Human follow cam for MoW blog - Merch2

Whilst playing the excellent '3000 miles to Tokyo' mod a few weeks ago I found the cave cut scene with the infantry follow cam a real exciting prospect and thought I might be able to modify a code line to run as a playable feature instead of a cut scene. A long weeks worth after work evenings of frustrating trial and error with notepad, the GEM and the old SoEdit program for the angular values in the matrix 34 table and here it is!
The follow cam works with most human functions in normal gameplay and just like the Kingtiger from RGB and the Mustang for RGB2 the viewpoint remains a trade off between leaving enough horizon in view to see where you are going and to steer/aim in direct control mode. This cam also works with thrown items like knives and nades and doesn't lock up pointing skywards.
I always wanted a human follow cam a bit like shift+F in the GEM but for real gameplay - well it's finally here and there is a notepad tweak for the mod that will even convert it to full first person style - although it is a bit hard to control your man with that mode. Because the camera hovers against a blank wall whenever your player is in cover there I've modified the triggers to allow the camera to be switched on and off at will to prevent bad vision sectors ruining the gameplay. Also unlike RGB if you don't like follow cam you can switch it off for the whole of this stealth level and just play with normal camera.
I had to shrink the 'active' icon (yellow arrow around the selected soldier) so it didn't fill up half the screen in follow cam and adjust the FoView to a larger angle than normal gameplay to get all of the body in view or when you lay down the player disappeared off the bottom of the screen!
Have also worked on some new skins and portraits this last few months to wrap up the storyline for RGB2 - progress continues slow but steady - the follow cam has added an extra twist to some of the levels but this will be the last code tweak as I need to get back mapping and scripting again to get this all tied together. That's all for now and thanks for your support so far...