Post

I've spent *years* researching 3D Platformer Cameras in hopes of making Slime 64's camera "not terrible." In this thread, the White Cylinder is the Camera Target (slightly above the player!), and the Orange Cones represent the "vertical dead zone" where the camera won't follow player movement.

When performing a standard jump on flat ground, the camera essentially doesn't move. However under normal gameplay, if the player moves up far enough to surpass the deadzone, the camera target pretty quickly (but smoothly!) lerps up to keep them in frame. Similarly the same happens when descending.

When airborne we raycast down to see if the player is near any ground. If they are, and the grounded camera position would be *higher* than its current position, it ascends to match. Notice how the camera doesn't descend when going downhill. This prevents undesired "dips", as seen in Yooka-Laylee.

However, these systems aren't enough on their own. Player action should always inform camera behavior. When the player double jumps, they have indicated they want more height. We snap the camera's vertical target to match where they performed the double jump, and then resume normal behavior.

Similarly, we have a limited-range flight ability. Since we expect more vertical gameplay while using this power, we make the camera target more aggressively lerp towards the player's vertical position, essentially bypassing the deadzone. Note the difference between an air jump and a normal jump.

That's all I've got for now. Any developers have other camera tips to share, or questions about my approach? Also tell me a game camera and I'll tell you if I've researched it as part of this endeavor lmao

Oh yeah if you like this post and want to try this camera out we have a free two hour long standalone prologue out now on Steam :) store.steampowered.com/app/1562410/...

The Devil Inside? (it's not actually relevant lmao, but I like to reference it in game cam discussions 'cos it's one of the few games I can think of with a "2nd person" camera - you're followed by a film crew & one of the camera modes is "Live Camera" which is the view of the camera-operator NPC)

You should add an achievement for hitting all code paths for the camera within five minutes

But then I need code paths to track those code paths, which will then need more code to track those code paths.... Really one of the scenarios is a PANIC mode where the player is moving way too fast to track. I'm not even sure it's possible to hit those speeds but if so that's the achievement 😅

If your have had a quick dash/dodge type where the slime moves significantly faster, would you change the camera behavior for that or do you feel staying centeted horizontally is fine?

I didn't cover it in this thread, but we also have some rules around "lookahead" where the camera target moves ahead of the player We do have a move that dashes forward and the lookahead is okay for that, but for a crazier example @seandick.net has been COOKING bsky.app/profile/sean...

I have a question. Is there any issues with ground being clipped between the camera and the character? I think there was an old GDC talk on cameras, and they talked about the Journey thing for those kinds of clippings.