"Freeze frame" - Pause game without locking camera view

[Smidge204]

So I've been working on a Kerbal-Clasically huge rocket, which has led to some truly spectacular failu^H^H^H^H^H educational opportunities. But at ~3FPS it's awfully hard to swing the camera around fast enough to see exactly what part of my rocket is trying to get to orbit without the rest of the craft.

So I can hit Escape to pause the game, but I can't control the camera to pan around. Is there any technical reason why we couldn't have a "Freeze" button that pauses the game but still keeps the camera controls active? Like time warp only with warp factor 0? Not only would it help diagnose failures, but I'm sure it would allow for capturing some really epic screenshots too.

=Smidge=

[Guest]

That would be nice. Also, I think that maneuver planning should be enabled in that mode. IRL, that sort of thing is done long before mission takes off, but since KSP doesn't allow that, I'd settle for a pause mode with that functionality.

[LethalDose]

I like this idea. It'd be a good way to pause, get juuuuuuust the right screen shot, or simply take a close look at the craft you built without time slipping by.

I disagree with the first response of allowing node placement during the pause, though. There's plenty of time before practically all nodes to appropriately set up the node, OR things have to happen quickly and you should have to act fast. Planning nodes ahead of time should be allowed, but the solution should be allow players save nodes for each flight.

[Sirrobert]

Hell yes!

This would be perfect for screenshots

[tetryds]

what about also add a slowmotion mode?

To make it go like 0.5x speed.

That would be good for recording launches or docking.

Or for checking out which part is clipping the ship and causing phantom forces whilist the ship gets eaten by The Kranken.

[Deadweasel]

I wonder if the complete freeze thing on pause has to do with Unity itself. It may not be possible to have movement of any sort when the game is paused, because Unity acts as a "player" (as in media player) when running, and moving the camera is a kind of scene animation/navigation that's not possible while the player is halted.

Just a thought, no idea how accurate it may be.

[regex]

I wonder if the complete freeze thing on pause has to do with Unity itself. It may not be possible to have movement of any sort when the game is paused, because Unity acts as a "player" (as in media player) when running, and moving the camera is a kind of scene animation/navigation that's not possible while the player is halted.

Just a thought, no idea how accurate it may be.

It's not accurate at all. Rendering can happen without physics calculation, otherwise your GUI and the ship behind it wouldn't show while the game was paused. IIRC you can also zoom in and out by rolling the mouse wheel while the game is paused in the map view, but I'd have to confirm it.

[Deadweasel]

It's not accurate at all. Rendering can happen without physics calculation, otherwise your GUI and the ship behind it wouldn't show while the game was paused. IIRC you can also zoom in and out by rolling the mouse wheel while the game is paused in the map view, but I'd have to confirm it.

No, zoom doesn't work while paused (at least not for me on .22).

Also, yes, of course rendering happens without physics calculations, or you wouldn't be able to access the pause menu while paused. However, I think you're confusing the idea of "rendering" with actual animation, which is what camera movement is, in a sense, and which itself requires additional rendering work. I know at least this much is true based on experiments with frame buffer captures that result in geometry that includes not only the local stuff, but also a huge slice of whatever else is within view range of the camera at the time (such as a wide swath of Kerbin's surface).

If the geometry is present at the time of capture, that geometry obviously needs to be calculated and introduced as the camera changes its angle, and I definitely see the geometry changing between captures at different view angles.

Captured while looking at the nose of a plane on the runway, immediately after launch

This tells me that the pause function really is a total pause, where the engine won't render anything different from what was visible in the camera at the moment the pause was enabled, because changing the camera angle means doing additional rendering work to include the "new" geometry in the view.

One element that backs this theory is the fact that while the game is running, say on a basic ship on the runway, the fan on my video card is ramped up slightly to the point where I can hear it. If I hit pause, the fan spools back down to about the level it's normally at, sitting at the desktop. Yes, I know that's really only a reliable indicator that physics calculations have been paused, but given that the fan speed goes up the more I move the view around on the ground, I think it's a fairly logical connection to say that the camera view is locked because the pause function halts ALL new processing, not just physics.

Just based on what I've discovered so far, I would imagine that if there were a way to bypass the frame freeze at pause and move the camera, you'd see nothing but black beyond the edges of what was in view the moment you hit pause.

[regex]

snip

Looks like the Unity camera works a lot differently than I thought, I stand corrected.

[mahparson]

I think this would be really cool

[tetryds]

@Deadweasel: slowing down the time is even a possibility?

[Deadweasel]

@Deadweasel: slowing down the time is even a possibility?

Oh yeah, there's no reason why that couldn't work.

In fact, I suddenly just remembered...

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/kerbcam/

[zxczxczbfg]

I think it would be a very great idea, not only for watching your ship but also for toggling multiple engines if you forgot action groups, allowing you to toggle them all without unbalancing your thrust.

[JiWint]

Yep,a button that's easy to press and takes a short time to press,like tab (near wasd!).It would be awesome to have a 3D look of a ship that's just about to crash

[TimMartland]

You coul have a little 'pause' button as the leftmost button in the timewarp tab.

[Deadweasel]

Might help to actually try to look around a little bit...

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/57324-0-22-Dynamic-Warp