Camera and Player Movement and Orientation

Last night "lollerskivvies" and I discussed player and camera movement and orientation in our world. We drew a little diagram on the whiteboard which I later replicated in Visio shown here:


Our tool, which lollerskivvies is developing, will be able to define points which will construct the player's path, along with points to construct the camera's path. At this time, we decided that it would be best if these points were 1:1, as to not screw up any timing issues.

I figured I would use quaternions for the smooth camera orientation interpolation, I have done this before and it works great. The problem I'm facing now is how to get a nice curve for the position interpolation. If I just LERP betweeen points, the character in the above diagram could cut straight through a wall. I briefly looked into spline generation, but most algorithms involve defining more than two points. I could possibly just use the circumference of a circle as the path. Eh, it's something to think about.

In other news, lollerskivvies and I got his particle system running at a framerate independent speed last night, so now fire looks as sweet on my laptop as on the alienwares in the lab.