One of the cool features of Supreme Commander's 'strategic zoom' is, that instead of zooming to the map location that previously was in the center of your screen, you are directly brought to where you pointed your mouse cursor at. As we think this is a very nifty feature, we adopted this now for Fleet Operations. Should be a lot more convienient than to zoom first and then scroll where you wanted to look at.
And now for a short demonstration video of the new 'hot spot' zooming...
[youtube]G3evmX5M1vU[/youtube]
Hot spot zooming
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Written by
DOCa Cola
If you have played the RTS game Supreme Commander which was released in 2007, you for sure have noticed that it featured a at the time new of it's kind method to allow navigation on the map dubbed "strategic zoom". It allows to zoom out very far that your battlefield is only being shown as minimap representation of the map and get back to a certain point of interest quickly. While we don't think such a feature exactly would fit a more 'classic' RTS game like Star Trek Armada which usually have a lot less units on the battlefield at a time compared to Supreme Commander it still can serve as inspiration to improve the now one decade old usability of the game we are developing for.