Am I the only one that finds it weird, and useless, to have an external camera view that hangs off the rear port [left] side when the ship's accelerating? I bet you almost never use external views because they are useless.

I wish we had an external camera that we could rotate to the position we prefer, and leave it there. It'be nice to have a second external camera view that's always fixed above and behind your ship, and a third that's always above [or below?], but in front, pointing backwards, so you can glance at what's coming up behind you.

Seems a shame to have a kind of flight sim game that doesn't even try to offer the kinds of external views common to every single successful example of a flight sim. Especially considering how cool the visuals could be in this game [if only we actually saw our ships from the outside, now & then].

Please, please consider it.

Yes this would be another great way to show off the game. Seeing the ship from behind is always prettier, unfortunately, as it is now, it's a view that's only good for showing off.

I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to give us an alternate view where all the HUD components show, but we have the camera offset behind our ship.

If it's that simple to do, do it!!

I just got a new computer that can run VO at maximum settings with 6x antialiasing at 200fps and VO is an eyegasm. I love seeing the ship from behind with those graphics. Please give us a usefull 3rd person view!

cheers

The external views were originally intended for screenshots. Not for actual flight.

I enjoy the dropcam view... Press F9 once, then F10 once.

another game i play has this:

camera_custom_pitch numbergoeshere
camera_custom_back numbergoeshere
camera_custom_rise numbergoeshere

and what it did was make it so you could set any camera.

Back is how far back from the ship it is.. (devs would have to scale it out themselfs)

Rise is how high it is from the ship.

Pitch is how its angled from where youve set it to already..like looking a little down or up from where you are.. etc

They did it from an ingame console where you enter it so we could just /camera_custom_rise 2 /camera_custom_back 3.1 /camera_custom_pitch -.5 or something like this (this is my setting in the other game ;))

EDIT: Make sure this custom setting has camera_custom_behaviour
you set this to 1 or 2. What 1 does is lock it in position behind your ship where you have it set. and 2 makes it rotate slowly along with you as you turn like a smart cam..

Possibly something bindable like the 'i' zoom, but user-defined. Definitely.

my guess is the external view stuff is more complicated than it seems and they are afraid to touch it without breaking something or having it not work properly.

This is actually one of the easier things to code without messing anything else up. Completley seperate from most other stuff. There are 2 heavily difined branches of code right now that are both of the external veiws. They are easy to tell which are which.. They delete thoughs couple of lines and replace them with the new code which i suggested. It is fairly easy, easy enough for me to do it if this was open-source or i had cvs access...

Thanks to those of you who agree with me. I saw, in this thread, ...

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/8980

... that a1kon agreed it was a good idea, in general, and had planned to implement it. Maybe if more of us wanted to see an external view like this, the developers would implement it. It'd be nice to see -- that's my opinion.

I'll take that as a "no"...