Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta [Suggestion] Unrestricted camera rotation

I didn't have a whole lot of time this afternoon to play the alpha (only 10 minutes or so) but my general impression is enormously positive--the underlying functionality feels VERY polished (you know, little things, like cursor movement, menus, moving the characters around the world, combat, etc.)

Anyway, there was one thing that really annoyed me: the camera. Why is rotation limited to only 10 degrees or so to the left or to the right? Is the terrain only modeled from that perspective, or is it possible to allow for full camera rotation? If the terrain IS only modeled from the one angle, I think it'd be better not to have any camera rotation at all. It's the kind of thing where it's either all or nothing.

Indeed terrain is modeled to look good from those angles but not from elsewhere. I don't know if the slight camera rotation is extremely usefull or not but I could see it comming in handy if you can't really see something and would see it better from another angle ^^

It was mentioned few times before across many updates across few months - it is the way DOS designed. There won't be full camera rotation.

This is my understanding of why this can't be done:

The art in the game is isometric so that what you see on the screen is basically a flat image. Because of this, the guys at Larian were able to save time by only drawing one side of most of the objects seen in-game (I'd imagine that all background objects are like this, since they won't be moved or rotated), so that a much larger game-world can be created in a shorter time.

The downside of this approach is that full camera rotation is impossible since the objects don't have full 3D models (I can't think of any isometric games that are exceptions to this) - small rotations can be simulated by stretching things, but a full rotation is impossible and implementing this would pretty much mean making all the art in the game world again several times over, not to mention the engine work required to implement the 3D nature of the world...

Loxorz,

I'm not 100% sure if Sacred 2 had full camera rotation, but it had a very good camera that let you zoom, pan, and tilt. It was actually pretty nice in most instances.