Handling third person camera

[cassius]

I am using aggrors third person example as the basis for my game and it is going well. In the tutorial he avoids the camera being hidden behind walls by switching to first person position when a wall is detected. Works ok for the most part but it made me wonder if there were other ways of doing this. Has anyone tried some other method?

[MikeClarke]

Working in theory here, you could have it move up when it detect's a wall, then have it move in the opposite direction to the wall, finally snapping into first person. I'm not sure how to do this in code, but I would assume when it detects a wall it gives you a direction to the object.

[cassius]

The same thing could be achieved by letting the user roll the mousewheel forward and back. This would give the user control .In my le2 game I made no provision for this problem. I just had my character fairly close to the camera and made walls thick and ceilings high so the problem rarely occurred.

[ZioRed]

Personally I would move the camera towards the target (player) until no collision is detected (if it ends up to be too close to the character then would switch to 1st person as well) and also at defined close position I would switch the material of the character to use an alpha transparent shader so you won't have the view blocked by your own character. It's not something I did in LE till now (but may be I will give it a try) but this is something I'm used to do elsewhere.

[Tim Shea]

If you attach the camera to a physics object, like a small sphere, and then apply a spring force (proportional to distance) towards the target position, the physics engine can handle this for you. More complex collision shapes can also keep the camera a minimum distance from terrain, or ensure an unobstructed line of sight to (or beyond) the character.

[cassius]

I found that aggrors method worked fine exept when character walked up slopes and it switched from first to third person somewhat eccentrically but this turned out to be because I was running in debug mode. In release mode it ran smoothly.

[AggrorJorn]

The example in the tutorials doesn't have any smoothing. You could use a linear interpolation to fix this. Tim She'd way. Also a good.approach. It will prevent wall clipping. Something that will.happen when you use the tutorial.

[cassius]

Like to know more about linear smoothing if anyone can help