Camera Positions Utility

Camera Positions Utility

I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that the game doesn’t remember your camera position when you save a city.

Similarly, when making assets, I often found it tedious to line up the camera for identical screenshots across bundles of assets (eg. rock sets).

Furthermore, have you noticed how when you move over your city the camera keeps going up and down as you go over buildings, networks, and trees? I hate that, and so do others who asked me in the comments if I could disable that behaviour.

Finally, I’ve always been mystified as to why we can’t zoom to the ground, or look up.

I made this mod to solve these shortcomings.

To address the above issues, in essence, it does four things:

1. It saves your current camera position when you save.
2. It lets you save camera positions for later use.
3. It disables camera collision with buildings, networks, trees, and water.
4. It lets you zoom ‘very close to’/’very far from’ the ground and tilt camera up freely.

With some extra features to make it worth the sub.

• Saves your current camera position when you save a city.

  Next time you load a save you will appear exactly where you left off, including height, angle, and field of view.

• Save up to 21 camera positions.

  Use keyboard shortcuts to save and access camera positions. This feature is also present in another mod called Camera Additions. Except Camera Additions doesn’t work in Editors, where it’s needed most. Also, 21 is better than 10.

• Disable camera collision.

  Options to disable building, network, tree and water collision.

• Easily change FOV on the fly.

  Keyboard shortcuts to change the field of view.(Disabled if you have Enhanced Zoom Continued).

• Increases min and max zoom level.

  This mod will increase max zoom-out distance considerably, to about 4x the value of Enhanced Zoom Continued. It also allows you to zoom closer to the ground without having to enter FPS mode.
  [puu.sh]

• Lets you tilt camera upwards.

  Unlock camera to look upwards, like with camera tool selected. You don’t need ‘Totally-Free Camera’ mod if you subscribe to this.

• Reduces Near Clip Plane distance.

  Lets you go close to objects without them being ‘clipped’ before you collide with them.

• It works in Editors.

  Unlike “Camera Additions” mod, this works in Asset/Map/Theme/Scenario editor.

• Keyboard shortcuts to rotate camera, etc.

  Rotate camera, center camera or set isometric projection angles. (Useful for neat screenshots in asset editor).

• Saving current position in save-game:

  This occurs automatically whenever you save your city. Next time you load you’ll appear exactly where you left off, instead of in starting tile, allowing you to continue working on whatever you were doing when you last saved, no time lost.

  When using Editors, the position is saved globally per-editor-type rather than per-save, for obvious reasons.

• Saving and Loading custom camera positions:
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + 1-9’ and ‘CTRL + SHIFT + F1-F12’ to save a camera position. Sound feedback included, can disable in options panel if you prefer no sound.
  • ‘CTRL + 1-9’ and ‘CTRL + F1-F12’ to load a saved camera position.
  • ‘CTRL + HOME’ to load last auto-saved position from last time you saved.

  Custom positions are saved on a per-city basis when in-game and globally per-editor-type when in Editors.

• Rotate X and Y axis, Change FOV, Center, Isometric:
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + X’ and ‘CTRL + X’ to rotate X axis.
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + Y’ and ‘CTRL + Y’ to rotate Y axis.
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + C’ to center camera at X:0 Y:-15. (Only works in Asset Editor).
    
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + I’ to go into Isometric Projection at X:45 Y:35.264 (Only works in Asset Editor).
    
  • ‘CTRL + SHIFT + UP/DOWN Arrows’ to change FOV. ‘CTRL + SHIFT + LEFT Arrow’ to reset FOV. (Disabled if you use Enhanced Zoom Continued).

  Holding ALT while rotating will increase the “steps” to 45° instead of the default 15°. Holding ALT while changing FOV will make you change FOV by 1 instead of 5.

• Disable Collision:
  • Use the checkboxes to disable various types of collision. NB. When water collision is disabled, and you walk into deep water, you will “sink”, however there are no water textures underneath the water surface so everything appears as it would with no water at all. This feature is there for those who don’t want the annoying “bobbing” and “rocking” effect when you’re stationary over water.

If you forget the keyboard shortcuts, you can read them in the options panel for this mod, under “Keyboard Shortcuts help”. You can also manually enter values in the “Input” section, as well as reset the Editors settings file.

• Any mod that detours/patches “CalculateCameraHeightOffset”, “UpdateTargetPosition”, and/or “UpdateTransform” methods in CameraController class are incompatible with this mod.

• Camera Additions

  This mod is incompatible with camera additions. Pick one.

• Please let me know if you find other incompatible mods.

This mod should be compatible with Enhanced Zoom Continued (EZC), in fact, it extends it in that it makes the zoom out level even greater. However, because FPS and Vehicle camera from EZC are “Cameras” of their own, some features of Camera Positions Utility won’t work when in FPS mode. Furthermore, if EZC is enabled, the FOV features of Camera Positions Utility are disabled.