Camera Space
After another evening of working in an unscheduled fashion, focusing on whatever seemed to be needed most by the game engine, the skeleton of a camera system now exists. Development on this new system quickly revealed that many tweaks and adjustments are needed in other areas of the game to make it work and still have any hope of following proper engineering practices. Ideas that once seemed relatively sound are now fraught with gaping holes in logic and elaborate plans to better organize things.
It may seem like something as simple as where an object lives in your game world or where it shows up on your screen would offer no itchy situations involving what objects actually know that information. In reality however, it’s one of the most crucial tidbits to get right, and it doesn’t necessarily end up where you may have thought. The fledgling camera system has shown us that we chose incorrectly in our initial plans and a bit of engineer vs engineer discussion revealed a far more intelligent place to put it. Included in these changes of course come still more revisions to the badly beaten up collision system.
The idea at its core is a camera that does the translation between world coordinates and screen coordinates. Between objects that can be seen and a viewport that shows them. It is actually a bit cleaner and simpler than it sounds, but it’s still a good deal of work to “get it right.” What started as “we need a camera system” became “do we really?” and then wandered back to “we sure do, except to do it right we need all these other things too.” Thus far nothing shows up on the screen, but I figure that’s only a day or two off.