Why do simple camera angles seem to elude game developers?

The BBQ Pit
1

In the pit because it fucking pisses me off.

I found Silent Hill 3 for $10 at EB games (PC version) and decided it was high time I scared the shit out of myself, so I went ahead and bought it. I start playing only to realize I can’t fucking control what I see. Nothing iritates me more and grabs me right out of the game experience than not being able to control the camera. I seriously don’t understand why developers think it’s such a good idea to block huge parts out of your view. It’s okay, though, because I don’t think I’ll be buying games anytime soon without first finding out if it has freelook.

2

This is why I stick to Tetris.

Also Centipede. That game rocks.

3

As an avid gamer, I feel your pain. I have SH3, and it’s pretty atrocious. But by far, the worst game camera I’ve encountered has to be the one in Kingdom Hearts . To add insult to injury, you actually can control the camera, and it’s still 99.999% unusable at best. In even wide-open spaces, the camera always inexplicably ends up facing you head-on (so you can’t see what you’re trying to face, or what enemy you’re trying to attack), or in really bizarre, equally unusable angles like zoomed in so the back of your head fills up 70% of the screen.

Don’t even get me started on what happens when you try to navigate a tight corridor…

4

This isn’t meant to excuse bad game cameras, because they bug the hell out of me, too. But you’d be surprised just how hard it is to implement the camera and get it right. It seems like it’d be a simple enough task, but it turns out it’s the new “holy grail” for game developers. There’s no single right way to do it; there are games that have gotten it right, but you can’t just take that method and apply it to any other game, because the environments are different.

In some games, like the Silent Hill series I imagine (have only seen parts of 3), only parts of the environments are actually modeled out and fully textured. So they have to lock the camera to keep you from seeing “behind the scenes.” This is done either because of a lack of development time, a lack of memory to hold ALL the textures necessary for a scene, or because big chunks of the scene are pre-rendered.

And when you do give the player free control over the camera, that opens up a whole mess of issues. What do you do when you get behind a wall or a large object? Fade it out? Make it half-transparency? Allow the camera to go outside the world?

And even when you tackle all that, then you have to make sure the camera just “feels” right. It’s not too mushy, or too unresponsive. If the player sets the camera and then moves the character forward, does the camera stay at whatever weird angle it’s at, or try to move back to behind the character? It’s a tough balance to get right.

My vote for most annoying camera is in Jet Set Radio for the Dreamcast. And only because I loved the rest of the game so much, but the camera kept drawing attention to itself.

5

God, yes. Nothing kills a good game like being unable to do anything because the back of your character’s head is blocking the way.

The irritating thing is, when camera work is well implemented you tend not to notice it. It’s so transparent that game designers don’t think to emulate it, I guess.

One game I recall the camera working well in was Xenogears. If the game allowed you to pan the camera a few degrees up or down it would’ve been perfect.

6

I remeber how the first 3d Mario on the N64 drove me nuts. Walking on some of those thin beams with the camera angle going one way too far, and then back the otherway too far. I still kicked Koopa

Made me want to eat the controller.

7

The Silent Hill series’ cameras have been fairly consistent and are somewhat of a compromise between the static frames of the Resident Evil series and the (usually) completely free cameras of adventure games. They made the camera difficult to control on purpose. There’s a way the designers prefer you approach the areas in question, and the way you approach the game. Might as well bitch about the lack of lighting. It’s just part of the environment.

8

Fable has some excellent camera control.

That is all.

9

AARRRRRGGHHHH!! Resident Evil camera angles!!! I’m going to go home and smash my old PS1 just because of that shit! (Since I don’t play it anymore, I can do that now).

10

I actually really like the Resident Evil fixed camera view… for that game. It makes it feel more like a movie, and when the lights are off and you’re playing in the middle of the night and you have to walk around corners blind even though you can hear the zombies moaning and shuffling–Wow!

11

Hmm, the only problem I had with the camera in Kingdom Hearts was when it got stuck behind a tree. Although I did hate that you control it with the L-R buttons instead of the right analog stick.

The one I found truely unforgiveable was FF X-2. It’s a RPG game. You’re in a battle, an RPG battle, and the camera gets stuck above the trees or behind a tree and you can’t see what you’re doing. How the hell can you screw that up?

12

No way!!! I’m always trying to look “down” on my column when playing Tetris. But I can’t change the angle. I hate that!!! Looking down would be cool.

I just had an idea. 3d Tetris!! Is it out already? That would be awesome, if not challenging!

13

I actually liked the SH3 camera more than that of any other similar game. You do know that there’s a button that brings the camera closer to her head and allows you to pan around, right? It works pretty well with a gamepad (probably hell with a keyboard, though…)

14

There’s an old arcade/computer/console game called Block Out that’s essentially a 3-D version of Tetris.

As for a game with a perfect POV, I’ll nominate any of the classic Infocom adventures. All the viewpoints you want, right in your head! :smiley:

15

Three Steps to Making a Good Videogame Camera

  1. Let the user position the camera wherever they want it.

  2. Keep the fucking camera there until the user says otherwise. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it’s behind a wall. Because, you see, the user, being smarter than a piece of software, will REALIZE that it’s behind a wall, and move it to a better place. The reason beam-walking in Mario 64 was so annoying was because you’d put the camera behind you (or wherever), and you’d start walking, and the fucking thing would move, causing the axis of control to change and causing you to fall. Unless of course you played the game way way way too much, and spinning the control stick along with the camera became second nature…but maybe that’s just me.

  3. Have a button that returns the camera to a preset position, preferably directly behind the character and a few feet back, a la Zelda: Ocarina of Time. After the user hits that button, keep the fucking camera there until the user says otherwise. The user hit the button for a reason. When they want to change it, they’ll do so, using the intuitive and comprehensive controls provided to accomplish #1.

I would think that this would be the easiest thing in the world to do – it’d eliminate the guesswork and “camera A.I.” required in trying to make an auto-cam – but if the current library of 3-D platformers is any indication, apparently I’m wrong.

16

Every 3D console game that isn’t a FPS, sports game, or other game that requires special camera work, should be like The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, in terms of camera. That game had the BEST camera of any game I have ever played. Ever. It had good camera AI, and if all else fails, hit Z and BAM, back to right behind you. Hold Z and BAM, it stays there.

PC games should have camera control just like Neverwinter Nights. It has OPTIONS! Fully AI, fully player controlled, or it does like Legend of Zelda, and picks what it thinks is best, and it usually is, but still lets you change it to soemthing else if you want. It’s so simple.

17

No! Silent Hill 3 has a good camera movement. If you press Shift (IIRC) the camera resets and you can also move it around.

A game with a truly vile camera was Catwoman. Add to that controls that are relative to the camera angle :mad:

The crapiest 1200MB I’ve ever downloaded.

18

It’s not an easy problem. Keeping the camera in one location requires more work by the artists to produce objects that look correct from all orientations, and even then thing go to crap if the camera winds up inside an object, or if objects repeatedly pass through the hither plane.

Also, sometimes the camera code isn’t really thought about much until late in the process. It’s difficult to write camera code when the objects in the scene aren’t already passing through walls and the like. So once things calm down, you assign some junior coder to go and put some logic into the camera AI to deal with certain situations. But then that creates some other artifacts, so additional code is tacked on. But then it breaks down in some parts of the game, so you kluge in more. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Another problem is the high turnover rate in the industry. Programers get burned out really quickly. The guy who wrote the camera code for one game will very often not be there for the next title, and the person who fills in will usually not be able decipher the code therein. Disciplined code is not common in the games industry, nor is comments in the code. So most times, you start from scratch. And then there is QA.

The testers, in the games industry, are the lowest of the low. Janitors get more respect. Really, I’m not kidding. (“Hm. He says the game caused his test box to catch on fire. Destruction of company property, terminate him. No, don’t fire him, shoot him.”) Maybe the lead tester will be listened to by the producers, but the others are pretty much despised, especially as the drop-dead date approaches. (“Three hours spent trying to reproduce this bug! Fvck’n tester!”) Not that some of that derision isn’t deserved by some…

So the drop-dead date approaches, and the producers are going through the bug database, deleting bugs reports that they deem not important enough before anyone else sees them. The programers look at the bugs assigned to them, try to reproduce them for about two minutes, and then mark the report as “no such bug”. The artists look at the bugs assigned to them, and decide to head out to Burning Man.

Then the drop-dead date hits, and everything is packed up and shipped out, no matter what. Well, maybe if the game doesn’t run, they might take a day or two to fix it, but sometimes not even then if it’s a PC game. I’ve heard of a game (Shogo? I forget the name. I haven’t actually played it.) where the character dies in the opening scene, before the user can do anything. “Blam! Mission failed. Play again?” <click> “Blam! Mission failed. Play again?” You have to download the patch to be able to play it, and God help you if you have a slow net connection. I swear, these days they should just make PC games so that the executable that they ship is just a downloader for the actual game executable.

Console games have a higher hurdle to leap, because games have to pass certain requirements by the console manufacturers, who are mostly immune to any financial repercussions if a particular game doesn’t ship in time – mostly. EA Games is the 800 lb. gorilla these days, and first-party games will often be pushed through by management, too. But all this means is that the game producers will artificially push up the drop-dead date to deal with the possibility of initial rejection, and will start ignoring bug reports even earlier.

19

Now I feel kind of bad about all the times I’ve muttered “fsking QA”. :frowning:

20

Welltris?