I mean, if I call anyone an “ungrateful troll” I’m sure my post will be hidden so fast I’ll be asking myself whether or not I even posted it
But I would say to not presume what players do or don’t do. I rotate the camera all the time. I like testing zoom limits (believe it or not, as unpopular as the zoom might be). I like taking screenshots. I’m a part of that huge, often-cited casual playerbase that doesn’t play competitively. I’m sure there are others like me, but I’m definitely not going to say one way or another how many there are.
I do know that DoW III was criticised for being unable to rotate the camera. Among other things, sure, but that was absolutely a high-profile criticism. That’s the only anecdote I have.
Nah. I post what I believe in, nothing more than that. If I had a “child”, it’d be the modding tools, and I’m basically approaching those from the same perspective of any other user. The only special insight I have there is I’m familiar with modding the Essence engine itself, and have been for years. I’m just a fierce advocate of modding in general; always have been.
The game itself, being vague-on-purpose here, is ultimately up to the developers, and they absolutely know that. I take no issue with anything I might have had a hand in being criticised, because the Council itself is far from a single unified opinion on any one thing. Being open to debate, criticism and compromise is pretty core to the whole experience (as it has been for past NDA’d things I’ve done).
I’m a fan of anyone who’s stuck around 6+ months and wants to make the game better, for the record. But where folks differ is probably on the “making the game better” bit.
It seems you didn’t understand basic feedback, lemme rephrase, complexity was always there, where modern stuff suffers is lack of accessibility, making stuff intentionally hard to modify either due to devs not wanting you to mod certain things (example: zoom), or refusing to use more general style of encryption and instead prefering some proprietary encryption methods that are anti-modder by nature (idea being to have complete control on what can even be modded due to modders lacking specialized tools devs have), also the excessive pollution with DRM isn’t helping modern games
For example in aoe2 and 3 you can mod new civs in with enough effort but no amount of effort will let you do so for aoe4 due to devs almost undeniably intentionally leaving civ tech tree manager and another tool out of the content editor, this is what the issue with modern game modding is, devs wanting complete control on what can be done, to the point of 4 not letting you mod UI in proper manner (can’t change layout, can’t have different icons outside of custom games section etc.)
I understand just fine, thanks. The problem is different people have different problems. The original comment was “needing a PhD to use”. That’s nothing to do with any limitations modding. That’s purely accessibility, onboarding, UX, that kind of thing.
You have different concerns. Which are fine, I’ve got nothing wrong with the stuff you want to change, and I hope to see changes as well. However, you then start to invent conspiracy theories when the developers themselves have been open in pushing for changes as well. The Content Editor is a beta, and we’ll see where it will go.
For sure, there will be management decisions that affect the product. But there are some that will just be technical limitations at this stage of the product, and assuming either way doesn’t help. The same goes for talking about encryption - these things are often “proprietary” (I put that in quotes because all code is owned by the company regardless, what you mean is more “handwritten”) for performance reasons (especially for something rolled in-house that could be based on something written years ago).
I was just playing about with zooming in and out, and positioning villagers at the top and bottom of the screen with different zooms, to understand better how the camera works.
I think I now understand why it works the way it does.
What it’s doing is making the visible ground increase by an equal distance at the top and bottom of the screen. So if you zoom in and put villagers at the top and bottom of the screen, then zoom out and put other villagers at the top and bottom, then rotate around to the side, you’ll see that the separation of the villagers is the same.
If the camera simply moved back in the opposite direction to where it’s pointing, the visible ground would increase more at the top of the screen than the bottom. I don’t think this would necessarily be a problem, but I think that is why it works the way it does, to achieve an equal change in visible ground distance at the top and bottom.
There are benefits of both how Relic implemented that swiveling and a regular straight zoom-out. In fact, there are 3 approaches to zooming:
Zoom out physically moves back and tilts down (swiveling, i.e. if it continued you would have a straight top down view).
Zoom out physically moves back and up, without tilting (regular zoom out in most other RTS).
Zoom out changes focal length and doesn’t physically move (e.g. using a zoom lens instead of walking back).
It looks like Relic decided for #1 and it may be because of what you said about units remaining at a relatively similar distance or my hunch is that the further back you go, the more haze and geometry pop-in come into play (have you seen how foggy everything looks if you move your camera right on top of a mountain?). If you used #2 you would have a section at the top of the screen covering very far out. That’d be great for keeping track of things happening on-screen but would exacerbate the haze issue and probably performance too.
IKR? I wonder why all this is so concealed even though it’s obviously still taxing the GPU. Either rub the eye candy on our faces or remove it so it frees up resources. Don’t just choose the worst possible camera angle.
These are the randomly generated puddles that look just like featureless brown dirt from the default camera angle. I only noticed that those are puddles until a few days ago:
There are others who do not enjoy aspects of the game and merely pointing them out. if you enjoy the game, great. People who doesn’t can share their opinions on it.
All this conversation about the water effects and terrain reflections and such is probably worthy of its own post. Camera rotation, tilt angle and sun position all should be revised and changed.
These “hidden” graphical details are not easter eggs you’re supposed to find later. Showcasing what your game engine can do should be always front and center during the first few minutes of play, otherwise people just leave the game or complain.
I can’t get over how weird this is. Rotating and zooming in looks like a completely different (and better) game, graphics-wise.
i already reported this to a relic developer on the discord who was concerned if ACTUALLY reflections are working as they should, (they were working as they should but there are some problems with tree reflections , he said) i said to them how they can fix reflections as well . the whole convo is on the modding discord , on the crafted map channel
That’s good to know. You can point that (those) devs to this specific thread and the screenshots. To me it looks like reflections work but they need extremely narrow angles for them to be noticeable (it really takes some effort to pull up ship reflections). There are things like the moat around the English Imp Landmark defensive keep (White Tower I think) that does not show reflections/bloom/glare as it should.
The other problem as you can see with the snow up there is that tessellation (the 3D roughness) is not visible unless you angle the sun correctly. From the default angle, terrain looks completely flat. Another thing that most probably don’t even know the game has. Ground tessellation.
