openmw.org

Got some people asking about this on the YouTube channel, and I'd like it as well.

The ability to hold down a button and move the first-person camera (the player's head) independently of the player's body.

In other words, the ability to look around (say side-to-side) while walking straight forwards.

This would be so comfortable for people like me that have buttons on the side of their mouse

Thoughts?

Saw the youtube comment and came here to chime in. The only way I've seen this done is with an oculus rift. That said, I haven't played many games so there may be some out there that do it some other way. (edit: went through the youtube comments. looks like tons of games do it) It seems like a feature that won't be used all that much but could be fun to have.

Because of the fact that the implementation of this feature (if it ever gets implemented) is 6-12+ months off, I think we should wait to see what happens with the oculus rift. Once the mainstream headsets come out I suspect we may get a huge influx of users asking for support. If that's the case, separation of the camera orientation from the player's orientation is a must-do so we could implement what that youtuber asked for pretty easily. On the other hand, if the rift becomes huge there may be very few people who would want that feature who don't also have a VR headset. It all depends on demand, which is really hard to guess this far in advance with a disruptive technology like VR on the horizon.

Having the camera moving independently from the movement of the player character isn't exactly a new idea. We may eventually implement something of this kind, but probably not any time soon.

You can do something like this in the game Shenmue (for the dreamcast). What other games do something like this?

In Gothic 1 & 2 for example you had a key that made you look backwards. There are a couple of other games that allow you to rotate the view by holding the right might button (IIRC Rift is one of them, but my memory is a bit vague on that).

I remember Duke 3d had buttons to look left/right.

I remember a couple games that did this. One was Jet Force Gemini for N64.

in DayZ you can turn your head in various directions by using the numpad keys, independent of your running direction.
in addition to that, you can hold a key (i think it was alt) to freely move your head with your mouse.

in fact, in MW you can kind of do something like that already in third-person view by holding your tab key, but of course without turning your character's head. it would be a fun to have a less immersion-breaking option though.

Hrawwaaaa wrote:in DayZ you can turn your head in various directions by using the numpad keys, independent of your running direction.
in addition to that, you can hold a key (i think it was alt) to freely move your head with your mouse.

iirc Shenmue allowed you to move your character with the dpad and use the analog stick to look around while you were running (while in 3rd person). I don't recall if there was an animation for the head moving though.

I thought this was going to be a request for a machinima assist tool for moving the camera away from the body.