I have a thread about holding weapons up in front of your own avatar's face in the first person mode, but that discussion has actually led me to wonder about first person mode more generally.

Why are the two modes actually even separate? Third person cameras have a variety of zoom levels, so why isn't the first person camera simply a zoomed in version of the third person? Have the highest zoom be a camera node that sits about an inch or two in front of the avatar's face. Then, when looking around, you would see the third person body and animation taking place below you and behind you.

Why.... is that so difficult?

It's actually easier to do that way. Devs choose not to do it that way to save resources.

how could it consume any more than third person does?

There are mods that do this in Oblivion, but there are bugs that come with it. For one, it can look very unnatural, and to be honest when you wield a weapon do you hold it up right in front of your face?

You Don't have to render a character model for the PC in first person mode. Oblivion, for example, renders the arms and part of the torso in first person mode but nothing else.

Right.

I'm saying that 3d person renders your whole body.
So if 1st person showed your whole body, why would it be any worse than what 3d person already does? It shouldn't.

Because it's a locked zoom that can't be accidentally changed. Lots of people find playing in 3rd person to be... awkward for RPGs.

I don't know about third person to first person. But just converting a first person animation to a third person view looks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3VnWYt9flM

Because animations have to be made...one for third person, and one for first person. It cannot be a zoomed in version of third person or you will not see your sword, sheild, bow, staff, ect.

Really..? Another thread on pretty much the exact same thing..?
It's different because it makes more sense, even though it might not be 100% realistic. Also, this is how FPS games have been done for..decades? This dates back to the days of the original DOOM.
It works. Why change it?

2d graphics worked.

You might mean that it made more sense, but I highly doubt that it still matters, at least from a performance perspective. And just arguing that something should be done because that's the way it's always been done... well that's just nonsense.

My point with this thread was to find out why it made sense. What does it give you that you can't get from a more realistic viewpoint? Obviously we function in real life just fine with realistic first person perspectives, so it must work just fine if you get it right.

It is exactly that. If you play the PC version, you can zoom in and out. The one thing is that when you zoom into the point of first person mode, it switches to where you can't see your body. That was most likely an effort to not show the terrible third person walking animations when you move in a strafing motion which was the only issue I had with the animations in Oblivion. The games weren't made for third person in the past, thus is why first person didn't show the body because the third person view of your character wasn't good. I'm sure you can see your body this time around with improved third person.

I just did the TLC (?) test in Oblivion (the command to separate camera from body) to test this. When you do, you get third person mode from the eyes of the character (more or less) rather than the 1st person fake view. Now do an attack swing with a sword. The swing is huge and probably correct (and looks great in 3rd person), but in 1st person I get like 2 frames where I actually see the sword, the rest happens outside of the view.

Frames are within reasonable speeds, but it seems the animation system isn't able to produce enough "animation keyframes", so I get 5 frames of one animation frame and 5 frames of the next but nothing in between. That's the *feeling* I get when I see it in action.

If you see the 1st person however, you still get the same number of animation keyframes, but their difference are way way smaller so everything actually appear smooth.

This probably may appear smoother on a better CPU (not GPU) than mine. As much as I love FBA in other games (like Arma2, which has less "work" in its "gun anims" compared to "sword work"), I think it would be a bad idea to shut out low specs machines completely (and I'm well inside the Oblivion spec now, but I wasn't when it was fresh).

It shouldn't though, really. This is 2011 now, it's about time we abandoned the stupid and dated "floating camera with arms" thing.

But I think part of the issue here is that, at least in Morrowind and Oblivion, characters actually used different animations in first person and third person, This might be to ensure that the animations look good from both perspectives though since I've never tried any of the mods to let you use third person animations in first person, I wouldn't know if that's the case, though it would make sense to me if it is. Since in third person, you're seeing things from behind your character's back, so you might need larger motions to ensure that you can clearly see what your character is doing compared to what you'd need in first person. Still, you wouldn't really need to use the same animations in both first and third person to be able to see you're body in first person, as long as the body model is visible from both perspectives.



Because just because something works doesn't mean you shouldn't try to give us something better, or at least different, if game developers thought that way, we'd still be playing Pong. Certainly, we wouldn't have the Elder Scrolls or even RPGs to play.

um

are you for real bro

like have you played Mount & Blade or ARMA? or the first-person mod for GTA4? do you know how clunky movement is? how hard it is to do anything at all? [censored] in ARMA trying to climb a set of stairs is a simulation in itself.

first-person games tend to avoid showing bodies because it makes it a lot easier to track which part of your body is visible to the AI if there are minimal parts to your body. generally if your head is hidden enough, they can't see you. when you get into body awareness you have things like elbows and legs sticking out of cover and if the AI doesn't respond to it then people will call it [censored] AI and if you can't get your arms and legs behind cover properly then people will call it horrible controls.

there's also the matter of legs in first-person - like Crysis, for instance - always looking like you're sliding on ice every time you turn around or move or do anything. they also don't respond to FOV changes realistically, so if you zoom in with your gun or binoculars or something your legs are just as big as they were unzoomed.

in order for body awareness to work well in a game that allows both first- and third-person perspectives, both first- and third-person perspectives need to receive an equal amount of work.

just popping a camera in front of the character's face and calling it a day is like buying a chair to sit on while you eat dinner, and then using that chair as your dinner table while you sit on the floor.

All respect but I'm not sure how/why you'd propose to replace the "floating camera with arms". Computer games have limited FOV.

Buy us all 2 extra monitors and gfx cards with eyefinity support BGS!

While I think it would be neat, this kind of tech being in a good looking, usable form is a decade or so away. Once we can get virtual reality right than we can get this looking good.

This. In real life you don't need to see your melee weapons to time your attacks well as you feel your hands and how the weapons swing. In a FPS game you need to see your weapons all the time in your view. The best way to do this is to have different 1st and 3rd person animations.