Adding a way for "dynamic" camera
Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2023 12:40 am
I wanted to write mod that would allow to shift camera forward into direction that player is looking... However I've come to think that it might be impossible with current modding API. While maybe I could come up with some hacky idea of using cutscene, while forwarding movement keys somewhere, so that player character is moving, I don't think there's way to know where's player cursor in relation to game-window, or if it's near some border.
As to why I think that would be useful - 1) for QoL.. instead of zooming out (and looking at ant-sized entities), or going to map view (do you have area of interest in your radar range?), player could just look a little bit forward. I would often find it useful, when I'm looking at biters from far and I want to see their stats. If they're ant-sized it's hard to hover mouse over them and read stats, but if I'm close... They are.. Biting me... And player "build-in" radar has smaller range than just eyes. 2) for modding weapons with big range 3) there are some RPG-feel mods that could benefit from that. 4) I think I would spend less time on max zoom-out, which helps with immersion a little bit.
Player should just be able to "move" camera up to point where you can see tile that is 100 tiles away from player. Right now you can see in-game around 110 tiles to left/right and ~70 tiles to top/bottom which is un-even and (I guess) also dependent on resolution ratio... So over-all pretty arbitrary.
It could be either vanilla in-game toggle-option ("Settings->Graphics->dynamic camera [x] (default:false)", or something), or adding new "https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/def ... ontrollers", or just adding some other way of moving player-camera.
As to why I think that would be useful - 1) for QoL.. instead of zooming out (and looking at ant-sized entities), or going to map view (do you have area of interest in your radar range?), player could just look a little bit forward. I would often find it useful, when I'm looking at biters from far and I want to see their stats. If they're ant-sized it's hard to hover mouse over them and read stats, but if I'm close... They are.. Biting me... And player "build-in" radar has smaller range than just eyes. 2) for modding weapons with big range 3) there are some RPG-feel mods that could benefit from that. 4) I think I would spend less time on max zoom-out, which helps with immersion a little bit.
Player should just be able to "move" camera up to point where you can see tile that is 100 tiles away from player. Right now you can see in-game around 110 tiles to left/right and ~70 tiles to top/bottom which is un-even and (I guess) also dependent on resolution ratio... So over-all pretty arbitrary.
It could be either vanilla in-game toggle-option ("Settings->Graphics->dynamic camera [x] (default:false)", or something), or adding new "https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/def ... ontrollers", or just adding some other way of moving player-camera.