[REQUEST] A ''Over the shoulder chasecam''

[Endie]

Uhm.. so, GZdoom have a native option to set the cam to third person, using chasecam or using ''chase 1'' in console, but the character in this view is centered, and i can't look what's exactly is right in front of me.
I'm looking for a cam angle that looks like Resident Evil 4, Gears of War or Dead Space.
I've tried the Ultimate-Third-person from The Zombie Killer, but the mod just crash my game.
Note: I'm playing on D-Touch, with GZDoom 2.1 Dev Build (optional)

Anyone can help me?

[Raziel236]

I've just seen this, check Black Warrior mod.

[Endie]

Oh yeah, i forget..
Something that don't affect Gameplay/Graphics
I've played this mod before, and it's awesome, but isn't what i'm looking for

[Raziel236]

What do you mean, doesn't affect gameplay and graphics?
I'm not telling you to use that mod, merely learn from the camera-changing properties of it.

[Endie]

Alright, i will try.

[Nash]

I think what Endie wants is a built-in option that lets you move the camera sideways, and something that works for everything (ie not tied to a specific mod).

It actually wasn't too hard to add over-the-shoulder to the built-in chasecam, I've done it before for my game. I don't know if the way I did it was the correct way or not, but all it involved was adding an "angle offset" to P_AimCamera.

One thing that I didn't know how to address however, was the weird issue with the chasecam being both playsim and not playsim at the same time. The chasecam seems to be a render function, the playsim doesn't care about the camera... but for some strange reason, the chase status is being serialized (I remember Randi adding this feature at the request of one of LilWhiteMouse's mods). You could even change the chasecam during demo playback. o_O

What I ended up doing was added the chase settings to player_t and made it all properly serialized and networked and what-not. It might be overkill though.

I might send a pull request post-release GZDoom 2.4.

EDIT: my source changes as an indication I'm not talking out my ass (yes I realize this commit REMOVES this feature but it's not hard to add it back)

EDIT 2: Also note that with over-the-shoulder camera, your gun shots will not end up at the center of the screen's crosshair anymore. It *might* be possible to make the engine do angle adjustments for the weapon firing functions, depending if the chase camera is on or off. I don't know what's a good way to solve this problem.

[Endie]

I think what Endie wants is a built-in option that lets you move the camera sideways, and something that works for everything (ie not tied to a specific mod.)

Yeah; it's exactly what i want

[Nash]

Another problem from the fact that the playsim doesn't know about the chase camera is, sound positioning would sound wrong.

Currently, sound is treated the same regardless whether you're viewing in first person or third person. When you'll be able to move the camera sideways, a player would expect the sound positioning to be affected too (so a player's firing sound should be heard slightly to the left or right of the audio spectrum, because the player's sprite is now pushed to the side of the screen). That will never happen though because the camera doesn't exist to the playsim.

[Endie]

Well, i think switching for mono audio can help, maybe?

[Nash]

Started work on porting this feature into GZDoom. Here you can see the problem with the shots not lining up to the crosshair.

Some ideas on how to solve it?

1) Modify all weapon firing code pointers to calculate where the shots will end up. This will break multiplayer and demos. Not a good idea.

2) Modify DrawCrosshair() to dynamically blit the crosshair position depending on where the shot will end up. Basically just fire an invisible line trace from the player and draw the crosshair at whichever point the trace ends. The related code is inside the status bar source files, and I'm not touching that stuff right now because there's some crazy stuff going on in that area upstream. ALSO I don't know if this will be VR headset-friendly. Probably not. I have zero idea how to make 2D-over-3D graphics look correct inside headsets because I don't have one.

I'm not sure how modern games do it. I DO know that for some games that allow you to switch between third and first person (like Fallout New Vegas), the player's firing origins are actually calculated differently depending on which camera you use (same as my idea #1). This is evident if you have something picked up with the Z key - watch how the position of the object changes every time you switch cameras. But New Vegas is single player so it's not an issue for that game. It won't work for Doom.