Howdy all, I''m trying to design a 3D battle system similar to FF7 (much simplified, of course). I''ve been thinking about how to design the camera system so that I can use some nice camera transitions during battle animations like FF7 does. Do you guys have any suggestions on how to do this? Will scripting be a good choice to handle camera transitions? Have you done anything similar to this? Thanks! Eric

Actually I''ve coded a 2D version of a FF clone...

Anyway, first of all you should set up a camera class so you can easy switch between the different cameras.

Then you can asign different cameras, one that takes care of the overview look, one of the centered on character etc.

This is just the basic layout, now to the hard part: the movements of the camera.

I have no idea how the pros does this, but one way might be to create points which represent the movement of the camera (and the look-at position). Then inside this camera class you can assign different movements with a certain ammount of points. The movement should be a class itself and functions like StartMovement() should control the movements.

Just an example of my thoughts:

if (<attack is made or something>
{
currentCamera = ACTIONCAMERA;
camera[currentCamera].movement[rand()%3].StartMovement();
}