Action Camera

[hartleecub]

It's interesting to use from time to time but I never know when the view will become active when I click the icon. When the icon is lit, what triggers the camera? I've seen it activate on takeoff roll and pushback but can't see a definitive sequence to know when it'll happen. Is there a way to always have it come on at any moment?  What are the usage requirements and constraints?

[Avwriter]

I agree that this is one of the most bizarre an annoying aspects of the sim.  When the camera is active, it will activate in a semi-random manner.  The camera seems to be triggered by phases of activity by the aircraft, including aircraft pulling into and out of the gate, takeoff, and landing, as well as the occasional views of aircraft during taxi.  This can be anticipated to a limed degree if there are not too many aircraft moving around.  However, when the airport is busy, it becomes impossible to the point that I often cannot even determine what aircraft I am looking at unless there is an obvious landmark within the view.  Moreover, if I forget to turn it off, the camera will often snap to some irrelevant view right at the moment when I am urgently trying to view something else.  Thus I use the feature only occasionally, in hopes of getting a better view of something, or if I am momentarily bored, but most of the time I leave it off.  Based on Victor's statements, the developers seem to worry a lot about us accidentally getting a view of parts of the airport that were not designed to be seen close up, and that might not be as pretty as the areas closer to the tower.  Frankly, I wish that they would treat us more like grownups and let us decide what we do and do not want to see.  Granted, IRL, tower controllers at many airports often cannot see certain areas of the airport, although this can be and often is resolved in the modern world by the use of remote cameras.   The biggest single failure of this mode, however, is that when a ground incursion occurs, the camera does not automatically snap to it.  That would actually be very useful, as usually the incident happens so far away from the tower that I cannot clearly see what happened, and even with the ADIRS zoomed in all the way, I usually just see an indistinguishable clump of yellow planes and have a hard time figuring out which one I need to delete to resolve the issue.  If an incursion would snap to a close up view, this might be a little more clear.

 

One interesting note is that it appears that the airport designer does have some control over how this camera works, and the action views at KLGA are handled a bit differently than those at all of the official FeelThere airports.

 

Andrew

[VenturaGuy101]

It would be nice to have a camera target the currently targeted aircraft so we can capture any odd behavior such as bad pushback or stuck planes that you cannot see clearly from the tower but you know is not right on the ADIRS but the action camera will not activate.

[Pdubya]

I end up rarely using it- partly due to the spastic behavior it has. I do like the end results, but the abrupt camera zoom-aways are rather immersion and concentration breaking in my opinion. Perhaps a slightly different implementation Vic?

[FeelThere_Vic]

Folks,

At the beginning of the development we had an idea for camera movements but when we begun playing the sim with that we decided to pull it because it was so annoying (a typical case when something looks just right on paper but doesn't work in real life). That's when we decided to pull this action camera at all from the game. However some testers thought let's leave it with a switch that a user can turn ON/OFF within the game so we did and we adjusted the action camera a bit further allowing (just like you noticed) the airport designer decide where can the camera be triggered.

As much as I hate saying that but I always want to be honest with you; probably we should've pulled this action camera from this release. For sure the next version will have a totally new camera system written from scratch. Unfortunately we can't change this one to this new idea as it would require to rebuild pretty much everything within the game. 

We received so many requests for European airports and we always said no because of the satellite licensing issue (I saw some Youtubber said we pull the data from Google, it made me smile as we wish it would be just like that :) ). However recently we begun testing something that would possibly allow us to make worldwide airports. If the theory works then you will see better ground quality in the upcoming airports (maybe around the 4th from now) and if it works we may streamline that technology into the new version of the game that would allow us for much nicer camera solutions.

Thank you

Vic

[Avwriter]

Thank you Vic for offering this insight.  As always, it helps make sense of things from our end.  Its also great to hear that there is hope for worldwide airports.  I am glad that you did not pull the camera entirely, as there are occasional times that it comes in handy.  I just hope that for the next version that the user will have more control of it.   Regards,

 

Andrew

[VenturaGuy101]

Vic thanks for this information.  It really helps with the community with some of the development insight.