Ok, here are my suggestions so far.

For the orthographic camera make the projection plane go through the
location point rather than through the (location+direction) point. This
should keep those objects from disappearing.

And here's a big change - make the angle keyword adjust the up and right
vectors instead of the direction vector. For the perspective camera it will
make no difference. For the orthographic camera it will mean that the
viewing area will be adjusted no matter if the angle is specified before or
after the orthographic keyword. This means that the orthographic keyword can
be specified at the very start, and yet the angle trick will still work.
Backwards compatibility won't be a big problem as it is doubtful that users
have specified an angle keyword after the orthographic keyword when it's
ignored anyway. If they have, they can just remove it, and the scene will
render like before.

I'm not fully aware of how it will affect the other camera types, but I
think it should be no problem to adapt them to work well with this new
behavior.

If this change is implemented there will AFAIK be nothing that adjusts the
length of the direction vector. This alone is a great step towards a more
predictable and intuitive camera.

Now here's one more change that will be possible if the before mentioned
change to the angle parameter is implemented - h_angle and v_angle should be
allowed for all camera types! h_angle will only adjust the right vector
while v_angle will adjust the up vector. This is particularly useful for
camera types like cylinder camera type 1 and 3, where the vertical and
horizontal angle respectively can currently only be set indirectly by
messing with the up and right vectors respectively. h_angle and v_angle were
never needed any more for the spherical camera in the first place than for
those camera types.

So, what do you say?

BTW, the documentation for the various camera types really should be
improved. I think I can do that to some extent, but I'd like to wait till
the camera mechanism is fixed.

Rune
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