Unlock the secrets to a seamless shared camera experience in Unreal Engine 5. This guide walks you through creating a dynamic system that keeps all players perfectly framed, enhancing your couch co-op games.
Creating engaging couch co-op experiences often hinges on a smooth, intuitive camera system. While split-screen has its place, a shared camera can offer a more cohesive and immersive gameplay flow, keeping all players focused on the action without visual distractions. If you’ve ever struggled with players wandering off-screen or the camera feeling clunky, you’re in the right place.
In a detailed tutorial, the experts at UNF Games—comprising the talented Ram and Mao—demonstrate how to construct a robust shared camera system in Unreal Engine 5. Their approach ensures that all participants remain perfectly framed, regardless of how far they spread out or gather together. UNF Games is well-known for their comprehensive educational content, offering resources like their guide to creating games in Unreal Engine 5 and various on-demand courses to sharpen your development skills. They even host a vibrant Discord community where creators can connect and share insights. Now, let’s dive into their method for building a dynamic shared camera.
Disabling Split-Screen and Initial Setup
The journey begins with the standard third-person template in Unreal Engine 5. The first crucial step is to disable split-screen, as the goal is a unified camera experience. This is typically done within the Game Mode settings. To facilitate testing, you then add multiple player start points to your level, allowing you to simulate a multi-player environment. For developers using Unreal Engine 5.6, a common input setup error can arise. Ram and Mao advise resolving this by changing the “Begin Play” event to “On Possess” in the player’s controller blueprint. This ensures the controller is properly initialized before the player pawn exists, preventing potential headaches.
Crafting Your Custom Camera System
Next, the tutorial guides us through creating a custom camera actor blueprint. This actor is composed of a spring arm component and a camera component. The spring arm’s target arm length is adjusted, its collision test is removed to prevent unwanted obstructions, and it is rotated to achieve the desired viewing angle. The camera component’s rotation is then reset to ensure it aligns correctly with the spring arm. Interestingly, this custom camera actor isn’t placed directly in the level. Instead, a camera manager actor (a class found under “all classes”) takes center stage. Within the camera manager’s event graph, the custom camera actor is spawned at a zero-zero location and promoted to a variable for easy manipulation. To guarantee that only one instance of this shared camera exists, a check is implemented to verify if the local player is the first player (index 0) before spawning the camera and assigning its point of view to the controller. A custom event in the camera manager handles camera setup, deftly circumventing controller possession issues encountered with “Begin Play.” Finally, this custom camera manager is assigned in the project’s Game Mode class defaults, and a reference to it is obtained within the Player Controller blueprint. The custom setup event is then called at the end of a “Sequence” node to avoid interfering with existing template logic. At this stage, the camera will be static and shared among all players, ready for dynamic enhancements.
Dynamic Positioning: Keeping Players Centered
To make the camera dynamic, its location is updated within the shared camera’s event tick based on the players present in the game. The Game Mode is queried to get the current number of players. A vector variable, aptly named “Location Sum,” is used to accumulate the actor locations of all players through a “For Loop.” This loop iterates from index 0 to the player count minus one, adding each player’s location to the “Location Sum.” After summing all player locations, the “Location Sum” is divided by the total number of players to derive an average, or central, location. This calculated average is then set as the camera actor’s new position, ensuring the camera always centers itself among all active players, providing a balanced view of the action.
Adaptive Framing: The Power of Dynamic Zoom
Keeping players within the frame requires more than just centering; it demands intelligent zooming. UNF Games tackles this by dynamically adjusting the spring arm’s target arm length. Another “For Loop” iterates through all players to determine the maximum distance of any player from the camera’s current center point. This maximum distance is then fed into a “Map Range Clamped” node, which transforms it into a zoom factor (e.g., scaling from 1 to 1.5). This zoom factor is multiplied by a base arm length variable (set in class defaults) to determine the new target arm length. This effectively zooms the camera out when players spread apart and zooms it back in when they are closer, maintaining optimal framing without manual intervention.
Enforcing Boundaries: Guiding Player Movement
Finally, to prevent players from moving beyond the camera’s bounds, modifications are made within the character blueprint’s “Move” function. A reference to the shared camera is obtained and validated once. The character’s movement is reoriented to use the shared camera’s world rotation instead of the control rotation, ensuring consistent movement relative to the shared view. Boundary checks are then implemented: the relative vector from the player to the camera’s center is calculated. A dot product is performed between this relative vector and the camera’s right vector (for horizontal movement) or up vector (for vertical movement) to project the player’s position onto the camera’s local axes. The absolute value of this dot product is compared against a “Max Distance” value (derived from the camera’s properties), and movement input is conditionally allowed. Movement is permitted if the player is within bounds and moving towards the center, or if they are already inside. This intricate logic, applied for both positive and negative directions on both X and Y axes using “And” and “Or” nodes, combines conditions to create a robust boundary system. The “Max Distance” values can be tweaked with multipliers to differentiate between horizontal and vertical bounds, ensuring a balanced and controlled framing experience.
Implementing a shared camera system like this can significantly elevate the quality of your Unreal Engine 5 co-op games, offering players a more polished and enjoyable experience. The detailed steps provided by Ram and Mao of UNF Games break down a complex system into manageable parts, allowing you to create truly dynamic and responsive camera behavior. Experiment with the parameters and logic to tailor the system to your specific game’s needs. For more expert insights and to connect with a community of passionate creators, be sure to check out UNF Games’ resources and join their Discord server!
