I want to setup my camera with seperate screens like how they used in Celeste

Here is a media that shows what I mean with screens;

To reach collecticable, you need to use screens and how it affects game mechanics.
In my game I have 4 seperate 512x256 screens at my starting screen. I want to implement this, but I only used Cinemachines Follow & Confiner 2D functionalities before. Is there a guideline I can follow, or an example I can investigate?

PS. As a side-question (I'm not sure if this is a existing term), what does Cinemachines LookAt field used for? Is it for following targets rotation?

 

No problem, here is what I mean by screens. (Before explaining, I didn't give name "screens" to this, it is described as seperate screens in game's fandom. To reach the top, you need to dash between left and right screen.)

I attached a Paint-made image P), think scene is made of this squares. If player is in first square, camera is in first square. When player moves, camera moves to next screen, and (in Celeste, I don't want to implement this) characters physics mechanics reset. This could be done with a few position checks, but my game is growing. So I want to know if there is a Cinemachine-specific way to implement this feature.

-TY for reply ^^

 

Screens are also referred to as rooms in a 2D context.
I got this working pretty well in Cinemachine with triggers, basically a box collider per room. On contact with the player, the virtual cam linked to that box activates and all the others deactivate, creating the blend or pan between the rooms.

A major issue I have though, that I have not found a solution for yet, is when the player returns to the previous room before the end of the Cinemachine blend transition, even if as short as 0.1s, the Vcam fails to activate and come back to the player. In other words, the main cam is showing the wrong room.

 

Here's a screenshot:
Every room is basically a Box Collider Trigger, which also serves a a confiner in bigger rooms.
Every room contains a VCam.
OnTrigger with the player, the Vcam of that Room activates, and deactivates the other Vcams, leading to a blend, which you can control on your Main Camera Cinemachine Brain.

 

The vcam activates properly. But lets say if the player jumps back to the previous room before the blend has finished between both vcams, that is where the problems arise.

Here is an extract from the code, which every "Room" contains = BoxCollider2D Trigger & Vcam
(the Coroutine is overkill, but was meant as a plug for this issue, but did not help solve the problem)

Code (CSharp):

1.     private void OnTriggerEnter2D(Collider2D collision)
2.     {
3.         if (collision.gameObject.layer == layerMask)
4.             StartCoroutine(PrepareBlendCo(collision.transform));
5.     }
6.  
7.     IEnumerator PrepareBlendCo(Transform player)
8.     {
9.         while (cinemachineBrain.IsBlending)
10.             yield return null;
11.  
12.         SwitchRoom(player);
13.     }
14.  
15.     private void SwitchRoom(Transform player)
16.     {
17.         DeactivateCam();
18.  
19.         if (myVirtualCamera.Follow == null)
20.             myVirtualCamera.Follow = player;
21.  
22.         myVirtualCamera.gameObject.SetActive(true);
23.         SetCheckPoint(player);
24.     }

 

Thanks.
Got rid of the temp coroutine and even added a myVirtualCamera.MoveToTopOfPrioritySubqueue(); on activation, but still the same result.
I'll post a short video in the morning. Somehow I can generate that problem on every play, so I'm obviously going down the wrong lane.


ps.: sorry to NoctisShadowzel for hijacking this post. Hopefully all this info will be beneficial for setting up a Celeste style camera management system.

 

No need to sorry, I am glad it is useful for someone else too!
Also thanks for answers.
@Gregoryl, I want to ask a second question. I always use a empty game object with only a polygon collider which points are almost exactly on backgrounds corners. For this game, I used GameObjects with EventTriggers to make a UI, because it is going to be interacting with Main Character, and it became a problem when I noticed screen-sized polygon collider is messing up my touch receivers. I disabled GO which contains polygon coll. and tested if 2D Confiner still works. With the Bounding Box disabled VCam still stays in bounds while following my character, but it behaves like screens I asked in my first question. It doesn't do smooth transition. Even if this is what I wanted to achieve, I wanted to ask you if this is expected behaviour... (I didn't do any other changes to my scene with VCam.)

 

I made a short video which demonstrates the issue, and even the cause, but I do not know how to solve it.

As you can see, the player enters the confiner collider of the adjacent room, and triggers the activation of the vcam of that room, and the deactivation of the current one. The blend works fine.

The problem is when the player does not fully exit the confiner collider/trigger of the previous room, but returns to it, failing to cause a new trigger. Also causing the player to respawn in the wrong room after death.

One solution would be to not use the confiner colliders as blend triggers, but make dedicated trigger with ample space in between triggers so that the player always exits these. Not a very clean solution, since depending on the output (pixel perfect 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 etc), the player might have to blindly run out of the display for a certain amount of time before hitting the next trigger, which is not a positive gaming experience.

There might be a better way to do this?
Thank you.

 

Every room has its own static collider. What you see moving in the clip is the Pixel Perfect gizmo.

 

Oh, nope, I think I couldn't adress my question right way. What I'm asking is, when Bounding Box is enabled, VCam follows the main character, as it should. But when Bounding Box is disabled, the effect I opened this thread for, screens/rooms, happening without any additional changes. I just didn't understand why did this effect came in play when I disable the bounding box, it seems weird. That is what I asked if expected behaviour or not.
Since this thread goes on, I will put a video of my development to show this weird behaviour I'm asking about; if question isn't clear.

 

Yes they do, so your solution worked like a charm! Wonderful, many thanks.

 

Even if I'm going to change my Camera handling to the method @zapposh have suggested, I'm sharing a video to show the problem I'm seeing with my current Camera/Cinemachine setup.

First of all, as you can see in video, when I disable gameobject with collider I use as Bounding Box, Cinemachine don't do smooth transition anymore. It behaves like if I implemented screens/rooms (that was topic of this thread), it changes position if only I pass from a position, an edge of Cameras viewport. That was what I was asking, if expected behaviour or not.
Secondly, at between middle/up and right room, Camera is showing a not related room, that is under the player.

There is only one Polygon Collider, shaped as same as scenes shape, three equal rectangles at top; one at middle/bottom - like a T, only one VCam, one Main Camera.

Even if I'm changing my approach, I wanted to ask if this is a bug, or is it about my setup. (I also tried to play with settings at Body section with Framing Transposer selected, nothing worked.)

 

@Gregoryl, I'm not using Physics, so my Collision Check is based on Raycast, I tried to use CinemachineTriggerAction script with VCams, also added a CinemachineCollider too. Didn't worked. Also tried with Trigger BoxColl2D, but I think, I need Physics collisions for this to work as expected. I think I must do position check from script...

 

@Gregoryl, sorry about not responding quickly. Been thinking about a new idea...

No, there isn't.

Because I changed the way I implemented this Camera setup, I don't have the setup I have in video right now. But to answer your question,
My Player is child of a empty game object, that doesn't change position (Parent is always at Vector3.zero). But VCam's Follow field was set to Player, not to parent GO.

 

Silly question, but do you have a blend time on the blend property of the CinemachineBrain on the camera? Without it you'll have cuts instead of blends.

 

In the video I posted, there is only one Virtual Cam and one GO with Polygon Collider shaped as same as level itself, used as Bounding Box.
So there is no blend, no rooms or anything. I posted that video to ask @Gregoryl if this is a bug or not.

 

Hey, so if anyone found this old thread from a google search, like how did and couldn't figure out the solution, well I finally figured it out and made a simple tutorial on it -

Let me know if this helps anyone out.

 

Thanks for sharing this, it's really helpful for what I'm trying to do.

 

Any good tutorials on how to use the trigger action? Or examples?