Pivot, pivot, goes the widget.

The never ending camera saga.  I’ve finally got the new camera working fully, on PC at least.  I will have to test how it works on mobile hopefully sometime early next week.  For the moment I just want to play around with it a bit on PC and see how it feels.

The camera is a combination of the two previous camera types…  An orbital camera that rotates around the player horizontally and vertically, and a pivot camera that only rotates around itself.  Each camera itself had problems with view-able ranges.  The orbital camera ensured you always had the player in view but prevented you from ever seeing the horizon or being able to look up at the rest of the world.  This comes back to the spherical world problem, where the horizon is always up, instead of down or horizontal like in real life.

The pivot camera also had its own issues.  You could sometimes lose sight of your character,  if you turned very sharply it would be a  moment or two until the character turned to follow and re-entered your view.  The other is that you could never look in front of the character.  I discovered that anytime you crested a hill or mountain and were about to head down the other side you could never see what was approaching.  Looking down would only allow you to see the ground below the camera and behind the character.  You were unable to pitch the camera forward and look down in front of the character.  This was frustrating as you could never tell if you were just climbing a hill or about to leap off a cliff.

So… By combining them I hope I can get around most of the draw backs of either, although there are still some minor issues I will have to play around and see how it feels before I try and come up with any other solutions.