Day 3 - Director / Camera

There is already a class named "Window" in Leadwerks (and probably every other game engine out there), so I first called this camera class a "CameraManager" but I ended up renaming it to "Director" because a director controls the scene (via camera) and because it's a shorter name. I'll be honest about that part.

List of classes at this time:

Scavenge
Game
Settings
Inputs
Director

I didn't know exactly how to approach the camera issue, so I created the Director class to handle multiple camera situations and scenarios. If I don't have a character to control (I don't even have a ground to land on yet) then I need at least a default camera.

Therefore, the default camera is being created as a debugging spectator camera. In the future, the Director will be responsible for creating a camera if none exists, and it can act as a manager (right now, it creates the only camera). What I mean by "manager" is that the Director can be responsible for render targets, switching camera targets, projecting/unprojecting, and so on. This is a long written way of saying; I made a class, it creates a camera that normally wouldn't exist, but I need it for debugging, and this class will still be useful in the future. Phew!

Along the way I also slightly rewritten the Inputs class, specifically the portion that involves the input bindings, and I'm glad I did. I had to expand the input binds to create keybinds for a flying camera that can ascend and descend. It went from my ugly previous mess, to establishing keybinds in this way:

std::unordered_map<int, std::string> binds = {
    { ACTION_WALK_FORWARD, "walk_forward" },
    { ACTION_WALK_BACKWARD, "walk_backward" },
    // ...
};

I apologize, but I still haven't found a way on Blogger to present code with pretty colors. Once I've established myself more (remember, I started 3 days ago) I plan to share code snippets and tools with the Leadwerks Community, so I will be linking to those in the future.

A lot of future talk in this article; that means I need to push forward.

Next article will be about LUA, my classes, and "Leadwerks Ultra Engine"