Camera Zoom Level - Why is it reduced?

Well, hopefully they'll read this post and just fix the issue. Shouldn't be that big of a problem...though the question is why they decided to reduce the maximum zoom-level at all. Gets me.

This is done intentionally to better represent scale and to help with texture memory use (i.e., prevent the game from crashing).

Well, i know that with the devs.exe, you have no limit with the zoom but since these is not yet include, best is to use notepad and look in the file called camera.setting abd try to modify some of the entry related to the zoom... don't know the one needed to be edited... like any modder, "test and trial" is the way to go... in the same file, you can control the behaviour of the camera "shake" during big explosion... and several other thing...

Game crashing aside, when I used to zoom in on a fighter and follow it around, it got a much grander scale of the ships and universe around me.

What is perhaps much more annoying and in my opinion game breaking, is that it is very hard to click on other ships for ability targets etc when zoomed in due to the 'invisible' bubble that surrounds them.

I don't see why zooming in close in Rebellion would have the effect of crashing the game when I used to zoom in close all the time in Trinity and never had a problem.

I agree with Zvarringly and boshimi that some of Sins of a Solar Empire's awesomeness is lost when you can no longer zoom in really close behind a fighter to see it fire at a ship or zoom in really close on an enemy ship to see it get blown up. Or zooming in really close to a pirate planet while my ships are fighting its defenders and imagining that I am on the planet and I am seeing my doom coming for me as my defenders are blown to pieces.

These are things that I genuinely enjoyed about Sins of a Solar Empire and I feel that they make Sins unique over other strategy games such as Command and Conquer or Battle for Middle Earth. To lose this freedom with the camera is to lose and integral and important part of Sins that will be sorely missed by me and the others on this post.

In Rebellion, I had hoped that Stardock would expand on Sins, not limit it with restrictions such as the camera zoom level. There is still time to change this before the final release, Stardock, and I hope that you choose to go back to Trinity standards or maybe even let us zoom in a little closer for instance to see the little detail on the Akkan capital ship.

To be fair to Yarlen and the SD crew,  they have added (and plan to add I'm sure) many items that push and expand the limits of Sins. It is regrettable however that the zoom has been limited.

Having used ships parked in front of other ships to 'artificially' get closer zoom levels on nearby ships (the ones I parked in front of) the textures do not look as crisp when viewing them so close on high resolutions. I do not see this being a problem however from an aesthetic standpoint.

Yarlen, does this have anything to do with the Titan and the fact that it is so large relative to the old style of zoom? Is there any way we could get the zoom closer without having major impacts on crashing?

I think that you speak of the main memory and the 2gb thing...

Well, can you explain how limiting the zoom can reduce the memory use... if i good remember, all texture are cached in main memory... and a .dds texture already contain all the lod level ( mipmapping ), using the full quality or the lower quality mipmap don't change anything about main memory use...

The only problem that i have ever see with the zoom is when you zoom in and out very fast, multiple time... it greatly slowdown the game... CPU lag problem but not a memory problem...

Okay, I was a bit harsh when I said that they are limiting Sins with Rebellion. They are not. If anything, Rebellion is building Sins to be bigger and better than ever.

I do feel that zoom should be something that I can decide and not the limits. If I want to zoom in close and see the not-as-crisp textures to get a more cinematic feel, that should be my choice and I hope I am not denied that in the final release of Rebellion. Even if it makes the game go slower. I don't recall Trinity ever crashing when I zoomed in close, however.

OMG this guy is really retarded.

No, he is a troll that Stardock moderator need to ban... 4 post made in various topic with only the same wall of capitalized repeated troll thing...

As i wrote before, with the dev.exe, you can dissable the zoom limit... and if the dev.exe is not included in the final release, you will have a modders revolution since it is our only tool for debug mod...

It has to do with mip-map levels on the textures. The top level uses a lot of RAM and is rarely seen unless you zoom very close in. By not loading this top level mip, we have been able to greatly reduce the amount of texture RAM needed (i.e., we went from ~1.8GB to ~1.5GB).  Some may point out that 1.8GB is still less than 2GB, which is true, but when you get that close to the barrier, it is very easy to surpass it and crash.

Zoomed out to the current levels, things still look good, and many things look even better due to the new shader changes, adding missing specular data and other things we've done.

With the .dev exe that you guys will eventually get, you can simply switch off zoom limitations if you so choose if you still want to get close in on things.

To get those "OMG that is so AWESOME!" screen shots.

Thank you for the answer Yarlen as that helps clarify the original mystery surrounding the zoom levels. Would it be possible to disable the top level of detail so that we could still zoom in but without increasing the ram load? I'm sure you have looked into this,  I guess at this point I am just curious to see if there is anything that could be done in the future to mitigate issue for those that are concerned about it.

For sure!!!

A 300Mb saving is significant, so for a large map that memory would be best used for something else than hi-res textures.

Could Sins conditionally load the top level mip?

Eg, if a saved game has less than X units, or for small/medium maps.

I was quite impressed to see the shadow of the tail-fins of a TEC fighter fall onto its wings.

Is it me, or does zoom sensitivity seem higher in Rebellion than Trinity?

I don't necessarily think that the actual zoom sensitivity is higher but since both gravity wells and their spacing with each other were scaled to some extent the apparent sensitivity does seem different as a result. I don't think it's a bad thing though and in fact I really like it. In creating custom maps (in Trinity / Diplo) you can yield a similar result by playing with the map scale.

I do not have the beta, but could somebody tell me how much exactly the zoom has been limited (like a figure like it used to be 100ft but now 200 or something like that)? I saw this post and think that if changed a lot it could be be annoying but if only at tiny bit of limitation is added from Trinity I suppose it does not matter as much.

Thank you, Yarlen, for responding. Why is there a RAM limit on games anyway? I'm sorry if it sounds like I do not know much, but I have seen a lot about RAM limits recently, for Skyrim and now Rebellion. Does this mean that a computer with, say, 10GB of RAM would run Rebellion no better than a computer with 5GB of RAM because there is a limit of 2GB? Is this only for the online portion of the game or for all aspects?

Last, I would like to ask about the .dev exe thing. What is this exactly? Does this mean something in the code of the game? What I would really like to know is how to turn off the zoom limit. Would it be simple or would it involve delving into the code of the game and finding it and removing it. Would this possibly mess up other aspects of the game?

Any help on understanding these concepts would be much appreciated.

The is two things we must take into consideration - there are still a large amount of people who still use 32-bit systems (when the game was released), and then there are other people who use 64-bit systems (Since this was quite some time ago, there were not many 64-bit systems, if any at all). So we can see that a 32-bit based game would work on a larger amount of computers.

32-bit systems are built in such a way that only a maximum amount of RAM can be used. 32-bit systems simply can not "raise" this limit - the reason is that the physical hardware that the computer is built upon was 32-bit. 64 bit systems, on the other hand, have a potential max of well over a terabyte for RAM. They do have physical limit as well for how much RAM can be used, but will will not be hitting that wall for quite some time with our current level of technology.

Also, 64-bit games can not run on 32 bit systems, but the reverse is true, thus, the reason for the 2GB wall on your 64-bit system. This is one of the reasons why Sins 2 will be designed around a 64-bit architecture, in order to increase the available amount of RAM, and by the time that it gets released, the vast majority of systems will be using 64-bit based architecture (a larger target and possibly more sales).

Thank you, Yottsu.

I now just have to find out whether the computer I play Sins on is 64-bit or 32-bit.

Would there be any way to take away the limit, like with the zoom restriction in the .dev exe thing?

Nope. None at all - this game is built on 32-bit architecture. You can not upgrade your hardware with software. 32-bit software can only be upgraded to 64-bit after a massive overhaul.

Finding out what your operating system is (please note that a 32-bit operating system can be on a 64-bit system, but not the other way around), it is a simple matter of going to control panel and then system, for Windows 7 that is.

I think it is fine not to be able to zoom in as far as before, but please remove that invisible bubble around structures that makes you zoom in on them when you did not intend to do so. It is annoying as hell, it was fine the way zooming worked in Trinity, why change it?

Thanks, Yarlen, i will use the dev.exe when the full game release. I love tracking a single fighter and see it fly everywhere.

Alternatively, would be be possible to have Zoom Limitations switched off in the Option menu? With a big warning that it might crash the game.

Well, the zoom limitation is the easy way and these with less memory optimization... but optimization is somehow a little early... first have a game running perfectly ( or almost perfectly )...

First, let look at a picture with mipmap :

left part is the basic one, right part is the various level of mipmap... if the actual zoon level limit to the use of the top mipmap picture ( right top picture ), it will be more efficient to restore the zoom like it was before, resample the original picture ( by example from 2048x2048 to 1024x1024 ) and save with mip mapping... this will lead to a reduction of 70% memory used for cache texture... quality onscreen will remain the same as with limited zoom with big texture...

Problem is that down sampling all the texture is not a easy job due to the huge amount of .dds texture in sins... since .dds is not a lossless compression, it is best to use original texture saved in a lossless format for resample...

BS... again someone who propagate myth !!!

At the hardware level, since the pentium Pro from 1995 ( http://download.intel.com/design/archives/processors/pro/docs/24269001.pdf, page 21, section bus description : 64 bit data, 36 bit address ), computer are 36 bits, good for a max of 64gb of physical memory... simply look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Microsoft_Windows , by example the physical limit of windows 2000 32 bit datacenter edition... cute, 32gb limit for physical ram on 32 bit hardware ( in fact 36 bit hardware )...

The thing who really limit your to 2gb application and 2gb OS on windows 32bit desktop OS is the Microsoft licensing system... more you pay, more ram you can use... it is the same with the recent win7 on 64 bit... win7 x64 home edition is limited to 8 gb, home premium x64 to 16gb, win7 pro/ent/ult x64 to 192gb... need to use windows x64 server version for reach the 2TB...

For info, photoshop was one of the first 32 bit application able to use 3gb ram on 32  desktop windows OS but using PAE and 3GB switch in the boot.ini from XP... long before Ironclad begin to work on sins...

Sure... some people have use PAE and 3GB along with a LAA sins exe... this can push the limit from 2gb to 3gb... personally, i play sins on Linux ( not rebellion since it is in Beta stage ) where the game limit is 4gb without modification and 2 thread ( need multiprocessor and hardware supported speculative multithreading, multicore don't work )... with some more tuning on linux ( not for people who have never compiled software with GCC ), i was able to push the game to use 11.5gb ram before crash...

Anyway, i don't recommend to use any trick during the beta testing since trick can introduce new bug who don't really exist in the game... best is to beta test Rebellion in the environnement intended by the devs... once Rebellion is released to the public, with all major bug corrected, you can always try something like at http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112556 ...same on a old 36bit hardware using a 32bit windows OS and if you have 4gb ram, it can lead the game to be able to use 3gb ( 3gb is for ALL application, best to shutdown unneeded application )... from 2 to 3, it is a 50% improvement... on 64 bit OS, you will have a full 4gb for sins alone...