Great, 🙂

Is it supposed to replace the old external view or will it be a new additional view?

It's fully intended to be an additional view. That is the reason that WaveMotion is requesting an additional icon graphic.

😎 This will be very handy for all you movie makers out there!

bchimself has been requesting it on air in his Let's Play series.

Thanks for the great video, Brianetta!

That's a good question. From my own experiences from playing with the sidereal view, I found that there wasn't much reason to use the old external view at all. Of course, I'm probably biased in favor of the new view since it's my feature and I was also testing it. 😀

I'd recommend that we let both external views stay until we've had them for a while and we have a better idea of what they do and do not do. One big thing sidereal view has a hard time doing is combat; the camera doesn't move with you when you have to turn to face your opponent. Since I've heard of at least one Pioneer player who likes to fight with external view, that deficiency seems like a point in favor of keeping the old external view. To be safe, I've decided not to call to replace the external view and to ask for a new icon and translations for the sidereal view.

That looks awesome, and it really lets you see what the autopilot is up to. The final docking approach reminds me of BSG.

Something that might be cool is to have some visual representation of the autopilot waypointing, so I can see where it wants to go. Its not part of this patch; it would just help me make sense of it all 🙂

That is 'effing cool! We definitely need both views! 😎

Here's a thought, what about using F9-F12 to choose the 4 view modes directly? It would be useful during combat.

F9-F11 are already used to select between the scanner, equipment, and message displays on the console. Although, having a key for the message display is currently pointless.

If I have my way these keys will become redundant. Scanner will always be on, messages will be displayed in some kind of HUD overlay and equipment will be somewhere accessible. I can see F9-F12 being made into direct camera select buttons, with F1 remaining as switch back to worldview and cycle cameras.

I consider both views are needed, this kind of view can be seen in some flight simulators and have their different use, The vanilla external can be considered more aesthetic, cinemathographic, visual and screenshot related, and the last one more "navigational".

Greetings

Looks fantastic! Will be gettings fraps warmed up for when this is in. Personally I'd leave the original fixed cam in, you can just guarantee if its taken out you'll one day say "Hmm, I wish I could just fix the camera right now..."

I expect the sidereal cam to see more use for screenshots, due to the greater range of angles possible with it. It can rotate in place clockwise and counter-clockwise (with period and comma keys), which means that you can truly get any angle you want. For example, with the current external it's often not possible to set the camera parallel to the planet you're flying over so that the horizon goes side-to-side in the screen. The sidereal cam lets you do that easily.

Haha, you're definitely right. I'd originally thought of the new camera mode as a button you could press to lock and unlock the external camera to the ship rotation instead of an entirely separate camera mode. It turned out that implementing it like that was not entirely a fun task (as far as I could see) due to messiness in our UI code. Once that is cleaned up, we might consider merging the two external views.

How about F1 to select view mode followed by the keyboard 1-4 keys to select the type of view? As a implied before, being able to select front and back views with one key press would be very helpful in combat. Repeated presses of F1 would still cycle through the types of views.

Thanks for your suggestion. We've decided to implement just that, except we used shift+1 to 4 instead, since using the number keys created a conflict with existing UI functions (choosing autopilot options from the navigational menu).

Anyway, I'm pleased to announce that the Sidereal View mode has just been merged into our master branch just minutes ago. This means the feature will be included in Alpha 19, due out a week after this coming Friday. If you're impatient to try out the new camera before then, you can find it in the next nightly build, which we will announce from http://twitter.com/pioneerspacesim . Cheers!

Cool that sounds good. Its always been a minor annoyance cycling through camera modes 🙂

^^