The detached camera

The world can now be looked at from anywhere, and the places worth looking from can be kept. This is the cinematographer's tool from the world design: not a gameplay camera, a way to stand where a scene might be framed and judge the land from there.

From the saddle

Press Tab and the scene stands still: the horse stops mid-stride, the dust hangs, the sun stays where it was. The camera is free. W A S D fly along the view, Q and E go down and up, Shift is two hundred metres a second, the mouse looks. It never goes under the sand. Tiles load around the camera as it goes, the same way they load around the horse. Tab again and the ride resumes where it stopped.

V keeps the view. It writes a vantage to art/world/lowwater/vantages.json, where the camera stood in world metres, which way it looked, the lens, and the sun as it was, with a name like v-004 that you rename in the file along with a note about what the land should do there. It also saves a frame of what you saw to boards/grabs/. [ and ] step through the saved vantages; Backspace forgets the one you are on. G saves a dated frame from any view, with a small sidecar of where the camera was, for a "this is wrong" note. The key card lists all of it while the camera is free.

From the shell

tools/ue.sh shot out.png 0 "-LwSet=Goto=sallow-ford" renders the ford from forty metres up before the first frame. Goto=D7 goes to a square of the survey sheet; Goto=<vantage> or Vantage=<vantage> to a saved one. The vantage board, one frame per vantage after every regeneration, is the next increment.

What the first vantages say

Three are kept to start: above the ride's start, Sallow Ford from the air, and square D7 of the March. Two of them are nearly black. That is the dusk look doing what it was tuned to do: a sun six degrees up lights the slopes of dunes beautifully and the ground seen from above hardly at all. The look is not touched. The fly camera has its own exposure knob instead, FlyEV, off by default, and three stops of it show the land while sculpting; a grab taken that way is brighter than the game and says nothing of the kind yet, which is on the list.

Decisions

Goto moves the camera, never the riders: moving them means moving the sim's frame, which waits for the nav work. Vantages record world metres so they survive a change of start place. The letterbox stays up in the detached mode, since a vantage is where a letterboxed scene will be framed. And the scene's clock stops while the camera's keeps going, so headless runs of the detached mode still deliver their shot and quit.