RidgeCam

A fixed-angle follow camera for platforming that has to play on a phone, a controller and a keyboard.

The rig holds one heading and never turns. That is the point of it. CharacterController projects move against the active camera's forward and right onto the XZ plane, so a camera that never rotates turns camera-relative movement into absolute screen-direction control: the direction the stick points is the direction the character travels on screen, from every device, and no look input is needed to play. A steerable follow camera makes a phone player manage a second thumb to get anywhere; this one does not.

It follows with damping, and it treats height differently from the ground plane:

• Ground follow is a plain damped chase, groundDamping seconds to cover ~63% of the gap.
• Height follows a stepped anchor. While the subject stays within heightDeadZone metres of the anchor the camera holds its level, so a jump moves the character in frame and leaves the world still. Clearing the band — arriving on a new storey — pulls the anchor, and the camera eases up over heightDamping seconds. Without this the frame lurches vertically on every hop, which reads worst on a small screen.

The aim point leads the subject along its own horizontal velocity by leadDistance, read from CharacterController's velocity telemetry rather than differenced from position, so the vertical arc of a jump never tilts the shot.

Public fields: follow, offset (where the camera sits relative to the subject, in world axes), aimHeight, leadDistance, groundDamping, heightDamping, heightDeadZone.

Attach through Camera.behavior

local cam = entity(rigId).component.get("Camera")
cam.behavior = asset.ref("RidgeCam", "component")

The Camera owns the behavior slot, which is what lets it tell the rig when follow changes.

Player cameras: leave follow empty

Entering play drops and respawns PlayerPrototype subtrees, so the body is recreated with a new entity id every time. Set the target on the Camera and leave this rig's follow empty:

entity(rigId).component.get("Camera").follow = body

PlayerPrototype refreshes Camera.follow to the live body on every clone, and the rig reads that slot whenever its own follow is empty. Set follow only for a camera watching a fixed, non-respawning subject.

Choosing the offset

offset sets the viewing angle, and the angle sets how readable depth is. A steeper drop (a larger y relative to z) reads gaps along the depth axis more clearly and flattens the sense of height; a shallower one is more dramatic and makes depth harder to judge. The shipped default, {0, 12, -13}, is a ~42° look-down: close enough to a 45° isometric that a stick direction and a screen direction agree, without losing the vertical.