Originally posted by
clapfootadam
Also, what would be the challenges toward implementing an outright first-person view for cinematic purposes, in conjunction with what was in the blog
Great question.
1) One of the biggest issues is that we have no sky. Its just a flat colour, and it would seriously destroy the immersion to just have an overcast sky at all times of the day.
To implement a proper sky box is no simple feat, and its tied to the lighting of our game as that's how we calculate day-night cycles. So if we were to change that the whole look of the game would have to be updated. This is not a bad thing, just its a monumental task
2) the scale of props in the world are quite inconsistent. We have to fudge the sizes of things to make them read from the in game camera. A lot of the details on smaller objects are just non-existent or roughly 1-3 pixels in size. If you were looking through the eyes of the player any illusion of a cohesive/attractive game would quickly fall apart.
Hope that is a sufficient answer. In terms of how zoomed in the camera can go, I'd love to hear the arguments for bringing the camera in closer. Why would you want to have it that close?
To piggyback off of Adam here, I'll also add that it's that everything is designed to be top-down. The world design wouldn't look 'correct' from a first-person perspective. There's a couple of level design terms I like to use. One is called signposting (using objects to lead the player around the space), and the other is sightlines (designing terrain in a way so that from every position, the player can see somewhere important they can go.) Most open-world games use a combination of sightlines and 'breadcrumb trail' signposting to design their spaces in a way that feels easy to understand yet believable.
In Foxhole, we use a technique I refer to as lateral signposting. Because most of our game is viewed on a single plane, the world is designed so it makes sense from that perspective. Especially since sightlines aren't an asset we can take advantage of.
In addition to the issues Adam mentioned, buildings are also skewed in size to simply look better from top-down without being too tall/take up too much screen-space at any given time. Everything down to the water is designed to look a certain way from our camera.
In short, games are typically designed for a specific type of camera from the outset. Changing that isn't simple. Even a company like Rockstar, who added an FPS mode to GTA V, it took them a year and that's definitely not the way to play. Same with RDR 2. The First Person mode doesn't work nearly as well as the TPP the game was designed in.
You can see how strange the game looks whenever the camera breaks in Foxhole. :P
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