Better zoom in?

I did some simple research on the camera controls of SupCom, it seems in SupCom when you zoom in, the camera won't move exactly towards the position under your cursor, instead it would move along a curve (which is a side effect of the rotation during zooming), and the position under your cursor would end up vertically closer to the middle of the camera. It seems it is the main reason why it feels much better than zooming in Spring, without it playing SupCom/WarGame/RUSE/PA without minimap would be quite difficult.

Can we have something similar in Zero-K? I don't mean the rotation, but the effect of the position under your cursor end up closer to the middle of the camera, which might be achievable with a method different to SupCom.

No, SupCom has a different method, in Zero-K if you zoomout then zoomin without moving your cursor, your camera would still be in its original position, which is not the case in SupCom.

Hmm, it seems it is because I'm using COFC and it has both "zoom in to cursor" and "zoom out from cursor" enabled.
But that's not important, with the default Zero-K camera the cursor's relative position to the ground would still be unchanged after zoom in, only changed after zoom out. If you zoom in to a unit close to the edge of the camera, it would still stay close to the edge of the camera, which is not the case in SupCom.

COFC without "zoom out from cursor" is the same with the default camera, the default camera has "zoom in to cursor", and if there is a tree under your cursor, after zoom in the tree would still be under your cursor.

SupCom's camera rotate when you zoom in (like total war camera in Spring), so the cursor's position related to the ground is in gradual changes when you zoom in to cursor, that's why the camera moves along a curve instead of a straight line, and further your cursor is away from the horizontal axis of the camera, the bigger the curvature would be.

I still dont get what is your problem?

Imo the niceness of the zoom modes is entirely subjective.

I would say it's less intuitive.

Rotating camera is not the only approach to improve centering.

Is there still anyone couldn't understand the centering in SupCom? Or misunderstand it as a perspective thing like how you see things on a table become "closer" to the horizon line and each other when you lay your head down on the table?

I'm not a lua coder, and it seems the algorithm is hardcoded so I can't find it in the lua files of SupCom, so the only thing I can provide is a speculation.

In SupCom:
5km maps have 20 zoom levels, get 45°rotation at level 10.
10km maps have 23 levels, and the last one isn't a full one, so it's actually 22.5.
20km maps have 25 levels.
81km maps have 30 levels, get 45°rotation at level 15.

Also if you try to zoom in to the north or south edge of a map, it feels like the trajectory of the camera movement come close to 4/1 of a circle.

So it seems the algorithm is really simple, the rotation angle gradually decrease from 90° to 0° at a constant rate from fully zoomed out to the ground. For example, on a 81km map, which has 30 zoom levels, the camera rotate 3° for each zoom level.

Other than this rotation and how SupCom limit the camera movements (force it to be contained in a camera shaped space which also contained the map), the SupCom camera is COFC without free rotating.