I've been playing Wizard101 and Pirate101 for like 5 years of my life now...never questioned the annoyance of not being able to get a bird's eye view of anything. And I've never questioned the inability to look upward when sailing.

Why do our cameras have these limits? There're some amazing landscapes and architectures in this game that I will never get a good look at because of this. I want my camera to be able to point anywhere.

If you guys decide to leave it as is, could you at least add crow's nests to ships? A great addition to them would be a mounted telescope. Interacting with one let you see in its PoV and pan or zoom the camera around, regardless of its angle. A vignette around the lens of the telescope, maybe a few dents/scratches on it, would be awesome. Pressing X again toggles back to the normal 3rd-person view of your pirate.

...so...it began with a question, that's why it's in A Pirate's Life...cya...

Thunder Hawk on May 18, 2016 wrote:

You can do that. Just click in open space, hold, and move around your mouse. Have fun.

~ Hank

Also, you can right-click and hold to move the viewpoint... when you release, the camera view will stay where you left it until you left-click again. Great for sailing through dangerous areas when you need to be able to look over the top of your sails to see what's directly in front of you. Or for those times you want to just sit at anchor and enjoy the scenery.

Thunder Hawk on May 18, 2016 wrote:

You can do that. Just click in open space, hold, and move around your mouse. Have fun.

~ Hank

Dood

ok so imagine your pirate is up on some ledge somewhere. there's some stuff way down below. you can't look at it because you can't move your camera far enough down to see anything. annoys me.

As Thunder Hawk pointed out, you do have some ability to move the camera (I move mine in sailing mode all the time).

But to answer the question, "Why can't we put the camera anywhere we want, anytime we want?" the answer lies in how some of our environments are created.

Like the scenery on a stage-- which may be wonderfully painted on one side but look like bare canvas and wooden planks on the back-- video game artists very often don't complete the environment from certain viewing angles. This allows game developers to keep the size of the game down as much as possible, both in terms of the drive space needed as well as the amount of memory required to load each environment.

We developers have the ability (which we use to build and test worlds) to enter "fly mode" and zoom the camera anywhere we want, including up in the air and through solid spaces. It can be very disconcerting to see the environment from angles that the camera normally doesn't go! It's an out of body experience-- literally: the camera leaves our avatar behind and zooms around... we have another command we can use to "snap" our body back to the location of the camera.

If you've ever stood too close to a wall, and turned around, and suddenly found the camera inside the wall surrounded by black space and weird shapes and textures, you know a bit how this looks. Our QA team does a pretty good job of ferreting out all those trouble spots so we can fix the camera-- but they do occasionally slip through.

Ratbeard on May 19, 2016 wrote:

As Thunder Hawk pointed out, you do have some ability to move the camera (I move mine in sailing mode all the time).

But to answer the question, "Why can't we put the camera anywhere we want, anytime we want?" the answer lies in how some of our environments are created.

Like the scenery on a stage-- which may be wonderfully painted on one side but look like bare canvas and wooden planks on the back-- video game artists very often don't complete the environment from certain viewing angles. This allows game developers to keep the size of the game down as much as possible, both in terms of the drive space needed as well as the amount of memory required to load each environment.

We developers have the ability (which we use to build and test worlds) to enter "fly mode" and zoom the camera anywhere we want, including up in the air and through solid spaces. It can be very disconcerting to see the environment from angles that the camera normally doesn't go! It's an out of body experience-- literally: the camera leaves our avatar behind and zooms around... we have another command we can use to "snap" our body back to the location of the camera.

If you've ever stood too close to a wall, and turned around, and suddenly found the camera inside the wall surrounded by black space and weird shapes and textures, you know a bit how this looks. Our QA team does a pretty good job of ferreting out all those trouble spots so we can fix the camera-- but they do occasionally slip through.

I move mine in sailing mode all the time
I do as well, helps you look past the sails and watch out for flying enemies along with enemy ships sailing the skies

A great and thorough response and I would much rather restricted camera angles then out of place environment

I like to get good screenshots by backing up into something, turning around, and then moving my mouse around so it's like a first person view. Now I just need to think of a way to bribe Ratbeard into making a normal first-person view somehow... Hmm...