Hello! I'm interested to try out this mod, but I'm going to be playing a modded playthrough with a relatively large base. So could you help me understand a bit better how the "Base" and "area" trackers work? I'm adding this mod to a save that's already 7 hours in, so will it just automatically be zoomed out to include my entire base, including distance outposts? If so, it'll just be so zoomed out that it's pointless.

So I'm wondering how to essentially have it follow the player, but only zoomed out to a certain level, so you can see new areas develop, but without the camera jittering around centered on the player. I'm imagining I can do this with areas, but not sure how. Do I need to start a new "base" tracker each time I go to do a new build? Or is this accomplished with areas? Or do you have other ideas?

Thanks for the help!

The base tracker zooms out to fit the entire base automatically (including outposts). It does this by keeping track of what you build, so for an existing save it will ignore the existing buildings. There is a button to recalculate the bounding box of the base. But this is something that you do not want, as it will include your outposts as well. So instead you could 'initialize' the base tracker by building (and removing) buildings on the corners of the area that you would like to keep track of.

Pro tip: When you build another outpost that the base tracker should ignore, you can pause the tracker. It will ignore the miners, stations, etc. you build. When you unpause the tracker, it will continue tracking the things you build next.

The area tracker keeps track of the defined area, it will not automatically resize. It can be used when you plan to build something, and want to show the complete build area without zooming out gradually. For example, you could focus the tracker on the ore field and the (planned) station and build the whole thing.

It is up to your ideas, inspiration and editing skills to select what tracker(s) you like to use. Basically when you don't have a plan for the final timelapse the area tracker will just keep tracking everything. If you have some sort of a plan, e.g. zooming in/out of certain areas where you are building you could use the area tracker (and smooth zooming enabled on the camera).

Good luck making a cool timelapse!

So there seem to be some issues with this mod. The player tracker doesn't seem to be working (or there is a feature that is in the way of doing what I would like). Due to not wanting to do a bunch of editing, I was hoping to just have a basic tracker that follows the player and takes a screenshot every 5-10 seconds or something. However, the player tracker seems to consistently deactivate. based on the description, it seems you have programmed player tracker to deactivate upon building an entity, but this is a bit of a non-feature as some people might just want consistent player tracking (like me =D)

In the long run, I think a really cool feature could be "dynamic player tracking & zoom". So this would essentially follow the player, with the camera following at some sort of smooth movement pattern (potentially with a variable to set how "hard & fast" it follows), but it would zoom out as the player moves around, and only slowly zoom back in towards the player. It would also stay zoomed out to level "X" at minimum, where X is set by player (currently when doing player tracker, you cannot set zoom level for this, which would be another great feature). So this way when the player runs really fast, it does a combo of both moving and zooming out to keep the player and their constructions in frame, but then works its way back towards normal zoom as the player stands still.

Thanks for reading!

What you might want to look into is setting up your camera properly, in the bottom left part of the camera control window by default it has 3 trackers in it(base player and area) get rid of base and area from that list and it will only follow the player around.

What you can also do is setup multiple camera settings by creating new camera's and setting those up to only follow the player.

But if you want to stick to just one camera then the settings of the following picture should suffice for you to be able to do what you want https://i.imgur.com/EJzRxGl.png

I have a series of camera's setup that I use depending on what I am working on.
1. An action camera set to speed gain of 30 (used for player travel via car or train across long distances)
2. An "base" camera that is an area camera around my main base
3. A work camera that I define the area's of my projects in beforehand(this includes the main area and 2 camera's that will be bigger by a 2 chunks and 10 chunks incase the project grows bigger then expected)
4. An base camera that I default to if i want to have 30-60 seconds worth of the entire maps view(this uses a series of trackers that have smooth camera movement unticked to save on time)

As I use Space exploration and factorissimo I have a dozen or so camera's setup for different surfaces that follow the above setup(for each surface) so that if the player moves between surfaces I can pause and swap to the different camera setup with little issue.

Lol. What a rude sentence "you might want to look into setting it up properly". Well buddy, guess what, I did exactly what you described already and it doesn't work. I have only a player tracker in existence and the camera has only the player tracker enabled. It still stops itself regularly. I might be an idiot, but I'm not that stupid at least.

Sorry for my late response (IRL happened ;) ). Not all people are native English (I am certainly not), so some things might be considered rude/normal depending on the mother language, so let and keep this in mind :)

True, the Player Tracker disables when an entity is build, as the whole idea is to keep the camera on the player until the base is getting build (to have a sort of intro for a timelapse). Different players different ideas, and oyu are not the first player with a different use for the tracker!

I am aware of this and a ticket to make this behavior configurable was made already: https://github.com/veger/TLBE/issues/36

I think I'll implement this soon, as some other change needs to get tested and released, as this one seems quite easy to implement.

Note that, the tracker/camera supports 'smooth camera movement', but smart following, trying to stay/keep player in the shot is not that trivial (and not supported (yet)).

Keep following player is a new option in version 1.4.5 for the player tracker

Sorry for my late response (IRL happened ;) ). Not all people are native English (I am certainly not), so some things might be considered rude/normal depending on the mother language, so let and keep this in mind :)

True, the Player Tracker disables when an entity is build, as the whole idea is to keep the camera on the player until the base is getting build (to have a sort of intro for a timelapse). Different players different ideas, and oyu are not the first player with a different use for the tracker!

I am aware of this and a ticket to make this behavior configurable was made already: https://github.com/veger/TLBE/issues/36

I think I'll implement this soon, as some other change needs to get tested and released, as this one seems quite easy to implement.

Note that, the tracker/camera supports 'smooth camera movement', but smart following, trying to stay/keep player in the shot is not that trivial (and not supported (yet)).

That's a good point I will keep in mind!

In any case, thank you so much for adding that feature! This will make it much easier to do a "uber simple" timelapse that is both effective at always following the player's moves, but also not being so zoomed out that the file is too big or too grainy.

I'm excited to try it out!

Looking forward to find your timelapses online :)
(main/only reason to build the mod is to watch the timelapses players make ;) )