My 3rd Person Character Controller

[Clackdor]

W - forward

S - backward

A - turn left

D - turn right

1 - Sword Swing (no sword model loaded, though)

 

Mouse right click to turn your character with the mouse.

Mouse left click to look around, but not change direction.

[Road Kill Kenny]

Cool. Now you just gotta do the camera object avoidance. Use raycasts, don't give ur camera a physics body.

 

XD

[Clackdor]

Got it. Replace character.exe in the zip with this one.

Character.exe

[Josh]

I would use the Curve() function to make the camera gradually align to match the player's direction when they turn.

[Road Kill Kenny]

Hi Clackdor,

 

Very good I see you have some decent object avoidance. There are just a few things I'd like to point out. Tree of them is really easy to fix. The other not so.

 

1. The camera can go upside down. Try limiting the X rotation of the camera

 

2. Your collision with the floor is very good. However you don't have many walls in your scene so you may not have noticed that if you get too close to a wall the wall disappears. I managed to position the camera against the structure to show what I mean. As you can see some of the structure is invisible and the camera is looking through this. I don't know if there are any conventional ways of solving this but I came up with a way myself. Check my youtube channel for Third Person Camera stuff I think I explain it somewhere in there.

 

3. What Josh said. Curve() should not be too hard to implement

 

4. Character needs to strafe. Difficult to position the character freely without a strafe left and strafe right option.

 

Otherwise its coming along very nicely. My camera is not perfect but I think it is good enough for now and I'll make it better after I program some gameplay. I'd suggest just do points 1, 3 & 4 and then move on to something else for now. Point 2 will be necessary in the long run but its not generally a quick fix and may take some time.

[Clackdor]

Thanks a lot for this feedback, Ken!

 

I will play around with the camera collision some more. It's only been implemented for a day.

 

The strafe code is actually commented out. This character doesn't have a strafe animation. I'll have to add it.

 

I also need to reverse the walking animation so it looks more correct when she is walking backwards.

[cassius]

I have been struggling with how to stop my camera passing thru walls and obscuring the view.In one commercial game I have this problem is solved by raising the viewpoint of the camera when near walls so that it looks down on the character from above then going back to eye level as the camera moves away from walls.

 

Can someone direct me to a code example??

[Clackdor]

Taken directly from my source.

 

pivot2 is an entity that is on a line between the character and camera, but positioned a little ways out so that the ray does not hit the character mesh. It basically makes a circle around the character mesh.

 

Because the TPick raycast collision location is given in global coordinates, I position a pivot3 at that location instead of doing Vec3 math and figuring out local/global conversion.

 

if (EntityPick(&raycast,pivot2,10.0f,1)) {
       PositionEntity(pivot3,Vec3(raycast.X,raycast.Y,raycast.Z));
       PositionEntity(camera, Vec3(0,0,Min(camz, EntityDistance(controller,pivot3)-0.7f)));
   }
   else {
       PositionEntity(camera, Vec3(0,0,camz));
   }

 

FYI, I decreased the frequency of the images shown in number 2 of Ken's comments by adding that 0.7f modifier shown above and also adjusting my near camera frustum range to 0.01.

[Eagle]

Now this is really cool!!! This was so sweet of you Clackdor, thank you so much~

 

Always~

Vickie

[gamecreator]

I'm guessing you have Flip(1) in your code. tkunze found that it makes it so the game doesn't update for me unless I move the window.

[Road Kill Kenny]

I'm guessing you have Flip(1) in your code. tkunze found that it makes it so the game doesn't update for me unless I move the window.

 

Huh? Flip(1) means v-sync is on. Flip(0) v-sync is off

 

Also Clackdor you can completely eliminate pic number 2 if you use multiple raycasts. as shown in the following picture:

 

Note: When I say in the pic fire 4 'arrays' I actually mean ray-casts lol.

 

Off course this is just my method and by no means the only way. However, it does eliminate any possibility of things being clipped on the sides above and below.

[Rick]

When I was doing mine some time ago I would move the camera toward the player by just a little after the pick to avoid clipping into geometry.

[Clackdor]

I did what Rick did. I will play around with your suggestion, though, Ken. It's not too bad now, except when the character backs right against a wall.

 

I've also moved on to focusing on other gameplay elements and shooting for a first game release this spring. It's sort of a stupid pac-man game that Rick gave me the idea for a while ago, but it does do a good job of exercising the old programming joints and getting used to Leadwerks commands.

[gamecreator]

Huh? Flip(1) means v-sync is on. Flip(0) v-sync is off

Yup, that's it. I can make a video if you want to see it in action.

[Road Kill Kenny]

Yup, that's it. I can make a video if you want to see it in action.

 

No that's fine. I know what it does. I'm just confused by what you were saying.

 

"the game doesn't update for me unless I move the window"

 

not sure I understand what you mean by that because it sure doesn't do that on my computer. Probably just a misunderstanding lol

[gamecreator]

I run the game. It seems frozen. I press the buttons to move. Nothing seems to happen. I then move the window. The window updates to the current frame - no animation, just jumps from the old to the current one. Press more buttons. Nothing moves. But as soon as I move the window it updates again. I'm probably one of very few people who this happens to.

[Marleys Ghost]

I did what Rick did. I will play around with your suggestion, though, Ken. It's not too bad now, except when the character backs right against a wall.

 

 

Which is why using a single cast followed by a camera move forward will not eliminate clipping, it may reduce it on some flat surfaces but posts and pillars are a different matter, and as you know when the 3rd Person character is close to, for example a wall, you will find the camera inside the characters head looking out. I use an array similar to that in Kens illustration.

[Road Kill Kenny]

I run the game. It seems frozen. I press the buttons to move. Nothing seems to happen. I then move the window. The window updates to the current frame - no animation, just jumps from the old to the current one. Press more buttons. Nothing moves. But as soon as I move the window it updates again. I'm probably one of very few people who this happens to.

 

Oh wow. Thats odd

[Eagle]

Awww, there is no way to use it on our own games?

[Clackdor]

I'm afraid it needs some refinement before I can release it. I would also need to define some parameters, for instance, its a player controller/animation controller. Should I separate those out? Plus, so many people are quirky about their controller, that I might just consider throwing out there as a code dump for others to edit to fit their needs. But it seems like most developers write their own.

[Marleys Ghost]

I was going through some old Buffer code yesterday with regard to some CCTV ideas myself and Macklebee had been working on, a few hours ago I found my test code for one of the first 3rd Person cameras I did using a raycast array, so to show the difference between using a single cast and an array of casts I combined the two codes to show the advantages of a raycast array.

 

The first section shows the cam position being generated by a single raycast, the top left screen shows the actual camera view, the green sphere in the main screen is the calculated position of the camera. In the second section an array of casts is used, again the top left screen shows the actual camera view, the green sphere in the main screen is the calculated position of the camera and this time the red spheres mark out the boundary of a simple raycast array. Kens Graphic shows how to layout a basic array.

 

[Rick]

Did Josh ever say if LE3D or even LE2 would fix the ray radius issue because that seems like it could help in a situation like this.

[Clackdor]

Thanks Marley. Good demo.

[Marleys Ghost]

Did Josh ever say if LE3D or even LE2 would fix the ray radius issue because that seems like it could help in a situation like this.

 

 

"It's not supported in LE2. This is actually one of the things I am working on in LE3. It's a lot harder than I expected, because nobody writes spherecasting code for an irregularly scaled sphere against a triangle."

 

 

Unless the Spherecasting function allows for the return of data from individually picked points which would be required to do the contrast and compare needed for this method, I dont think it would be of any benefit. If you use Kens basic array in his picture its a total of 4 casts and some basic maths, and covers only a relatviely small portion of what would be the surface of a sphere .. only flatter.

 

Thanks Marley. Good demo.

 

You are welcome, I thought it might help visualise whats been said, but you are on the right track though.