So I’m looking at various unity components I’ve ignored for the last few years. Cinemachine looks like it was well made, but it’s also seemingly designed mostly for cinematic sequences not gameplay.
Should I consider using this component as the main camera system in game or go with handrolled?
https://discussions.unity.com/t/852816
You should.
Basically the attractive thing about Cinemachine is that you can seamlessly transition between many cameras.
For example, your 3rd person character walks into a trigger the shoulder camera detaches and flies off to position of scene camera. This kind of stuff is trivial.
The subsystem itself, however, feels sort of weird. Can’t quite put a finger on it, but it gives impression that at some point the developer behind it got sidetracked into dealing with impact curves, perfectly configurable wobbles and stuff like that.
But it can work fine in many predefined cases.
So long story short I wouldn’t call it amazing, but it is free and if it can save some time, why not use it.
To piggy back, you can do “both” traditional and cinemachine. For example, if you want the transitions between cameras but don’t like the built in 3rd person follow / collision / whatever, you can just make a virtual camera and then attach your own camera controller to it. It’ll still do cinemachine stuff when you want it to, but you can drive how it generally behaves otherwise.
So you guys generally think this is a no brainer component to work with?
I’ve done a lot of work with cameras in the past, but I’m definitely not against some of the functionality here if its well done and reasonable to work with.
Pretty much. I mean it has a weird part about the curves/impact effect/configurable camera shake or whatever it was. But you don’t need to touch that part.