Camera Shaking effect

[aba211]

Hey!

I have troubles getting a camera shake done for my game. I'm trying to make the camera
shake everytime an particular event occurs. Like something hits you or explodes.

Here is how my camera movement is done:
http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/5598/53876399.png

[DavidN]

Here's an idea that might make things simple if it works... you could set the camera's position to the action point of your scrolling object, and handle the shaking by giving the scrolling object an animation where you move the action point around.

[mobichan]

That's sounds like an amazingly awesome approach.

[aba211]

I don't seemt understand how I can set cams position to scrolling objects action point. What event am I missing here?

http://www.2shared.com/file/OmC2bInG/camera.html
I uploaded the mfa file If it helps to clear things

[DavidN]

It's an option in the "Set position" event - if you click the Options button on the window you get when you're asked to choose a position (after clicking the AC object), you can select "action point".

The action point itself is edited in the animation of the object.

[aba211]

ah I actually solved it! Action point method worked out!

[JDWB]

That's one way. The only problem with that is you have to be on that animation when it happens. So if you want to jump or shoo during a shake, it either won't be animated, or you interrupt the shake.

I actually just did this on one of my games. I made the camera follow an invisible object ("Tracker"), which followed the player. Then I gave the tracker a compact, squiggly path movement (which doesn't start at the end of the frame. Then when the camera needs to shake, the tracker does it's path; at the end, it goes back to being still.

[RayMarble]

I just shake the layer both horizontally and vertically in every loop by Random(n) of pixels and then lower the (n) in every round. This approach has many benefits, for example it looks different every time, it's easy to maintain, the actions on screen can continue whatever they're doing, no need to introduce new specialized objects (other than using the Layer object, but that one is probably already in) etc etc.

Under certain rare circumstances this can cause problems in Flash but maybe it's inspirational to take a look. (You'll need TGF2/MMF2 Unicode to open the source but in the attachment are both a Flash example that will show you how it works and a screenshot of the code that shows how's it done.)

There was also a "Shaking Widget" somewhere in the forum, maybe that one's worth taking a look too (I ended up not using it but maybe you'll prefer that method to Layer-based one).

Edit:
Same example but added quick backdrop so it's more obvious what's happening.