Thank you also for the great suggestion.
Yep, this is exactly why I wanted to consider it. I get that it’s a non-standard way of handling the camera, but wanted to really consider the whole system for the sake of my sanity down the road. “Measure twice, cut once,” etc etc.
One solution I saw recently that handles this case somewhat similar to what you’re suggesting- they made an actual camera manager pawn, independent of everything else. In my case, this pawn would be a child of the mode and get refs to the important actors during initialization for the later handling of different cameras.
As I considered it more, though, I’m still unsure if this actually will save me any time or implementation down the road. A possible benefit would be that I could potentially centralize all the behavior for the camera work in this special manager and import the pawn in all modes, which I could use to then freely switch between via different “modes”, e.g.
- a “menu” mode for following the player’s cursor in a menu
- an “adventure” mode for focusing only on the player pawn
- a “fight” mode where the cam hovers between two fighter pawns, etc.
…But I could also just do that with a custom manager class on the pawn, so I don’t actually know if I’m making my life easier, haha.