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dot-spectate

Who is watching whom, what the server lets them see, and where the camera is — observer modes, a force-camera policy, the death-cam chain and a broadcast delay.

dot-spectate decides who a spectator may watch and computes where their camera should be. It is a competitive-integrity system before it is a camera: the camera is four lines of vector arithmetic, and the rest exists because spectator views get used to cheat.

Requires dot-core.

Usage

var spectate := DotSpectatorManager.new()
spectate.participants_fn = roster.keys
spectate.team_fn = match_node.team_of
spectate.alive_fn = world.is_alive
spectate.pose_fn = world.eye_transform_of     # eyes, not the body's origin
spectate.setup()
add_child(spectate)

spectate.next_target(me)
spectate.set_mode(me, DotSpectatorView.Mode.CHASE)

Then, separately, once a tick and once a frame:

spectate.advance(tick)
camera.global_transform = spectate.camera_of(me)

It computes a transform and touches no camera, which is what lets one manager serve a 3D rig, a 2D one (camera_2d_of gives a position and an angle) and a headless suite.

A client draws its cycle list from targets_for(me) and greys entries out with may_watch(me, them), so it never shows a name the server would refuse.

The two server-side rules
Force camera all, own team only, or nobody — with the numbering operators already type from memory. “Own team only” also forces first person, because a chase camera behind a team-mate sees round corners that team-mate cannot.
Broadcast delay The camera samples a tick in the past, so a spectator is not a live intelligence feed. Ninety seconds is the usual broadcast default; a competitive server’s is a few.

The death-camera chain

spectate.on_death("ada", where_they_fell, "bob", tick)

Death cam on the body, freeze cam on the killer, then a real target — three timers handing over to each other. The last hand-over is the one a game that writes this itself usually misses, leaving the player looking at their killer until they respawn.

Play