Jittery movement with camera following player

Questions & Answers
1

I’m working on a game similar to Factorio. The camera is locked to the player while the player navigates around the world. The camera is updated to the player’s position (minus some offset and zoom level) in LateUpdate. Player movement feels buttery smooth.

However, the player has a swarm of ships that follow it, and these ships experience a lot of jitter. The jitter goes away if I stop the camera from moving. I’ve tried different camera movement strategies (lerp, moveTwards, SmoothDamp), none of these work. Probably because there is some more fundamental solution to this problem involving the movement of the swarm around the player. Nothing uses physics bodies (or rigidbodies). I’m just updating positions of everything directly on their translation/transform.

Here is a demonstration of the problem:

---------- Here's the camera code: 
      var dirVector = DirectionBuilder.Create(Direction).Vector; // Vector representing up, down, left or right, depending on camera rotation
      var followObjectPosition = _followObject.position;
      
      var basePos = new Vector3(
        followObjectPosition.x - dirVector.x * _cameraZOffset,
        _cameraHeight,
        followObjectPosition.z - dirVector.z * _cameraZOffset);
      
      transform.position = basePos + (_followObject.transform.position - transform.position).normalized * _zoomFactor;

Pretty basic stuff. The swarm movement code is fairly complex to make their movement feel natural, but I need a solution that will allow arbitrary entities following the player to move with the player at around the same speed as the player, without jittering (might be worth noting that my game is DOTS, the player is the only thing in the game that has a monobehaviour. The swarm around the player are all pure entities).

2

I fixed this bug but it’s specific to people using DOTS. The problem was that the player being the only monobehaviour also has the mesh renderer attached to the monobheaviour. The camera is set to follow that monobehaviour’s transform position. However, there is some discrepancy in LateUpdate between a monobehaviour’s transform.position and an Entity’s translation; they are not synced.

So the fix was to put the mesh renderer of the player on the player entity (where it should have been anyway), and have the followObject be the player entity’s translation component instead of the monobehaviour. Since all the translations are updating in the same system, the camera follow is now synced to the entity component system’s translations. Now all the motion is buttery smooth.