■Regarding automatically returning the camera to a fixed distance
We've finished implementing the feature where the camera will automatically return to a fixed distance point for the legacy control camera setting on the development version of the game. Currently, the QA team has started the debugging process, and though I am sure I will get some flack for releasing this so late, it will be in patch 2.1.
As there are major differences in programming between the live/official version of the game and the development version, implementing this before patch 2.1 would be difficult due to the time required to perform the various checks and debugging to ensure stability on both versions. We really hate not being able to release things that are working right away, but we appreciate your understanding.
I feel like we had this in FFXI as I don't remember struggling with returning the camera. Am I remembering this correctly?
That's correct. The current legacy camera was transplanted from the FFXI camera program and it functions the same. * We transplanted this feature because of tester feedback from Beta Test phase 3.
The setting that will automatically return the camera, which will be implemented in patch 2.1, will be added as an option for the original camera feature. We'll be providing this in a way that will meet the requests of all of the testers who were asking for the same camera settings as FFXI.
The reason why this was not a concern for XI is due to the fact that from a battle design perspective, there wasn't as much of a necessity to zoom out with the camera, the areas where characters could move were wider on average, and characters did not move as fast as they do in XIV.
As the battle pace and game design for both XI and XIV are different, we adjusted the camera rotation controls to be fast for XIV, but we are reflecting back on the fact that the adjustments we made were a bit lacking.
■Transparency masking process
If we implemented a system to mask objects that are obstructing the view, all of these problems would be solved, however, this would require processes to determine what is obstructing and also increase the groups of transparent data models as well.
To avoid burdens from numerous processes and in order to prevent quickly consuming memory with large amounts of data from the field it would be difficult to increase applying transparent masking on specific individual objects. Due to this reason, we don't have a practical solution that we could currently propose as a candidate, so we don't have any plans to implement that change.