Coding: Setting Third-Person Soldier Camera in BF2Editor

[[R-DEV]​Arab]

How to modify the Soldier Camera to have Third Person.

Step 1: Open up BF2Editor and load the mod.

Step 2: (Highly Recommended – Enable reload .con)
On the top-menu, select ‘Tools’ and in the drop-menu click on ‘Options’. Press the + next to ReloadFileSettings and click on the checkbox next to ReloadConFiles. Press OK.



Step 3:
Under Resources directory, we will select any soldier model of our liking. Select the mod name and navigate the tree directory to objects/soldier/pr_usa (example)/pr_usa_soldier_1. Double-click on any one of the soldier. The soldier that is the most closest to the bottom is easiest to navigate.



Step 4:
With the Soldier loaded, you can press Enter on the right to enable the Soldier View from the camera. Make sure to click on ‘Enable physics’ to enable the soldier to move and to interact. This is needed to test how well the camera works with your input. You will be switching between Step 3 and Step 6 to experiment on view types.



Step 5:
Go back to the Resources directory tree, scroll up halfway and navigate to ‘common’ folder inside ‘soldiers’ folder and double-click on ‘SoldierCamera’.

Step 6:
In the TweakerBar underneath, select ‘Camera’ and deselect CVMInside. (Camera View Modes). Select CVMFrontChase as an example which will have the camera focus on the face of the soldier.
You can tweak the chase camera view modes by changing the

• ChaseDistance (Higher value = further from player)
  
• ChaseAngle (Angle of the camera)
  
• ChaseOffset (Chase camera position)

Quick list of each CVM and FollowStiffness:

• CVMInside - First-Person View
  
• CVMNose - Nose-camera of an airplane's cockpit. Used for vanilla Battlefield 2 air vehicles. Settings to control them are located in NosePos to set XYZ.
  
• CVMChase - Back Camera facing the back of the soldier. Settings to control them are located in ChaseDistance, ChaseAngle, ChaseOffset (XYZ).
  
• CVMFrontChase - Front Camera facing soldier. Settings to control them are located in ChaseDistance, ChaseAngle, ChaseOffset (XYZ).
  
• CVMFlyBy - Stationary camera that only rotates to where the soldier moves to. Used for vanilla Battlefield 2 land vehicles.
  
• CVMTrace - Appears to draw a camera where the soldier's head is.
  
• CVMExternTrace - Doesn't appear to do anything.
  
• FollowStiffness - Set to 1 if you want the screen to wobble when soldier camera is rotated. Set to 99999 if you don't want the screen to wobble when soldier camera is rotated.

After you are done setting, go to Step 3. to preview the changes. You need to do this each time you want to change the camera values, and you cannot modify them through the soldier object. You can however change the SoldierCamera position and rotation placed in each soldier.

After you are done, save in the BF2Editor via File -> Save and make sure SoldierCamera checkbox is selected before pressing OK.

Step 7: - For Manual Editing
You can alternatively do it via .tweak manual editing for more flexibility, but be aware that BF2Editor may be crashy when reloading con files. Just make sure that when you are on the Soldier screen that ‘Free’ is selected otherwise when you attempt to reload the file, BF2Editor crashes. To do this, navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Project Reality\Project Reality BF2\mods\pr_edit\objects\soldiers\Common and double-click on SoldierCamera.tweak

Step 8:
Change ObjectTemplate.CVMInside 1 to 0 and set ObjectTemplate.CVMFlyBy from 0 to 1 to enable. Save.

Step 9:
Check the BF2Editor. It will display the Reload Object message. Press Yes:

Tip: BF2Editor tends to be a little crashy when ReloadConFiles is selected. If you are using this for any enterable objects, make sure 'Entered' or 'Input' is not selected, otherwise when reloading the file, the BF2Editor will crash.


Step 10:
Repeat Step 3 to view the changes but this allows you to not need to switch to Step 5, although it’s safer to do edits in the BF2Editor.