Gaming Hacks

Improve Your Camera Control

Straighten out those herky-jerky camera pans.

When recording a machinima live ( [Hack #65] ), you may find that nothing’s quite as frustrating as making the camera do exactly what you want. This is particularly true when making dramatic pans. You can avoid this by always recording static shots, in which you aim the camera at the actors, yell “action!”, and leave it alone—but that’s boring.

You could script the camera (and that’s what you’ll have to do if you use Unreal, at least until its makers fix the camera demo recording), but that’s harder and more tedious.

If you want creative camera shots, you need a human on the keyboard; the mouse is just too jumpy. Unfortunately, when you’re panning the camera with the keyboard, it’s difficult to slow down as you near your goal. Fortunately, you can create nice speed step-up and step-down effects with some clever key bindings.

Changing Quake’s Yaw Speed

The console in Quake 2 and 3 allows you to change your yaw speed, the speed at which you turn while using the keyboard. Bring up the console with the tilde key (~), and type the following command:

] /bind c cl_yawspeed 25
] /bind d cl_yawspeed 140

Hit the tilde key again to return to the game. The default turning speed is 140, so turn left and right with the keyboard to acclimate yourself to the normal yaw speed. Be sure to note how jerkily you stop when you release the key.

Now hit the c key and try turning again. You’ll move much more slowly. Press d to return ...