The mod introduces a first-person-view free-walk camera for the conning tower bridge instead of a static camera. It also replaces an external unit-view camera with a camera which allows for much closer viewing distance and which is not reset to a default view on switching between units with keys ">" and "<".
When surfaced, a player will be able to freely move through the bridge and the deck of the sub in the "F5" view. This is kind of a replacement of the "shift-F2" option which existed in v1.0 and 1.1 of the game. However, this time the player will be moving together/riding on the sub which makes it even better.
The reason for changing the external unit-view camera (">" and "<" view) is that in the stock version the closest viewing point is still quite far from the unit, especially when compared with that in SH3. Now it is possible to view units at much closer distance. This comes at some expense though. When using the left and right arrow keys, the rotation will be around the observation point, not around the unit. On the other hand, switching between the units will not reset the camera to the default position but keep the current position and orientation which I have found to be quite handy. Let you avoid doing zooming-in again and again upon switching to another unit.
Although, I am mostly satisfied with what I wanted to achive, I have not been able to eliminate a bug (due to lack of time) which was introduced with my changes to the external unit-view camera. It often happens when fully zoomed-in onto the unit to the extend when the camera is colliding with the unit collision spheres and starts to go around the unit, as in case of the external "F11" camera, in this situation an attempt to switch to another unit may drive the camera in a buggy state by placing it at an arbitrary position, quite far and away from the unit. I try to move camera a bit back and away from the colliding state before switching to another unit. In any case the player would barely need such extremely zoomed-in views anyway.
Despite the bug I decided to make this mod available because I will not have much time to continue to work on it for a few upcoming weeks. After that, I will try to improve the mod.
Download is available on my site.
A few screenshots on what can be done in the F5 view
