New RenderCamera Work

This week I reimplemented the camera logic from scratch.

The previous camera controls in Vortex date from around 2010 and, even though it worked and helped release a number of Apps using it, it had some limitations that made it difficult to build new features on top of it.

I was interested, in particular, in providing a mechanism through which camera animations could be controlled from native code and scripts, rather than just responding to user input directly.

The new vtx::RenderCamera is implemented as a Component that can be attached to an Entity directly, basically providing the potential to make any entity in the scene a camera. Once the active camera is selected, this is passed down to the new Rendering System to draw the scene from the camera’s point of view.

This allows configuring a scene with several “vantage point” cameras in order to dynamically switch them around to make different cuts. At the same time, because cameras are attached to entities, entity movement provides a natural means to pan and rotate cameras through the scene.

I’m very happy with the result of this rework, as it provides exactly all the functionality we had before on top of a solid, expandable foundation.

Unfortunately, we still don’t have a way to draw a camera gizmo in the Editor, so we have no screenshot for this week. Next week, however, I’m planning on continue working on some visual features, so definitely stay tuned for more!