Impossible Odds - Tactical Camera

The TacticalCamera package provides a camera system for smoothly navigating your environments. It allows for both a top-down tactical view as well as close-up action views with some additional features:

• Move using keyboard input.
• Move using screen edge detection.
• Move to target position.
• Zooming in / out.
• Look rotations, with height-adjusted tilt limits.
• Orbit rotations around the focus point.
• Dynamic field of view, based on height.
• Height-adjusted movement speed.
• Restricted area of operation.
• Smooth collision resolve with terrain and objects.
• Extensive customization using animation curves.

It’s also designed to have minimal setup and integrate well in existing projects.

Setting up the camera

The TacticalCamera Component requires to be put on your Camera GameObject. It will also use a CharacterController which is added automatically (if not there already) to resolve collisions as well as smoothly go over any terrain and obstacles.

It requires two things to operate:

• An input provider: the TacticalCameraInputProvider Component is a sample implementation which is perfect for testing and quick setup.
• Animation settings: create an instance of the TacticalCameraSettings ScriptableObject. Adjust these to define how your camera should animate and smooth out.

Assign these to their respective fields in the Unity inspector view of the TacticalCamera.

Optionally, you can also place some bounds on the area of operation of the camera. The TacticalCameraBoxBounds is a sample implementation to restrict your camera to operating in an axis-align box.

Advanced

Settings

The camera’s settings define its behaviour regarding movement and rotation. These two are mostly driven by animation curves, value ranges and fade times.

• Movement settings: how fast the camera can move at a certain height as well the range of height values the camera is allowed to reach.
• Rotation settings: how fast the camera can look around as well as orbit around its focus point.
• Tilt settings: tilt angle ranges for both low and high altitudes, and how these ranges should interpolate.
• Field of view: should dynamic field of view be used, and how it should transition based on the camera’s height.
• World interaction settings: filter and define the raycast interaction distance for height control and move-to-target.

Input

The camera’s input provision can be integrated in your project’s input system by implementing the ITacticalCameraInputProvider interface.

A default implementation is available for which you can assign custom input keys. Your custom implementation can be assigned to the InputProvider property, and can also be injected into it.

Area of operation

The camera’s area of operation can be restricted using the ITacticalCameraBounds interface or AbstractTacticalCameraBounds abstract class. This allows you to implement custom area restrictions in your project, e.g. restricting in a polygon area, not entering the fog of war, etc.

The bounds can be assigned through the Unity inspector view when being derived from AbstractTacticalCameraBounds, but can also be assigned to the Bounds property or be injected into it.

Gotcha’s

• The camera is designed to work on its own without interference on the rotation of the object from the outside, e.g. animations.
• The z-value of the local Euler rotation angle is always set to 0 at the end of its LateUpdate phase. This is to prevent drift and keeps the camera straight up.
• The operating range of the tilt angle in the TacticalCameraSettings objects can be no larger than [-90, 90] degrees, with 0 being level with the horizon. This range is defined to prevent flipping over. If you make a custom implementation through ITacticalCameraSettings, best is to keep this in mind.
• This package includes the Impossible Odds Coding Toolkit. Feel free to use it!

Unity Version

Developed and tested on Unity 2019.4 LTS.

License

This package is provided under the MIT license.