I’m trying to achieve a camera system similar to Donkey Kong Country Returns (reference: http://youtu.be/roFyWMs3DgY?t=2m16s).
So I started off by trying to make something similar to the Sidescroller Template; and now I have a few issues.
#1 The camera is always locked onto the player; I don’t want it to move vertically with the player, e.g., when they’re jumping. But the camera vertical value should be able to change for certain parts of the level. I can create ‘camera hint’ volumes throughout a level to dictate what the camera height should be for that area. My problem is, I can’t just make the camera ignore my character’s Z movement (I looked for something similar to locking rotation).
As of right now, I’m just manually resetting the Z value of the camera’s spring arm every Tick. This seems ugly to me… And the weird thing is, when I move the exact same nodes into my camera manager, which is where it would ideally be, there’s a weird side effect where the camera jerks a tiny bit whenever I jump or land. It’s seriously the same exact nodes: works fine in the Character Blueprint but when I disable it there and try it in the Camera Manager Blueprint it has that side effect (feels like I’m going crazy).
#2 When the player is walking forward through the level (to the right), the camera pans ahead, revealing more of what’s coming up. So the character is positioned about 1/3 in from the left side of the screen. However, when the player backtracks through the level, the camera should catch back up and stay horizontally centered on them (again, look at Donkey Kong Country Returns for reference).
Again, I can kinda get a hack-y solution in there but not really sure what I’m doing.
It kinda feels like the camera shouldn’t be parented to the Character, because it’s not really moving exactly with the character… But their still has to be some logic to make the camera follow the player, etc.