Camera Speed Control in 1.6

Are you talking about how you move the camera or the speed of the camera when you execute a fly to command?

If I open the File menu - or any menu - while the navigator is flying live with the gamepad - he loses all control.  This means I would have to stop movement, go into the File menu to change the camera speed, and then resume movement.  That's not acceptable - we used to be able to adjust camera speed manually on the fly as we were moving...which is critical to how we have planned our shows and our presentation style.
There must be a better way...

I'm talking about how quickly the camera moves.  We do all of our presentations "live" and using a gamepad with two joysticks - everything we do is manual, where one of us "flies" the entire show, and the other operates objects and properties while narrating live.  So precise camera control - especially the speed at which it moves via the gamepad joystick - is extremely important.  I used to vary it manually while my partner was "flying" so he could ease into certain views at a 0.25 speed, and then if we needed to zip somewhere quickly, I'd crank it up to 3 or 4.  We would rarely if ever fly around on 1.

Additionally, when getting in close to the surface, especially using the new Surface navigation mode, any tiny little movement sends us flying across the surface at a high speed....we used to be able to slowly drop into an area and explore it, fly to pano-bubble and drop in to that and look around....slowly lift off from there and turn on a high texture WMS layer and actually navigate slowly between mountain ranges, for instance...  But now it zips around so quickly, we can't do any of that kind of navigation for any of our shows.  Very disappointing.

Plus...getting anywhere remotely close to the surface of the planet, even in "Surface" mode, means we constantly crash THROUGH the planet...and get those weird artifacts.  Why isn't there a built-in barrier so the camera doesn't fly through planets?  Our presentations rely heavily on being able to localize an audience experience to their own backyard, and connect that to the rest of the cosmos...  Not being able to get in close to the planet and see the Landsat data for local imagery is extremely detrimental to our ability to present in the way we have for a few years now.

The speed at which the camera moves under manual control is critical to how we present all of our shows, and always has been.  It would be great to find a way to manually control the speed like we used to - easily - and live during a show (not in a preset configuration file prior to launching).

So:
1) How do we adjust camera speed manually while flying during a show?
2) How do we get extremely close to the planet (in the case of Earth, down into mountain ranges and valleys - that close; in the case of Mars, down into the depths of Valles Marineris) either in Orbit or Surface modes and SLOWLY move around and NOT crash through the surface of the planet?

Thanks!

I apologize for not answering your question to your satisfaction. 

1) I believe you are referring to the camera speed slider on the camera window from 1.5. Please correct me if I am wrong. This slider was removed when we upgraded to 1.6 due to the way we changed the camera controls. It can, however be replicated easily with a custom event with the following syntax

camera.speed <multiplier> 

the multiplier can be anywhere from 0 to 100+ but I would keep it around 4-5. you can read more about camera control in the runtime syntax help

All you need to do is make a few custom events that you can easily click on to change when you need it. This also makes it so that in 2.0 you can add this ability on the panel control from a portable device such as an iPad.

2) This would also relate to the previous answer if you bring the camera speed multiplier down to a factor of .1 or .05 when in either mode (or even lower, please experiment to see what works best for your flying style) but if you are getting very close it is best to use orbit to get to where you want to be and then changing to surface mode to navigate a bit easier and with more precision. If you are getting stopped from moving close to the earth in ORBIT MODE then you would need to change the camera radius of the earth by typing earth.cameraradius 638.5. But again, it would be recommended to do close flying in Surface mode as the heighmaps associated with WMS layers can cause you to go through the surface very easily in Orbit mode.

No worries - thank you for getting to more detail on this.

1) Can you give me a better translation of how that custom event would relate to how we are used to using the Camera Speed slider from 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5?  It typically defaulted to "1", and we would usually take it down to 0.25 for slow and steady flying close to a surface of a planet (when flying through valleys of mountain ranges, for example).  We would take it up to "3" for very quickly zooming all the way out to, say, the CMB.  How does the 0-100 multiplier translate to the sale of 0.00 up through 0.25 and all the way to 4 on the original scale of "speed" from the slider?

2) Regarding the collision/crashing through planets - has something changed regarding height-maps?  In the new Surface mode, which we're really trying to get used to and make work right as you say, we can't get close enough to see detail in the landscape without falling through the planet...but before, in 1.3-1.5 we could easily get right down on the surface and ease through the terrain.  When using something like the feed from Landsat 8 (I think it's the SCISS Tileset server that offers up the pan sharpened global mosaic.....is that the current Landsat 8 feed?), is there not enough or too much texture/height that we're falling through the planet even when we're so high above the landscape we can't get into the real details of the terrain?  I'm confused as to where the problem is coming from and how to get around it...

3) You bring up a good point about triggering from the iPad......is there a tutorial on how to get those buttons to show up right in a browser on the iPad?  It's not clear how to do that...
Version 2 coming soon?

Thanks again!
Joe

Hi Joe,

1) It should translate exactly as the camera.speed numeral is in fact a multiplier and that is exactly what the slider did. So if you used to take it down to 0.25 you just  make a Custom Event that is 

camera.speed 0.25

to take it up to 3 

camera.speed 3.0

2) This sounds like it might just be an issue with the levels of your WMSTexture Levels and Texture Resolution. in Surface mode you do get close enough to bring up even the highest resolution of maps, but if they are not being loaded in the WMS layer than. Under your Layer properites in the GeoScope tool I would change Texture Resolution to 1024 and Texture levels to 13-14. If you go to 15 you could have some stability issues on certain WMS servers.



3) There isn't currently a very good tutorial to do this in 1.6 as is was basically a bunch of JAVA script that requires a decent knowledge of JAVA in order to get to work correctly and there is no tutorial. 

 In 2.0 the need to code has been completely removed and 2.0 should be coming in late February of 2015 so it won't be too long now!

Great - Thank you very much!