Live Free or Roll Hard (AKA: The Pachinko Movie)

Since last week, I've done some further tweaking of the tracking algorithm, so the cameras are doing a decent job of following their targets. I didn't have a movie last time, so let's start off with some video footage! Notice how the cameras try to keep the target within the center of the frame without abruptly locking in; they also move in and out a bit to stay on course while avoiding obstacles. It's kind of working like a spring system, with a desired orientation towards the target and a desired position behind it—the desired position can also be put on the side, for instance, to track alongside the ball.

While the improved camera tracking is pretty visible in the video, most of what I worked on in the past week was under-the-hood: specifically, I've been making the code more general (to make more complex additions easier to implement), and gearing the cameras up for cutting to different angles.

The major change is that simple behavior trees are now involved. Just importing all the right assets and files into my Unity project ended up being more of a hassle than I was expecting, but I got that done. There's now an actual Director too, who is currently just using a behavior tree when deciding which camera to assign an event to—you can see this in the video above, where the Director assigns the first occurring event to the red camera, the next event to the green camera, and so on.

The second major change (which, again, you can't see in the video) is that I redid a lot of the event and camera code, to make everything much more general: now you just tell the spheres what constitutes an event for them (in this case, it's being mobile), and they just tell the Director when they are engaged in an event, and when that event ends (in this case, when they become stationary). The spheres don't have to deal with the cameras at all, and the Director does all the mediating.

Since I think tracking is pretty solid, and I've got the start of behavior trees, next week I will play around with having the cameras cut to different angles. Surprised at how short this post is? Stay tuned for my self-evaluation!