Chase Camera

[darkprophet]

Hi all,
I just made a chase camera for a game im developing, and I just wondered if the "player" can use the camera properly.

Anyway's here's part of the game so far. Any Pointers?

Btw. It uses LWJGL and jME (Current)

Here's the link:

http://www.myjavaserver.com/~digiwired/vz2.jnlp

What do you think?

[blahblahblahh]

its webstarted now:

http://www.myjavaserver.com/~digiwired/vz2.jnlp

as soon as I saw the webstart version I was willing to try it...

...however:

1   2   3   4   5   6   7

An error occurred while launching/running the application. Title: Volatile Zapper 2 Vendor: Volatile 7 Category: Launch File Error JAR resources in JNLP file are not signed by same certificate

[Seekely]

Ran at a smooth 150fps for me, and I suppose works well for whatever its supposed to do =p  Although I didn't like so much that I was able to get the model off the screen if I moved the camera fast enough....Of course this is all relative to the purpose of the app/game

This was the zipped version though, the webstart gave the same error as blah^3.

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[darkprophet]

dam about the webstart thing. Il try again soon.

Thx Seekelyfor your reply, i wanted the person to see where the fighter is going before it got there. But would that kind of camera do for a fighter game?

[darkprophet]

kewlies, webstart works now. I haven't got a clue what was wrong before, but I rejared everthing and uploaded and everthing is now as cool as ice.  

If anybody has a linux and a mac handy, id love to see if this works on em. Thx

[blahblahblahh]

Well webstart had to be run twice before it noticed the u[pdate.

But it still doesn't work - it keeps saying the selected display mode is not valid, although it doesn't bother to say why.

[Jens]

It works on Linux, if I choose 24bpp and 0Hz, but I don't know what the app is supposed to do.

[darkprophet]

hehe, right, +/- increase/decrease speed, WASD to move or mouse.

Blah^3, whats your graphics card? and what OS are you using?

Btw, you need to wait a while (around 30 secs to 2 minutes) for the terrain to be generated, Md2 models to load, CamHandler to initialise....etc

[blahblahblahh]

GF2 with linux. I strongly suggest you put in some EXPLANATION rather than just an error dialog that says nothing (as is currently the case).

Even better, I still wish someone would just do a "standard" skinnable LWJGL mode-selector and give it everyone else . So many people seem to have problems getting this bit right.

[Orangy Tang]

Ick, that camera is horrible

Firstly the biggest problem is that the camera rotates around its own point, it should remain looking at your ship and pivot around that point instead. That way the ship is always on screen.

As well as that the sensitivity was way too high for me, to the point it actually hurts your eyes. Drop the sensitivity and add some smoothing to the camera movement and it'd be easier to view.

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[shmoove]

I didn't like it either  
I think Orangy Tang's idea is very good. Keep the look-at point of the camera the same, but move the origin so that the ship is always in view.

shmoove

[darkprophet]

right, so im going to have to implement spherical coordinates. Right, onto that now.

[darkprophet]

had a little play with some algos I made up about a chase cam, what do you think of it now?

Btw, its a new URL:

http://www.myjavaserver.com/~digiwired/xv.jnlp

Cheers, DP

[zulo]

runs fps 3679!! should you not cap the fps at 60
or something?

[darkprophet]

Glad to hear it.  

what HW are you on? id love to get your HW (it runs at 400 on my dev pc)

Im going to be implementing a FPS capping game (FixedFramerateGame in com.jme.app) soon. So that will be done.

Btw, which version did you play? cause im in development at the moment...the one with the bus that takes you to another bus room?

DP

[Mojomonkey]

700 FPS for me, on a fairly high end machine, not sure how he possibly got 3700 FPS.

Anyways... I'm not sure I understand, the camera doesn't seem to be chasing at all.

[darkprophet]

yeah, that thread was from AGES ago.

The design changed and the camera will rotate like a CCTV camera, around an axis rather than actually chase it, perhaps even zoom in/out.

The chase camera was using rotation around the axis and elastically follow the camera (if you remeber my implementation from VZ2 which never took off the ground)

DP

[Mojomonkey]

Hmmm I'm not getting the CCTV effect.

[darkprophet]

hmm...i should have said the plan is to make it so its like a CCTV camera...its not yet implemented...its the third thing on the list at the moment  

[darkprophet]

Different day, different camera system...would you mind testing this camera system for me?

Its a zip (1.66Mb) with batch and sh files..Forget about the physics for a while, that needs quite alot of tweeking, but is the camera comfortable? When you crash, is the camera giving a good view? Stuff like that...

Regards,
DP