BETTER VISIBILITY, LET US ZOOM OUT FURTHER

This has been a pet peeve of mine since I started playing POE. Why is the screen so close to the character? Why not let us zoom out further? Diablo, Last Epoch and pretty much every ARPG allows the character to zoom out further than POE does. It is a style choice but why? Being able to see further creates a better experience and POE should foster a better experience by allowing us to see more on our screens.

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ginstgermain wrote:

This has been a pet peeve of mine since I started playing POE. Why is the screen so close to the character? Why not let us zoom out further? Diablo, Last Epoch and pretty much every ARPG allows the character to zoom out further than POE does. It is a style choice but why? Being able to see further creates a better experience and POE should foster a better experience by allowing us to see more on our screens.

It's not possible. The game is designed to this exactly zoom. But I admit, this is probably my biggest complaint about poe1.

They've only did the opposite by crudely "fixing" widescreen to limit visibility :)

Besides, their engine and level design leverage this exact zoom and camera angle as performance anchor. Of all things that will never happen in poe1, this will never happen the most.

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Echothesis wrote:

Besides, their engine and level design leverage this exact zoom and camera angle as performance anchor. Of all things that will never happen in poe1, this will never happen the most.

Actually I can say that's not true. No difference on my setup.

Why do you come here talking about a bad game (d4,d3) and an ok game (LE) and try to convince us if it would be better if poe was more like those games.

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Lonnie455Rich wrote:

Why do you come here talking about a bad game (d4,d3) and an ok game (LE) and try to convince us if it would be better if poe was more like those games.

A better question is, do any of those games ACTUALLY have a better zoom / view distance than PoE? Because D4 is definitely closer in and I can't tell the difference between PoE and D3

This point is almost completely irrelevant if you play a melee/slam build. Maybe the op should try that out.

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Dxt44 wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

Besides, their engine and level design leverage this exact zoom and camera angle as performance anchor. Of all things that will never happen in poe1, this will never happen the most.

Actually I can say that's not true. No difference on my setup.

You mean you've hacked zoom limits? :)

Every game with fixed camera is built around this camera to reduce costs. By level design I meant if you'd rotate camera by 180 degrees, you'd likely see lack of details or even no materials on the "back side" of landscape/building meshes that aren't available as hideout decorations.

As for performance, you can leverage the fact that most meshes are supposed be at approximately same distance from camera, as opposed to 3rd party character camera for example.

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Echothesis wrote:

Every game with fixed camera is built around this camera to reduce costs. By level design I meant if you'd rotate camera by 180 degrees, you'd likely see lack of details or even no materials on the "back side" of landscape/building meshes that aren't available as hideout decorations.

Dude, we are on PoE1 forum, talking about PoE1 zoom. What's your point?

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Echothesis wrote:

As for performance, you can leverage the fact that most meshes are supposed be at approximately same distance from camera, as opposed to 3rd party character camera for example.

Interesting. What optimization methods you can leverage in this situation?

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Dxt44 wrote:

Interesting. What optimization methods you can leverage in this situation?

First, with top down view and flat terrain it's easier to estimate how many things can be within FOV simultaneously. You don't need fog, far-clip planes, design levels with limited spaces and other tricks of free 1st person view.

Then there is less work on mesh/material LOD per 3D asset, you won't need to account how every monster will be seen far away, but still before far-clpping range.

Above helps even before getting into coding, less features required, less hassle.