FreeCamera for taking in game recordings/screenshots

Just some thoughts…

The choice of P as a hotkey was arbitrary (I never expected that this would be added to the client, so usability wasn’t a big concern). I like F8.

As far as easing, it uses a damped spring. The spring coefficients are editable in the corescript. @ScriptOn is probably right; it could be loosened a bit.

I think the letterbox should be removed; that was just me having fun (again, didn’t expect this to get pushed to production).

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Can we (the devs with serverside console access) do this whenever we want, or only when freecam is already enabled? I see plenty of roblox livestreams about contests in dodgeball, phantom forces, … Being able to hide CoreGui but still be able to have a (minimalistic) UI (scoreboard etc) would be nice.

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You can do this whenever you want.

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Btw, until this option gets added you can use Ctrl + Shift + C to turn off the black bars (and all user gui).

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So for now, these are all the shortcuts and their functionalities, right?

  • Shift+P: FreeCamera (supersmooth studio camera) with black bars
  • Ctrl+Shift+G: Disable all CoreGuis (but not user GUI)
  • Ctrl+Shift+C: Disables all (user) GUIs (not CoreGuis)
    (including black bars, as they’re just in a regular GUI)

(all of these only work for people that have “canmanage” of the place, e.g. access to the Server Log)

Developers with access to the FreeCamera can disable it by removing PlayerGui.FreeCamera once it gets added. They could do that and add their own version of the FreeCamera to finetune things, e.g. removing the letterbox, changing the dampening or speed, … (source: FreeCamera.lua)

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Yeah. We should probably add some documentation about these tools. Maybe we could have a page on the developer console listing developer shortcuts. Or maybe in the wiki.

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@TheGamer101 Can this be a real feature?

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My internship ends too soon sadly to implement any new features for this ;(
I will suggest it to someone else though.

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I think it’s very unlikely this feature is going to break the game, and if it does it’s only going to break for the game’s creator, not anyone else

Therefore, I personally think the Shift+P keybind is perfectly fine as I personally haven’t seen it used in any games, and even if used, I think it would very likely be used for an obscure feature / bind. Nice feature! :smiley:

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It’s perfect, but maybe be able to pan and rotate the camera?

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Why not apply for a job there? You’ve done too much work for the benefit of this community, why not make it full-time?

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The keybind is Shift+P (not Ctrl+P). The game does not need to have a Shift+P keybind for this to conflict – only a function bound to just ‘P’ that may be pressed while the player is sprinting (or any other feature that uses held Shift). There’s no good reason for the keybind to be Shift+P (as mentioned earlier, it was arbitrary), so there’s no justification for keeping it around in spite of it breaking games, even if only for a game’s team of developers.

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I have to finish university first. After that, I will hopefully be back to work for Roblox full time!

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An update I never thought about but always wanted

YES.

You should probably add a check to see if the free camera is active for toggling the black bars. For when I press L it makes the black bars visible without having the free camera active.

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Opps, I must have messed that up :frowning: . Unfortunately I’m not interning at Roblox any more so someone else will have to fix it. Maybe @darthskrill can take a look.

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we will take a look! thanks!

Actually, we already have a fix on the way! Also the key command will be changing to shift+L to make it harder to trigger by accident. It looks like a fix should ship tomorrow night.

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Still possible to trigger accidentally while sprinting similarly to the keybind for freecam discussed above. Is there a reason we haven’t just removed black lines? As mentioned above, they were implemented for fun – not because they were useful.

The black lines aren’t useful and don’t make the game cinematic. We should just remove them.

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The original intent of the camera mode was as a tool for in house usage to take cinematic footage for use on streams and such. It wasn’t until after it was finished that we all thought it was pretty cool and should be given to a game’s developers. So its features, such as the black lines giving a different perceived resolution, were definitely shaped by its original intended purpose.

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