Smoothing out the angles on a camera

[Mr Lenguini]

I set up a cinematic where the camera circles an object while staying pointed towards it. I calculated the angle of the camera by
camera.angles = vectoangles(targ.origin - camera.origin);
where this is updated every cycle of the game, but the change in angle is only changing in whole units and looks really jerky. Is there a way to smooth out the camera angle change or is it some sort of limit of the game. The player view point moves fluid enough so there has to be a way to emulate the smoothness. Any help or ideas.

[Wazat]

The problem is Quake tends to send angles to the client (even when you're playing single player it emulates client-server format) as bytes, meaning you can only have 256 possibilities for each of the 3 360-degree angles. This makes things pretty jerky, unfortunately.

Darkplaces I believe has fixed this, and sends large angles by default...? This bug was the bane of existance for a long time for a lot of people, but in DP at least it seems to be fixed. I don't know if I set an option or something.

[Sajt]

It isn't a bug, it was just compressed because Quake didn't ever have a need for really precise values, so it did it to save on net bandwidth. IMO they should have made SVC_SETANGLE take WriteCoord instead of WriteAngle...

[Mr Lenguini]

So what your trying to say is there is absolutely no way around this in regular .qc based quake coding at all, right?

[Wazat]

Probably not. Most Quake engines still have the problem with byte-sized angles. As said above, this was a design decision by ID Software, not a bug; however, it's become a major inconvenience now that we've raised the bar in our mods.

The one non-new-engine-solution might be to use the player as the camera... but I think self.fixangle=TRUE; does the same as the setangle writebyte, so perhaps that won't fix it either.

If you can't get DP or the other high-graphics engines to run on your compy, then perhaps Spike has fixed it in FTE? If you're trying to avoid all new engines completely, then I don't know what to tell you.