Level Up.pdf

Third Person Camera 131
(a) didn ’ t result in great footage, and (b) generally pissed off the coaching
staff. To solve this, I recruited a friend to act as a spotter as I filmed to make
sure the collisions were kept to a minimum.
Having that experience made me realize that every camera needs a
spotter — even ones that live within video games, which is why I say “ treat
the camera like it ’ s a person. ” As you program your camera and build your
world, give the camera room to maneuver and the player a way to
manipulate it. This style of camera is commonly called a follow cam
because it follows after the player. After years of working on 3 - D follow
cams, here ’ s what I ’ ve learned to watch out for:
Sorting. Sorting is what happens when a camera moves through a
character or geometry. Nothing breaks the illusion of a real world faster than
this. What ’ s worse, in many cases, the sorting camera will show the
background layer of the world, which in most cases is a sky or flat color
layer. It looks crappy and great pains should be taken to make sure this
doesn ’ t happen in your game.
You can avoid sorting by paying attention to the camera and the geometry.
One way is to give your camera a detection radius so that it can avoid
passing through world objects by moving over, under, or around objects. If
you don ’ t want your game to process that much collision detection (which
causes the game to slow down), have world objects turn transparent. It
works pretty well with objects within the confines of the walls, but shouldn ’ t
be used for perimeter walls. Avoid having objects in the world disappear
completely as players get disoriented when elements in the level flicker in
and out of existence! (And it looks bad.)
Controls. Think about how your camera is going to operate in regards to
controls. Many games won ’ t work properly if the player is pointing the
camera straight up or straight down. Another annoyance for me is the great
“ airplane controls vs. player- relative controls ” debate. Personally, unless I ’ m
flying a plane, don ’ t make me push up on the analog stick to make my