Determining the camera's direction and/or angle

[elcius]

Addons cannot determine the camera's direction and/or angle.

can be done using party nameplates, www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hl8_48e9KM

[myrroddin]

That was broken during Wrath, and is invalid. AddOns cannot determine the camera's direction and/or angle. Blizzard specifically release patch 3.3 to address this.

[elcius]

Originally Posted by myrroddin That was broken during Wrath, and is invalid. AddOns cannot determine the camera's direction and/or angle. Blizzard specifically release patch 3.3 to address this.

that video was taken in 5.3
you can fairly easily calculate the camera pitch when provided with a party members nameplate by solving the SSA triangle of the distance between the party member and the zoom of the camera, and the angle between the nameplate and the player/center line, this gets you camera distance from the target, from there you calculate the 2 possible intersection points and use the most logical one.
when provided with more than 1 nameplate you don't even need to hook the zoom or use player direction and can just reverse the transformation matrices to calculate the camera location, but that's a little more complicated.

[Dridzt]

That's a pretty nice workaround.

Although I presume if it ends up into a popular addon they'll just remove more camera info from being accessible to addons.

[Malsomnus]

That calculation sounds like an awesome workaround indeed. If anybody turns that into a usable API, I can create an add-on that makes virtual pets that follow you around and only you can see

[semlar]

I explained how to do this exact thing in the #WoWUIDev channel 5 months ago and everyone pretty much universally decided it would be a bad idea to implement on the off-chance blizzard breaks nameplates.

On the other hand, I've been infinitely curious what blizzard's reaction would be and now that the cat's out of the bag it's only a matter of time before someone resurrects something like AVR Encounters.

[Malsomnus]

I would like to believe that other developers, who may consider writing the new AVR, would avoid it because they already know for a fact Blizzard disapproves of it, and probably realize that in the not-that-long run they will gain nothing and, most likely, lose whatever bit of the API Blizzard breaks as a result.

[Resike]

Damn, i want this in my addon.
The question is is it working when you jump/move/change z axis. Because the guy in the video didn't really wanted to move.