   Chase Cameras
  Hi I am currently working on a driving game for my final year project at university. The next stage for me is to have the camera follow the car in a nice way, acting independently of the cars movements but following it all the time. It should be a pretty standard camera that all of the driving games use but i cannot find any help on it as of yet. If anyone could provide any suggestions or point me to some papers or examples then i would be most grateful. I am using DirectX 9 by the way.Thanks 
  attach the camera to a "boom" that comes off the vehicle that you''re chasing and attach it to the "boom" with a spring.  the boom and spring are obviously virtual constructs.  the spring you can handle by looking up the physics of springs.you get from this a camera that "tries" to stay right at the end of the boom, but when the car turns it "lags" a little behind the turn.  the amount of lag is controlled by the "mass" of the camera and the "springyness" of the spring.  and the faster the car turns, the more the camera lags.  also when the camera is really lagged it will move faster towards the boom the further away it is.  it''s a pleasing effect.for extra credit, give the camera a bounding volume and have it collision detect with your other game objects.  this will prevent it from clipping inside of other objects.  if you make the collision volume big enough you''ll end up with a pretty smooth camera.if you haven''t looked at it yet, rent a copy of Jax & Daxter (right spellings???) and take a look at their camera.  it''s very smooth.  also take a look at other racing games and reverse engineer how their camera works....-me 