Zooming

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Naborg wrote:

people will just whine for most silliest reasons... we dont need zoom out people and we already have zoom in game is almost fully polished! View distance in my opinion (and prolly about 75% beta players too) is great and there is no need for increasing it!!

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Chris wrote:

I haven't read all the posts in this thread, so please treat my reply only as a general response to the camera zoom issue - I'm sorry if I don't address specific comments that I may have missed.

There are performance concerns with allowing the camera to zoom out further. It's an "n squared" relationship between the zoom distance and the number of objects that the game has to render. We're already looking into ways to make the game faster on old machines, and zooming it out further would undermine this. In the last year we've zoomed it out by 5% and 10% (after putting a lot of work into improving performance so that we have room to do this).

We've balanced our ranged combat around the distance that players are able to attack. If we zoomed it out further, you would not be able to attack monsters that you see on the edge of the screen. There are also issues with the distance that objects are serialised to you from the server, so increasing zoom distance would increase bandwidth consumption and (marginally) server load.

I understand that players abusing strange aspect ratios are able to see further than others, and this is something we're looking for a good solution for.

I'd like to support further zoom distance in the future, but there are a whole lot of big things that will have to change before we can do that - ranging from performance to balance concerns. This is not something we're able to just change with a simple number.

We recently compared our zoom level to other popular Action RPGs. When taking into account field of view and relative run speed, it wasn't too dissimilar.