marine commander view

Feha

Well, I remembered I heard somewhere about the commander view not being very good with maps that used room under a room. Then I also remembered a fun game named zombie master.

This made me figure out this nice idea. If the commander view is bad in such locations, you could add a free-look toggle mode, like the zombie master has (press a button and you toggle between noclip ctrls and rts ctrls). Still would work best without rooms under rooms, but it would also make changing height very easy to do as a human.

Not sure how compatible such an idea would be with the ns2 commander view, but hopefully it would work.

SentrySteve

The commander in zombie master basically just spawned waves of enemies and watched as the action unfolded. Allowing a free roam in that kind of game was a very smart choice. In NS2, the commander may be doing many tasks at once and free roaming around the map may make placing objects more difficult, soak up valuable time, and may make commanding even more intimidating. For example, say you're in top down view on one side of the map and a marine, on the other side of the map, needs a medpack. You click over, enter free roam, try to find him under whatever, drop the med, then go back to topdown. I think that adds another complicated layer to NS2's style of commanding as most people in NS1 couldn't handle 2D commanding.

I just get the feeling that allowing for 3D commanding would give something unnecessary for new comms to worry about and would be ignored by the good comms. Although it does impose some limitations, I'd prefer the map makers to not have overlapping layers.

Feha

Well, as I said, it still works best on maps that is not 3d
I know this because I played zm, and even though most mappers made you able to acces stuff even when outside the actual map (nodraw or whatever materials).
But I also highly doubt there wont be times you wish you could press a button, change height/angle, press same button and then do whatever you need to do.

Almost any map I ever played got something that could have been better, and when the map need to be made to be good both for fps and rts, its hard to not have any flaws that could be exploited/feel annoying.

spellman23

Word of God from the devs is a fixed top-down view/camera position.

However, it will have variable height.

<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/wiki/index.php/What's_new_from_NS1" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/wiki/inde...;s_new_from_NS1</a>

SgtBarlow

Hopefuly besides that variable hight control by the game the commader view can be zoomed in and out by the player within restrictions of the set hights by the tech points.
Meaning, I have some good stuff going on in my map on the ceiling, 90% of it is clear view but there are some places where zooming in would be required for a better view.