Smooth camera movement?

I'm making a 2D Android game and I ran into an issue with some camera movement.

I'm trying to smooth out the current camera movement of my game. In the game, there's a ball that bounces left and right. When the user touches the screen, the ball also moves up. The camera follows the ball when it moves up, but it is noticeably jittery.

The ball uses physics, so I move it with

Rigidbody2D.MovePosition()

inside FixedUpdate. The camera is moved by setting its transform. I've tried every combination of Update, LateUpdate, and FixedUpdate. Nothing seems to work...

Is there any way to move the ball and camera smoothly?

 

If your fixed update rate and your game update rate don't match, the movement of that object is going to be a little jittery as, depending on your fixed update rate, some updates the fixed update might get called multiple times, or not at all, within a frame update. For single objects moving this often isn't super obvious. For the entire camera moving that way it most certainly will be. Usually the answer is to use smoothing on you camera, and potentially even the rendered object's position, that is moved in Update rather than in FixedUpdate, but using the FixedUpdate position to inform the movement.

There are lots of "Smooth Camera" examples out there. Try one of them.

 

Hello, thanks for the reply!

I've already tried smoothing the camera with

Vector3.Lerp()

. I've tried this in Update, LateUpdate, and FixedUpdate. Still jittery, and I can't find anything similar on the internet.

This is why I'm confused... Any ideas?

 

Lerp is actually the wrong way to do it, though yes, most examples will use it. It too is framerate dependent. You want to use

SmoothDamp

or some similar velocity based system.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Vector3.SmoothDamp.html

Alternatively use an exponential decay based lerp.
http://www.rorydriscoll.com/2016/03/07/frame-rate-independent-damping-using-lerp/

 

Oh, I did not know that. Thanks!
I'll try it now...

 

Okay, I've just changed around my code and got it to work.

I tried putting it in Update, LateUpdate, and FixedUpdate. Update appears to have the smoothest look.
Does it matter where I put it?

 

Update or LateUpdate should both look the same as long as nothing else is moving it. You don't want it in FixedUpdate.

 

Perfect! Camera is following ball as smoothly as I can get it.

Thanks for your help

 

This was an epic thread

 

Always heard about Lerp, never about SmoothDamp. This is definitely better, thanks!