Can’t just switch camera systems. The system is the way it is in order to accommodate a number of systems including an occlusion system that makes things on the other side of walls not render, and messing with the camera collision can push it through walls then you end up with half the world disappearing at random times. This is just one of the important systems that need the camera to behave a certain way. In the big picture, having the world drop away is higher on the priority list than making all the jumping challenges feel good. It would have been nice to have had a final camera when most of the JPs were being built, but the occlusion system didn’t get in until near the end of production, so we couldn’t have foreseen the crazy camera demands it would have. We can make little tweaks to the existing JPs, but that’s got it’s own can of worms associated with it, like introducing new bugs. As to a First Person Cam, I would LOVE it. But that’s ANOTHER big can of worms, as we would have to create a new system for how we reconcile the direction of the camera to the orientation of the player’s face as they do all sorts of crazy maneuvers like back-flips, cartwheels, 720 spins, etc. Not to mention dealing with how to render the weapons and attacks which were not created with that viewpoint in mind.
Dear Mr. Foreman,
I have found a way to solve the camera issues in jump puzzles. I just took one of my halloween tonics I had laying around, used it on my charr, and managed to finish it under a humanoid form because my camera wouldn’t kitten out around my player model anymore this way.
What I would suggest for jump puzzles is adding some sort of “totem” at the start of jump puzzles which transforms norn/charr/asura jumpers into humanoids (this form could have a speed boost skill in its build for player convenience).
Adding a totem like that shouldn’t take to much changing in the maps (I think), it wouldn’t require the camera system to be changed and you could still design a jump map without having to adapt it to Norn/Charr standards (which may cause trouble for Asura, Human & Sylvari players). So yeah, that’s the rundown of my idea. Thanks for your attention
Best regards,
Thomas De Corte (aka Dropkick Dex)