Third Person Camera Spring Arm moves away from player too quickly.

[YashConnorJade]

Hi. I made this level using a combination of Phantom Camera 3D Third Person Mode and Simple LookAt modes. This type of gameplay and camera system is directly inspired from Classic Silent Hill series. But here, the third person camera is snapping it's position too quickly when it collides with a corner wall. You can see it in the video below:

Phantom_TPSCamera_Spring_Arm_Snapping.mp4

I've played 100s of video games and I'm fully sure that almost none of them had this snapping camera in TPS mode except dark souls 1😅. I request you kindly help me out into smoothing the spring arm camera movement so that it doesn't show this snapping thingy.

[ramokz]

This is how Godot's SpringArm3D node works, which is what Third Person follow mode is based on.

It functions by effectively making a raycast from the origin to the end of the spring arm line. If a collision object ever gets in between those two points, then the node (camera) attached to the SpringArm3D snaps to the surface of that collider object. If that collider node disappears, then the node attached to the SpringArm3D snaps to the length it has been set to, which is what you're seeing.

SpringArm3D is inherently fairly simple in its behavior and doesn't have variables when it comes to smoothing out; otherwise that would have been present 😄

There was a feature request for this a few months ago (#522), so there is a plan to rewrite an internal version of SpringArm3D, which would provide more parameters and options to solve things such as this.

[YashConnorJade]

Yeah I think I understand. There's a damping setting too that accepts vector3 but that too won't work as expected. It's and underline godot problem probably.

Also, I wanted to ask that phantom camera, asks you to enable physics interpolation. So does it work better with godot default physics or jolt physics? I need jolt for my project.

[YashConnorJade]

That said, running some local scenes, I don't seem to be able to replicate the same behavior when rapidly moving a Third Person camera around a wall.

Have you tried using a weaker system?

[ramokz]

The camera shaking thingy is happening to all cameras whether they're tpcam or simple look at cam. It's not just restricted to Third Person Follow cam.

So you mean when you rotate the character 180, it still shakes the camera, even if it's not using a Third Person Follow? Then that might imply that it's because the target is moving very rapidly and not necessarily smoothly when you do the 180 rotation, but that's just a guess.

Yeah the difference between monitor refresh rate and specs between of my 2 systems are night and day😂. My Laptop is just 60hz but my PC max hz is on 180hz. And it's set on 180hz.

There can be differences in how physics behaves depending on the frame rate. If you, for example, change the Physics Ticks Per Second inside Project Settings to a lower value, you might see different results. I generally test with a very low number to verify that things are working smoothly independent of framerate.

Can you explain what MRP is😅😅. I'm kind of new to Programming world so I'm not quite familiar with acronyms.

Yeah, MRP is short for Minimal Reproducible Project. It's essentially a small project with the sole intent of being shared with others to test what the underlying issue might be. It's the same kind of request Godot would ask for if you reported an issue with the engine itself; otherwise, a maintainer would have to try to replicate the issue, which may or may not yield the same outcome. The general idea is to remove everything from that project so it just contains the bare minimum to reproduce the issue, while not adding other systems, functions, etc., that could complicate the debugging process. Not saying it's the case here, but it's not uncommon that some other script or scene node is the cause of the problem, so it's just to reduce and isolate variables. The simpler the scene, the faster and easier it is to debug 🙂

Edit 1: So, while testing again and again, what I'm guessing here is that there are so many things that are happening behind the scenes while the game is played. The system is calculating the player position and setting the camera location according to it all the time. All this has to be calculated in _physics_process(). I also said in my last reply that cam shaking doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn't. So, here's what I found. I just have to reduce the number of calculations. I simply replaced _physics_process() with _process() and it fixed most of the camera shaking in my scene. My PC was able to calculate those methods almost instantaneously, whereas, my laptop is struggling to do so. That's why it was negligible on my pc. I hope there are no underling issues with the addon if I use just _process(). Please let me know if there are any optimization tips for the addon so that I could minimize the number of calculations that will be taking place on weaker machines.

That's interesting; it might suggest that it may have something to do with how you've set up your character controller. Ideally, it should by and large be done in the _physics_process, but there are exceptions, of course. In either case, it seems like the issue is due to how the two systems interact with one another. Something a MRP could help verify.

Have you tried using a weaker system?

Don't have one lying around unfortunately 😅

[YashConnorJade]

Yeah sure I can share you my link. There isn't anything too complicated yet happening in my scene. It's just around 10mb right now. It's an old build from 14 October when we started talking here. But it has that problem of camera shake.

Buttons work with click. Use WASD for movements. Q and E for strafing. And use Q+E for 'Quick Turn'. That's where the problem shows up. RMB to make the tpcam look forward from behind the player. Space to pass through door. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions😊

https://codeberg.org/YashConnorJade/MRP_for_Ramokz_Marcus_Skov.git

[ramokz]

Just an update, I haven't had the time to look at this yet as work has been pretty intensive the past many weeks. But hoping to look at it sometime next week or the week after

[YashConnorJade]

Yeah okay.... Me too, I'm working on steam assets right now.