Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers | Hacker News Reader

Scroll Back: The Theory and Practice of Cameras in Side-Scrollers

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353 pointssp33227 comments

This is so much more interesting than it should be. The GIFs must have been a ton of work to put together. Fantastic.

    > This is so much more interesting than it should be.

Is this a sibling expression to "I laughed harder at this than I should have"? It's okay to find things funny and interesting, even superlatively so.

Like zombo.com says, the only limit is yourself.

They probably mean "This is so much more interesting than somebody would expect based on a description."

If someone asked me "Do you want to watch a 52 minute talk on how they move the window on side-scrollers?" I would say no. That doesn't sound like it would even be worth talking about.

But it is, and I'm really psyched to watch this video.

If you prefer, here's the 52 min video of the talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022243/Scroll-Back-The-Theory-...

Great article. (Unfortunately I had to finish it in w3m because the gifs were so huge.)

I remember doing lerp and projected-focus before I knew what they were called. It definitely has more depth than it seems, and as I was reading I was surprised at how much thought went into some of these decisions, especially Super Mario World where I had never noticed it. I suppose it's like UX design -- you only notice it if it's bad.

This article is a strong candidate for in-focus GIFs, or webm, or both. I had similar issues :)

I was also having a major issue reading this article on mobile. Every app I tried to read it on was crashing repeatedly, with increasing frequency as I got to the bottom of the page.

How does w3m compare to lynx?

I use it mainly because it defaults to http; I never took the time to actually compare the two.

What's good in defaulting to http?

I suppose it wasn't as bad as I thought. If you type

    lynx news.ycombinator.com

it tries to "intelligently" choose the news:// protocol, which I have never used and probably never will. With w3m, it just goes to http no matter what the subdomain is.

I wish every game developer read this. Some really popular games have bad camera movement. For example, Limbo has poor vertical camera and you have to make "leap of faith" often. Trine has problem with scene transition with multiple players so you often play off-screen. And Vlambeer games have too much shaking ;)

Sreenshake can be turned off, but they have a problem with their offscreen action. That is, enemies that are 2 screens away from you can shoot you mercilessly which is even worse than a leap of faith because it's purely random and can't be prevented with skill or knowledge.

Yes. I've had such moments in Nuclear Throne very often.

It would be neat to have an interactive demo where you could explore the space of possible cameras.

Platform snapping... That's a really good idea that I've never noticed. I'm going to experiment with this.

Awesome work!

Unfortunately, some game engines just give you the Camera and basic stuff, and you must implement scrolling yourself while wondering, "Am I doing this right?" (mostly I use LibGDX). Would be great to see this codified as a library. I think it's not game engine dependent.

Great essay. Content is interesting, and the composition style is innovative.

Has this been seen by http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/ ? If not, it definitely should be :)

Yes: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/358eyf/

Strangely, it didn't do that well on /r/gamedev - I get the feeling that this talk, coupled with the article (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iNSQIyNpVGHeak6isbP6AHdH...) this will become the "definitive" article on 2D camera boxes. Great work!

I took a game programming class back in college and ended up coming with a scheme very similar to the lerp smoothed box shown there. Interesting to see all the history of this.

The vision and neurology section at the start was all messed up, but the review of approaches used in different games was great! Oh nostalgia :)

Abuse (1996) had some kind of (inverted) target focus I think. Or is that a snappy lerp-smooth?

Thank you so much for this!

awesome work!

This is so phenomenal. Just being aware of the different ways camera systems are used is incredible when playing and making games.

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