CoroNaut
commented
5 hours ago I like the idea, but I dont think its for CDDA. If this combat view had an option to zoom and adjust to contain ALL enemies and allies in the view, every second that passes will adjust the entire view. I can see this becoming very disorienting very quickly. Even if we consider the case where you track just yourself and one other zombie, the view and zoom will adjust as you two approach each other every second. Once again, this can get disorienting quickly. Games that have this sort of feature often come with smooth camera movements for a reason. CDDA is an ascii/tiles game, so every movement of the camera will be in very large steps and be snappy.
How about if that zombie you track goes behind a building? The view will instantly snap to just the player, and then you would probably have to re-track that zombie if it comes back into view (after you zoom out from this combat view mode). If it came back into view and it's still tracked, your entire view will zoom out and adjust all of the sudden, leaving you to wonder what the heck happened.
Not to mention, the view adjusting to contain all your enemies will likely have the player near the edge of the view. If the character is only 10 tiles from the bottom of your screen, and you want to go south, the player can only see those 10 tiles. Sure you would know where your enemies are, but what if a new un-tracked zombie comes at you from the south? It will only be seen when its within 10 tiles (if you are even looking at the bottom of your screen).
Then there's the issue of long tasks that pass time 5/30/60 minutes at a time. combat view can't work unless a frame is drawn every second. if they were, and combat view was on, the players camera would be zipping and zooming as full in-game minutes pass every real-life second. Lockpicking in your example is a longer task, so not every frame for every second is drawn. So combat view would have to be disabled, or combat view would have to slow down the game to real-time to keep combat view working as intended.
Unfortunately, I can't come up with a good alternative for something like this. I can only suggest to play while more zoomed out if you really need to keep track of that zombie moving north out of view. Secondly, safe mode is very useful, you can set it up to alert you to zombies that come too close, within 15, 30, 45 tiles or whatever, rather than inside the entire reality bubble. There is also the safe mode manager that has settings for specific monsters that might be more or less dangerous.
ZhilkinSerg
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Not sure if this is already another FR, someone else might call it different names and such.
Imagine Danny Rivers, a thief and a scoundrel, likes to watch them zombies from afar while going about his raiding business on the brink of sundown. Moving the view west helps this a lot in the Lycra st. on the east side of Hillburry.
However, the Z's might move a bit north or so while he's lockpicking the s*** out of the metal door and the view might not capture their movement. Danny, focused on getting into the pawnshop, might lose track of some tangos while doing stuff.
Solution you would like.
ENTER THE MIGHTY POWER OF COMBAT VIEW
Select one or more enemies, and the view will shift accordingly, capturing all of them: Danny and zombie child and the feral predator eating a panicked person in the food truck. The view is focused on a tile in their midst. The calculation for the tile coordinates can include weight for the player character, that shifts the view slightly more towards them.
"Okay, Aidee, but is that really all?" you say. No! The combat view also has an option to zoom out and in automatically if needed to cover all targets! Two fascinating functionalities for a price of one!
Describe alternatives you have considered.
Danny already is a master of manual view moving and has excellent coordination with his powerful key bindings having view moves and zoom near each other, but that doesn't benefit Lee, a 19 years old player from Ontario, that only has one arm and moving view gets complicated for him. Lee even tried to play with mouse to see if that helped but it sucked for him because he's right handed and only has left arm.
Additional context
I just had to write it this way. Sorry.