Disabling Cameras in Gladius

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Last night I was able to get a second Gladius camera added to my solar system simulation. I had meant to be able to switch between the two cameras but it turned out that I did not need to—I could watch both cameras at the same time:



That helped to identify what I was doing wrong, but I would still like to figure out how to switch between cameras rather than seeing two (or more) at the same time.

As mentioned yesterday, there is a CubicVR.js simulation that switches cameras. Since Gladius uses CubicVR.js as its rendering backend, I ought to be able to achieve the same effect in my Gladius example.

In the source for the example, there is a call to scene.setCamera() that effects the desired camera shift. I search through the Gladius source for something similar, but for naught. I had not really expected to find such a thing—if it had existed, then I would be hard pressed to explained both camera angles showing at the same time.

Digging further, I find that the gladius-cubicvr renderer does appear to render all cameras:

      // Render the space for each camera
      for( i = 0, l = cameraEntities.length; i < l; ++ i ) {
        var camera = cameraEntities[ i ].findComponent( "Camera" );
        // Render camera + objects
      }

The only thing that I can think to do is trick findComponent() into not seeing one or more of the cameras.

So I try to set the Gladius Entity containing the camera to inactive:

space.findNamed( "camera1" ).setActive(false);

That has no effect.

Next I try to actually remove the camera:

var thing = space.findNamed( "camera1" ).removeComponent("Camera");

That does have the desired outcome as only one view is now present:

I can even re-add the camera if needs be:

space.findNamed( "camera1" ).addComponent(thing);

I am not certain that is the best way to go about doing it, but it works.


Day #430