Dragonblood Creation's Camera System

Hello!
This System offers the following features:
- Functions for smooth acceleration and deceleration for realistic and interesting cinematography in nearly all situations.
- A fully integrated Debug System, which can help the cinematic's director to further perfectionate his camera sways, of course turnable on and off.
- Two different types of acceleration available for choice.
- English and German Tutorials, also for people new to JASS

This System's handling is, once implemented, nearly the same as you know it from GUI, so you don't need to make your whole cinematic in JASS. These aspects should be sufficient to prevent you from complaining "But Infrane & Anitarf already made a camera system".
I'm looking forward to your criticisms!

By the way, I strongly recommend to use another method than waits to time sways using this system, since inexact waits can destroy the whole effect of smooth sways. I posted a tutorial for one alternative timing method here.

Post your comments either here or in the according forum on my site. To see this system in action in a real cinematic, I suggest to visit my site and download the Isengard Beta Cinematic from my campaign. Have fun and please give credits to Waldbaer@Dragonblood Creations!

Update 3/25/07 Version 1.01: All leaks killed (the system now no longer uses any location variables internally)

well looks interesting... but it's pain me to say... it's not really good enought why ? you don't correct camera Z so it's not really acurate. but in whole from
1 to 5 it's a good 4 !

PS i don't like than threads are empty ;) and it's make my sad. i give you some rep + ;) !

Of course I do... at least I think so but I'm not 100% sure about what you mean. I have Z-Offset just as a normal Camera aspect with all smooth abilities and for FarZ, I thought smooth acceleration was just a waste of performance because you don't feel a change as a break anyways. That's why I do it just normal like every WE "Apply Camera" does it, too. Did you mean something else? Then please explain it a little bit more in detail to me.
BTW thanks for comment & reputation!

no i don't mean FarZ =) i mean the Z offset of camera to the ground !

So you mean a CameraEye Z-Offset correction to prevent the camera from following the ground, right? Well, I tried that out, but it did not work the way I did it. As far as I found out, this only may be possible, if I'd do every target position change as instant apply. And this on the one hand would be quite performance-eating because it had to be done at least 30 times a second and on the other hand would limit the system at other sides (e.g. it would not allow to adjust anything smoothly while the player is scrolling, e.g. Z-Offset or Angle of Attack).
Hm, but you brought that up to my mind again... maybe I'll implement it in a way that it does the target movement either like normal scrolling (as it is now) or with instant apply to offer CameraEye Z-Offset correction. What do you think about that?

Your camera system looks interesting and very useful.

It's glad to see the effort that you put in the documentation, and I congratulate you for that. Other good thing is the GUI portability which is great, everything well thought.

I've tested your system, running it in WE and it works great. The code itself is loooong to read, so I decided to make a quick test with JassNewGen pack in order to get information about possible leaks. That's what I've obtained:


As you can see in the test map, the unallocated locations reach 268 in the DCCamSystem_Loop function. Probably in a cinematic this is not a big deal, but if the play is longer, that leaks can affect greatly the performance. I suggest to check this function and try to detect which of these locations are not removed. If I found something else, I'll post it.

I hope Infrane and Anitarf can put an eye on your system, it would be great to hear their comments. Keep the good work.

Oh, thanks for your comment, this turned out very useful and I think I found the problem, somehow I once used "Location( x, y )" to get a location which I already had in a variable, just a simple correction. Could you check it again now (I don't have WE Helper & stuff)?

Ohh yes, the system is better, but it has some other problems. Check the screenshots.


About the JassNewGen pack, you can download it here. It's superb!!!

Soo many locations! Are they even required? Why not use X/Y coordinates? Other than that, nice system. I watched your LotR beta cinematic on your web page and it was outstanding! Good job and + rep

This camera movement looks so much better then the movement in the older version of that cinematic, good job.

Thanks for the feedback to you all!

Oh these damn locations... I hate them... I'll remove them completely from the system, this should remove the leaks finally!
But it will be some work, so I'll update in the next days and probably not today... we'll see.

Update!
Version 1.01: All leaks killed (the system now no longer uses any location variables internally)

Man, you are fast :)

Tested again and it fantastically clean. Good job.

*Approved*