Limit direction of movement?

[elvisish]

Is it possible to only have the camera move in specific directions, like Super Mario Bros NES and Sonic The Hedgehog SMS jungle act 2? In SMB, the camera can't move left and in that level in Sonic SMS the camera cannot move downwards. I'm thinking of just constantly adjusting the limit shape, but I'm not sure how performant that would be.

[ramokz]

Yeah, adjusting the limit shape is not ideal as the limit shape is not being recalculated at runtime for performance reasons.
Even if it did, it's a bit overkill given the intent.

Limiting movement to one direction is not something the addon supports out-of-the-box. However, one approach to achieve it could be to use a pseudo follow target that follows the position of the playable character, but where it can only increment its positional value in the desired direction.

[elvisish]

That's an excellent idea, I hadn't considered doing it that way. The edge limit smoothing wouldn't work with that method I don't think (where the camera smoothly comes to a stop at the edge of the limits)? If not, it might be an interesting idea to add direction stopping to PC as a feature, it might be able to take smoothing into account.

[ramokz]

The edge limit smoothing wouldn't work with that method I don't think (where the camera smoothly comes to a stop at the edge of the limits)?

Edge smoothing isn't supported in the addon yet. Would basically need to see how Godot does it internally and then mimic the behavior in here. It's something that has been mentioned before in another post, so it's in the backlog.

it might be an interesting idea to add direction stopping to PC as a feature

I am cautious about adding too many specific features to the addon. Mainly because each use case is often highly opinionated, where a user would want certain features to work in specific ways. So it frequently leads to providing a fairly flexible solution that can quickly become unwieldy as you would need many buttons, toggle boxes and sliders to support all potential use cases.
Am generally trying to keep the addon's options fairly generalized and not overly specific to prevent the addon / inspector panel from being too bloated with too many options that only a small subset of users really require; not to mention for performance reasons.

In the context of this, I can see cases where a user would want the camera to be able to always go back a certain distance, or the option to go both up and right, or up, down and right. It is the reason I typically suggest building logic on-top of the addon with the desired camera approach, as it also provides more customization and flexibility in the end.

[elvisish]

Which part of PCam handles the limits? You mentioned the limit collision shape not being recalculated for performance purposes (entirely reasonable), but if I wanted to adjust the camera limits at runtime, which would you recommend? I also would like to put a collision in the same place (ala SMB) so the player can't physically move to the left either, and whichever position PCam calculates as being the left edge of the scrolling limits would be the one I'd probably want to use.

[ramokz]

Limits is being managed as properties of the PCam2D node, which emits changes to the Camera2D whenever they're changed.

You can modify the limit value directly at runtime, which will update the Camera2D's limit value as well.

However, you cannot change the Limit value if you have a Limit Target set, but you can change the Limit Margin; both in the editor and at runtime. It basically grows or shrinks the limit size based on the Limit Target's size with whatever value you supply it with, which might be what you are after?