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The 11th Etherlords Developer Diary has gone online at Gamespy. Eugeny Ivanov and Oleg Glazounov sound off about the difficulties of creating automatic camera modes for Etherlords. Here's a snip:
Glazz: When I created my first set of cameras, I noticed that it produced a funny effect on those who tested it. After five minutes of play, everyone including myself started feeling dizzy. This was a surprise for me, although I soon realized why this happened. The fact is that combat character animations are rather short (we intentionally made them faster for the purpose of accelerating the combat), while the distances at which the camera had to fly were rather long.
As a result, the camera continuously flied back and forth at high speed and soon you could hardly understand were you are and what you are looking at. This is how we came to the idea of "cuts," which means that the camera partly skips its trajectory and shows a close-up of the event immediately. It's like in a movie, when you see a pregnant mother and the next moment -- oops, a baby is already 10 years old ;) Well, not quite. It's more like they usually shoot dialog: you see a face of one of the two people speaking, and then another one right away. The majority of the team was against this idea at first, because instead of a smooth camera movement we would have abrupt change of its focus. However, we could hardly think of a better solution to prevent the dizziness effect. |
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New Etherlords Dev Diary
