Camera smoothly follows bullet

[Tarvis]

Sometimes it can be jarring with the camera jumping around when a bullet leaves the screen, so what if the camera tracks it smoothly in the center of the screen (after it reaches the edge of the screen the first time) until it hits something? This would also help those few cases where it hits something in the corner and you can't see what it hit very well.

As an option, of course

[Qpoter]

Why has this gotten so little attention aside from 80 views? This feature is great, and wholly qualifies for OXC.

Using a high Fire Speed with the current camera system gets pretty nauseating. This would eliminate that pretty much entirely.

[moriarty]

I agree... but I'm no coder, so I don't know if this is possible in a reasonable way.

Would be really cool, though

[Qpoter]

I don't see how this would be difficult to implement from a technical standpoint.

On another note, I have a related suggestion that doesn't deserve its own thread.

When a bullet hits something, it makes a sudden stop at the point of impact to play the impact sound and animation. This sudden stop is not really a problem with Snap or Aimed shots, but tends to be annoying with Auto Shots since they are supposed to be 2 or more rounds fired in rapid succession. So my suggestion is for all the projectiles to be in flight at once (not for all of them to exit the weapon at once because then it would look like a shotgun), and have the sudden stop only occur on the last impact.

If that explanation made no sense, think how Xenonauts does Auto Shots.

[shinr]

Doesn't increasing the projectile speed, which also speeds up the "impact" animation, kinda solves this already? (In TFTD at least)

Then again, I prefer when the the projectiles go fast, and if you don't, then the above solution is not viable.

[moriarty]

On another note, I have a related suggestion that doesn't deserve its own thread.
[...] So my suggestion is for all the projectiles to be in flight at once (not for all of them to exit the weapon at once because then it would look like a shotgun), and have the sudden stop only occur on the last impact.

this has actually been discussed before... the main problem is that while your proposed mechanics do make sense, they actually alter the gameplay.
one example: in vanilla xcom, if an enemy is killed by the first or second shot, it drops to the ground, and the following shot(s) can hit whatever (or whoever) is behind the killed enemy.
if all bullets would fly simultaneously, they would probably all hit the enemy before it drops dead.

so yeah, it would make more sense, but it would also deviate from the original gameplay. so right now, it's probably way down on any kind of feature list, since the official goal of openxcom is to make the game as vanilla-xcom as possible (at least in terms of gameplay - the controls are already way better...).

[Qpoter]

I think it's worthy of being on the Advanced Options menu someday, but definitely not before 1.0.

[moriarty]

another unsolved problem: if your shots deviate very far in opposite directions (and in rookies, they often do, as we all know), which bullet should the camera follow?

a lot of this could be solved by zooming out, but I guess that is even harder in the kind of graphics engine we have

that's one of the things I liked in the new xcom2012: camera zooming out or changing viewpoint for shooting. looking down the barrel for sniper shots is brilliant.

[Piotr Karol Żółtowski (Piter432)]

that's one of the things I liked in the new xcom2012: camera zooming out or changing viewpoint for shooting.

I like this effect in new XCOM a lot

[Qpoter]

Well, we obviously won't get to have a look down the barrel for shots in OpenXcom... then again, maybe the FPS Screenshot feature might be useful for something after all...

I actually hadn't thought about deviation. I only get shots that terrible when a Rookie with 40 Firing Accuracy gets shot down to 2 Health. Maybe the camera would just follow the bullet that's most on target?