New Camera movement option; rotate in third-person without ShiftLock or RMB

Feature Requests Studio Features
#1

While I was doing the Accelerator program at ROBLOX this summer, my game got playtested quite often by the kids who came through for tours.

Something I noticed is that a lot of them went into first person because they didn’t know/didn’t like ROBLOX’s rightclick-to-rotate camera, and some of them just had no clue ShiftLock existed. Some of them remained in third-person but NEVER rotated the camera, except for a few who used the arrow keys. ROBLOX’s default camera works nicely for some games (namely, the ones that benefit from having a free mouse outside of UI) but it’s a nightmare for the common player.

Also there’s a lot of Mac users and, boy lemme tell ya, they don’t usually have right-click.

I think we could use a new StarterPlayer setting that would free up the camera in third-person, ShiftLock style, but without the character-facing-lock or custom reticle that it has. Basically lining up the mouse controls with, say, the gamepad’s right stick control over the camera. Lots of devs, both old & new, would benefit from this option, and lots of games would feel more user-friendly in a heartbeat.

“Just edit the CameraScripts!” Not a great alternative; I’ve been burned in the past by this due to the default scripts updating and breaking stuff. It just makes sense to have as a default option, and it’s what basically every player is used to when it comes to PC games. Plus that thing’s like 5,000 lines of code and nearly impossible to figure out or make changes to without having it unravel horribly. Hoo nelly.

18 Likes
#2

Edit: Oh I see, basically what the default is right now, except right mouse button is always “held down”. Support.

Will it lock the mouse (unless a gui has Modal true)? If it’s unlocked it might get awkward to control.

1 Like
#3

[quote=“Maelstronomer, post:2, topic:30632, full:true”]Will it lock the mouse (unless a gui has Modal true)? If it’s unlocked it might get awkward to control.
[/quote]

Yeah, that’s the idea. Basically how third-person works in all PC games.

#4

I’ve always preferred this type of 3rd person camera, it feels so much more natural compared to holding down a key to rotate the camera. I think it’d be a great addition, especially for new users who aren’t familiar with/used to ROBLOX’s control scheme.

A simple solution is to have a hotkey for mouse lock/unlock.

I scripted a camera just like this a while back for my RPG project, take a gander if you’d like an example:

4 Likes