SOMA Third Person Camera Control

[Abion47]

Got into talks with oneminusone over making a Silent-Hill-style camera setup in SOMA, so I decided to see how possible it was. Turns out, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.





I based the camera-switching mechanic on the bullet-loading segment of Phi, which incidentally ended up being only about 7-8 lines of code (if that) to get the camera part actually functional. Oddly enough, the actual player avatar is going to be much harder.

For starters, rotating an entity in SOMA is bizarrely difficult. As it turns out, rotating an entity can only be done by setting the rotation parameters of a transformation matrix, which by itself wouldn't be that huge of a deal except the creation and management of a matrix is also really difficult to figure out.

Ultimately though, I ended up using the cLuxAgent class rather than the iLuxEntity class, because unlike the other entity class types, the Agent class has an iCharacterBody field which does support simple rotation. And to be fair, when you're making a complex character entity, it should be an Agent entity anyway.

In any case, you can see from the video that this system is far from being suitable for a complete product just yet, but by itself the fact that HPL3 allows for this sort of stuff makes me excited to see what future mods come up with.