Camera

The camera is the window that the player observes the game world, the scene must have at least one camera, also can have multiple cameras at the same time. When creating a scene, Creator creates a camera named Main Camera by default as the main camera for this scene. Multi-camera support allows you to easily implement advanced customization effects, such as the two-player split screen effect, or the creation of a small scene map.

Camera Properties

• cullingMask

  cullingMask will determine which parts of the scene the camera is used to render. The cullingMask in the camera component in the Properties lists the currently available mask options, and you can combine them to generate cullingMask by selecting these options.

  For example, the cullingMask setting in the following figure indicates that the camera is used only to render the UI part of the game. Generally game UI does not need to be moved, but the player may move out of the screen, then you need another camera to follow the player.

  

  You can add or change groups through Group Manager in the Project Settings, which is the corresponding mask.

  

• zoomRatio

  Specifies the zoom ratio of the camera, and the larger the value, the larger the image displayed.

• clearFlags

  Specifies the cleanup action that needs to be made when rendering the camera.

  

• backgroundColor

  When the camera needs to clear the color, the camera will use the background color to clear the scene.

• depth

  Camera depth, used to determine the order in which the camera is rendered. The larger the value, the later the camera is rendered.

• targetTexture

  If you set the targetTexture, the contents of the camera render will not be printed on the screen, but will be rendered to the targetTexture.

  If you need to do some of the screen's post-effects, you can first render the screen to targetTexture, and then for the targetTexture to do the overall processing, finally through a sprite to show the targetTexture.

  Please refer to the Example for details.

Camera methods

• cc.Camera.findCamera

  findCamera gets the first matching camera by finding whether the camera cullingMask contains a node's group.

  cc.Camera.findCamera(node);
  

• containsNode

  Detect whether the node is affected by this camera

• render

  If you need to render the camera immediately, you can call this method to manually render the camera, such as when capturing a screenshot.

  camera.render();
  

Coordinate translation

A common problem is that when the camera is moved, rotated, or scaled, the coordinates acquired by the click event are used to test the coordinates of the node, which often results in incorrect results.

Because the click coordinates obtained at this time are the coordinates in the camera coordinate system, we need to transform this coordinate into the world coordinate system to continue the operation with the node's world coordinates.

Here are some functions of camera coordinate transformation:

// Transform a point from camera coordinates to world coordinates
camera.getCameraToWorldPoint(point, out);
// Transform a point from world coordinates to camera coordinates
camera.getWorldToCameraPoint(point, out);

// Gets the matrix from the camera coordinate system to the world coordinate system
camera.getCameraToWorldMatrix(out);
// Gets the matrix from world coordinate system to the camera coordinate system
camera.getWorldToCameraMatrix(out);

Screenshot

Screenshot is a very common demand in the game, through the camera and rendertexture we can quickly achieve a screenshot function. For the screenshot, there is a complete test example in example-case, the code example please refer to 07_capture_texture.

let node = new cc.Node();
node.parent = cc.director.getScene();
let camera = node.addComponent(cc.Camera);

// Set the CullingMask of the screenshot you want
camera.cullingMask = 0xffffffff;

// Create a new RenderTexture and set this new RenderTexture to the camera's targetTexture so that the camera content will be rendered to this new RenderTexture
let texture = new cc.RenderTexture();
let gl = cc.game._renderContext;
// If the Mask component is not included in the screenshot, you don't need to pass the third parameter.
texture.initWithSize(cc.visibleRect.width, cc.visibleRect.height, gl.STENCIL_INDEX8);
camera.targetTexture = texture;

// Render the camera once, updating the content once into RenderTexture
camera.render();

// This allows the data to be obtained from the rendertexture.
let data = texture.readPixels();

// Then you can manipulate the data.
let canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
let ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
canvas.width = texture.width;
canvas.height = texture.height;

let rowBytes = width * 4;
for (let row = 0; row < height; row++) {
    let srow = height - 1 - row;
    let imageData = ctx.createImageData(width, 1);
    let start = srow*width*4;
    for (let i = 0; i < rowBytes; i++) {
        imageData.data[i] = data[start+i];
    }

    ctx.putImageData(imageData, 0, row);
}

let dataURL = canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg");
let img = document.createElement("img");
img.src = dataURL;

Save screenshot file

Creator has added the ability to save screenshot files since v2.0.2. First take a screenshot, and then use the following method after readPixels:

var data = renderTexture.readPixels();
var filePath = jsb.fileUtils.getWritablePath() + 'Image.png';
jsb.saveImageData(data, imgWidth, imgHeight, filePath)

Please refer to capture_to_native for details.

The screenshot in WeChat

Because of WeChat Mini Games does not support createImageData, nor does it support creating image with data url, so the above method needs some flexibility. After using Camera to render the desired results, use WeChat's screenshot API: canvas.toTempFilePath to save and use the screenshot.

Case

Please refer to example-case for details, create a sample collection project from the editor to see the actual running effect.