Through Your Eyes Windows, PS5, PS4 game

Hello Dodos,

So far, the prototype has a very early start menu and a simple level to test the camera mechanics. The player has the ability to walk around in 3rd person view and draw the camera, which transitions the view to 1st person. The camera has the ability to change between modes which offer different perks: Zoom mode, which enables changing the focal length so that the player can photograph objects far away; Dark mode, which enables the player to photograph objects in very dark environments; and Invisible mode which currently isn't fully implemented and only shows face normals as a placeholder. It will in the future enable the player to photograph objects which can not be seen normally.

The object detection system in the camera is also not fully implemented, however it will be ready for early user testing: It is a system which casts multiple rays from the camera which enable it to know which objects are in view (and how many of them), how big they appear on screen and how far they are from the camera. The objects which are photographable have a component which contains the required parameters for it to count as a valid photograph, such as how big they need to be on screen, the required distance, the required Camera Mode.

The Camera itself is composed of 3 SceneCaptureComponent2D (one for each mode, with different rendering parameters) which all cast to a texture. The screen face of the camera mesh uses a material which shows the render texture, therefore, showing what the camera sees on screen (In the current build, the camera mesh is only a placeholder, but the screen will function similarly).

The grand majority of mechanics was implemented in c++, though some are/will be implemented in the event graphs of the class Blueprints reserved for the triggering of animations and such.

Custom animations and animation blueprints are not yet implemented, however there will be character animations for actions like: ‘pulling out item’, ‘putting away item’, animations while using the camera like: ‘pressing shutter button’, ‘pressing zoom in button’, ‘pressing zoom out button’. There will be a usable mp4 which might utilize the same animations or variations of the camera ones.

Current player movement is close to the default movement from the third person present, though parameters will be tweaked once we have the final character skeletal mesh and animation in order to complement the game feel.

The transition from third person to first person follows a timeline curve to smoothen the camera movement. First person and Third person views have different parameters toggled, such as movement speed, mesh visibility (once we have the first person arms mesh, it will be visible in first person), camera translation lag, etc.

The zoom function changes the SceneCaptureComponent2D’s field of view smoothly between the min and max set Fov.

The amount of rays is customizable, along with the ray grid aspect ratio and border padding(not casting rays close to the borders).

📸🐑🤍

See you soon,