Hey wanted to provide an update on this, while the changes haven't been stuck in the latest release, these were my first moves on our new update cycle, camera, PDA, and lights have been our top priority the past few days and actually went with your suggestions for most. I did want to clarify some of your ideas, when you say gallery for the costumes, do you mean like a grid with previews? Also, as far as camera zoom goes, the only smooth analog zoom mechanism for pc is the mouse scroll wheel, which is presently bound to swapping weapons, would you advocate to a keybinding for weapon swapping to free up the wheel?
Thanks for following up, Yes A grid to display the costumes would be for the best. Being able to click on a specific costume would be more user friendly than pressing a button repeatedly. Probably should limit it to 20 or so costumes per page to avoid a small UI.
Currently the camera system works without major issue, but at low zoom it feels centered awkwardly, and a little higher will have you scraping the ceiling. If smooth zoom would cause issues for players on controller then it's probably fine to leave it as is. but if most people play on mouse and keyboard I think it would be worth implementing.
Overall I love the changes in the latest version. It's a big upgrade from when I wrote my initial review.
Hey that's all great to hear! I totally agree with the grid, the issue comes from having to render them, the player model is pretty conservative on poly count but not to the point we could render it 10-20 times on screen at once without a noticeable performance load. We could do thumbnails, but with 130+ costumes, it's going to need a full pipeline for a pretty lackluster solution. So I'm currently toying with a reduced player model, something super low poly to allow for a live grid, but close enough to get the point across.
As for the camera, I think I may have written the most satisfying solution I've yet had in this project, a super slow reaction speed, so it clips through objects, but I've added a peephole dither to our major materials, so it gives it a very stylized and smooth feel that keeps the player framed consistently through collisions without jerking the camera. It's still being tuned, but shoot me a message on discord and I'll shoot you a one off build if you want to check it out!