amuzen {l Wrote}:As mentioned in IRC, this looks quite good to me overall. The things that need some more thought are the sidestepping behavior and camera locking.
Unless I am missing something, running circles around the camera does not sound particularly useful.
Becouse gruntunbur just did a quick summery of
Classic Super Mario 64 Third-Person Control and Animation by Steve Rabin
That's what Mario does is Super Mario 64 when you press the stick sideways.
If you going for Keyboard(/mouse) controls I think character-centric would be better.
press [W] to walk forward
Tap then press and hold [W] to run
press [W]+[D] to turn right.
press [D] to sidestep right.
press [S] to back up.
double tap [S] to do a quick 180
double tap [S] then press and hold [W] to do a quick 180 then start traveling the new forward direction(was backwards before double taping [S]).
amuzen {l Wrote}: When exploring caves or other irregularly shaped areas, being able to avoid obstacles without changing your facing direction is quite useful. I would expect that most people are also used to traditional sidestepping and expect it from a game of this kind. Because of that, there would have to be solid rationale on why this scheme would be better than the normal approach.
amuzen {l Wrote}:Being able to lock the camera on an enemy sounds like a useful feature, but a few additional points need to be considered. It would be necessary to decide, how would the player enable camera locking,
Use the Z trigger
That's a Zelda:OoT reference.
amuzen {l Wrote}:and how would the target be selected if there are multiple enemies around.
Left and right shoulder buttons. I guess you would use the camera controls that are now being overridden by the lock.
amuzen {l Wrote}:Furthermore, it would be nice if this could be made work reasonably well in smaller spaces. I was mainly hoping that locking would help with ranged combat and spells, but I am not sure how you would be able to hit a moving enemy with slower projectile types if your facing direction is locked to its current position. Resolving that would be very helpful as well.
If the camera's looking direction is locked to the character's aiming direction you have a FPS, use the standard FPS controls FPS style like in the 3D Zelda games or autoMagicaly like Diablo1/2
Action RPG's usually have the camera's pan fixed to the world axis, if the play uses the camera control to look south the camera stays looking south as it moves to follow the character.
Like was said over
Here with a chase cam you new to decouple the movement controls from the camera's chasing motions
The analog stick is a relative control device. Depending on the game state or how the character is oriented, pressing up on the stick may result in proceeding in any one of 360 directions. Designing good relativistic controls requires understanding how quality, feedback design and the other facets of mechanics design come together. Take the Mario Galaxy series. ... Running down the side of a planetoid is the same as running up it depending on how you look at it. A key point I must make here is "how you look at it" is largely the result of how the camera is designed. Galaxy's movement controls are built in with a wider turn radius than in Super Mario 64 and with a bit of smart-aim-assist like functionality. As long as you don't let go of the stick and let it recenter, you can push the system far enough that holding down makes Mario move up. As backward as it sounds, it feels completely natural.
Personally think trying to create a view dependent controls for character movement for a game with freely modifiable levels is a masochistic task.
But Gamasutra has an
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2 ... amera_.php[url]article of the Camera System from Full Spectrum Warrior[/url]