another camera peculiarity Salem shares with NWN2 is that it uses the middle mousebutton for manual rotation instead of the standard right mouse.

With the autorotation, trees obscuring vision and camera angle focused at the ground its no surprise that people get lost so easily.

Is it really so hard to put up some fog to obscure the vision range edge? We can do without it in alpha, though, just give ma a useful camera.
Of course, best would be a first person cam which I can rotate freely, but I'm not gonna be that greedy.

[*]The camera really needs some degree of tilt instead of just swivel and zoom as it has currently.

Frustrations in the beginning*:
* Not able to do/craft/build much
* This importantly includes not being able to build a claim or even effective containers.
* Near total spatial confusion, with no compass, minimap, and non-optimal camera

So far the core activity appears to be wandering around looking for stuff - hampered by the poor camera and sub-par interface.

I didn't get far at all, (maybe 5 minutes before I had to log off), but moving the camera view around was indeed a bit strange. I suppose it's because I'm used to most 3D games using the same mechanics more or less, and these were different. I'll have to go play some more 3D games and compare.

sounds good but i still think the most important thing is the camera

[list][*]Stop camera rotation

all the camera stuff i mentioned previously like not having shit between camera and character, shouldercam, etc

Seriously, camera is by far the worst thing about Salem ATM. Foraging in forest is an exercise in frustration. Either you zoom out all the way and miss most of the stuff because it's covered by trees, or you zoom in and only see half a metre ahead of you when you're going uphill which is quite common because all forests are on hilly terrain. But even on flat terrain it feels very unnatural, like I got a cast on my neck or something. Why can't we always have something similar to what we see when going downhill? So what if there's no skybox, a bit of blackness is nothing compared to the loss of immersion we get from being unable to view our surroundings when zoomed in. I for one would just love to look at trees from below, but it just can't be done.

Yeah, the camera is a big issue. I left it off the list because it is too huge. This is one big thing that needs to get fixed before release.

i can't play this for more than a few minutes at a time solely because of the camera. it is that frustrating.

i'm hermitting because i got lost and the only way to get back (no minimap yet) was to stake a claim so i could port to boston :v
not that i could fucking stand to play because camera

who cares about cabbage when there isn't a decent camera

As long as you're outsourcing stuff, you should outsource the client. Working on it is a waste of Loftar's time, and he obviously doesn't like doing it else we'd have a decent camera by now

I want the old trees back
Seriously, there was no problem with trees, only with camera.

Add more starter curios what give study stuff at start. I dont want to walk around 1 hour just trying to find chestnuts. Also the new trees are way too small . Change them a bit bigger ,make the branches less annoying and fix the bad camera angle.

Those trees man, what did you do to them? I loved them before. It was the camera that sucked, not the trees.

Camera issue solve: You can already zoom all the way to the characters back, allow zooming into first person with mouse look. This would make combat WAY more badass looking and we'd actually be able to appreciate the 3D graphics. As it stands, I'm gonna be playing the game full zoomed out looking at the top of my characters head thereby making the 3D aspect of the game completely pointless. (Just as soon make it 2D isometric like Haven.)

But camera needs some options for sure. At least option to stop it from auto rotating. And we need to see camera direction (preferably with seen area) on minimap, like in strategy games Or compass at least.

the non-default camera is a better choice in my opinion :V, add in some fog if you get annoyed by the black background.
Hopefully it's made an option later on with the default client
A compass would also be nice.

yes boshaw tell us more. camera and movement have been holding the alpha back since it began.

it would be really nice if we had beacons going to boston and/or claim and/or village. with the constantly rotating camera and the large terrains i'm spending 99% of my time with no idea whatsoever where i'm at. maybe you don't want fast travel in this game but we need something by which to navigate. otherwise, emergent gameplay will lead to people leaving up afk alts in boston or their camp for party arrows.

the best thing would be to turn off that smothing moving camera, player can turn around his view by a mouse
then I'll be sure that I am going in the same direction and not by a circle like a stupid noob
let the camera be fixed directly to N and that's all
or make this ability in options
because when this camera view begin to turn left or right by itself...it seems like you're drunk

This might be a decent standalone idea, but it isn't a good solution to the navigation problem. We need the camera to stop undermining our natural sense of direction, and we need the landscape to be more memorable.

Yes, I'm fully support camera behavior changes. And some changes to landscape to make it more memorizable. And minimap click movement too.

While I'm holding forth.... I re watched the witchcraft demo last night and losing those big, beautiful trees because of a shitty camera is NOT cool. Fix the camera and put the real trees back in PLX. Anyone with me on this?

right now what annoyes me the most is:
Seasickness from the camera movement (same old issue, im still using default client i might add)

Haven't checked the custom clients yet, but in the default client the camera does not follow you quickly enough when you turn and turning does not change your forward direction until the camera completes its rotation.
So it feels more like strafing. Except strafing isn't supposed to turn the camera. So it's not getting either behavior right.

I find that moving from 2-D Isometric to 3-d in Salem added nothing and actually made most things a pain in the ass (Building houses, fences, the camera, etc etc)

Free first "claim" as leanto would be good too (as someone from devs said once)....because the current camera is totally disorientiring thing and harmful for the new ppl here - they can just quit

- Camera tilt, just so you don't forget. No, we don't need a skybox first.

well it's not a commercial game yet and in the meantime it's unplayable (imho) with that fucking camera, so until they implement proper camera and minimap radar and inspirational highlighting etc in the main client you should be arsed

What changes? The camera is still complete and utter shit. It sort of works on perfectly flat terrain, even if it is fugly (feels like I'm wearing a cast on my neck), but the tiniest bit of hills and you're blind if you don't zoom out. Do you honestly want your players to play the game zoomed out ALL the time?

yeah i played with the default last night. camera sucks. freecam needs to be the only cam.

There should be a way to DECIDE how the camera turns, like in runescape, since it's the same style of game, and runescape did a good job when it comes to camera movement.

Ugh there really need to be a way to set waypoints on the map, or at least have a constant arrow marking your homestead/Boston.
I bought some land, wandered around for a couple minutes, and now I'm ultimately lost. In Haven it was a little easier since the terrain is somewhat simple to keep track of, but in Salem the wilderness is a giant maze. Also I've got a couple dew drops and some driftwood so I don't really want to just dump everything to get back.
I like exploring so far but there's something about the disambiguation between the constantly spinning camera and the static minimap or maybe it's just the fact that the minimap is tiny and can't be manipulated at all, but I've really gotten the feeling of getting lost/disoriented extremely easy which kind of frustrates the otherwise interesting early gameplay.

also what was with jorb's objection to a better camera based on it making boundaries visible when elevation has the exact same issue? look down the hill from boston, you will see the blackness

[sabinati]

^ lol

[sabinati]

Sabinati lost mod status in Salem forum: did he "quit" or was he fired?

quit

We were all really sad about that. Sab was the best mod. =(

no, i was terrible and rude and a troll, which is fine here but not really appropriate there, and i have not much interest in changing that behavior