createCamera method should not change the current camera

[quarks]

Topic

The method createCamera does the following -

1. creates a new camera
2. changes the current camera to the new one
3. returns the new camera

I am suggesting that changing the current camera is bad practice because

• the method title does not suggest that this is going to happen
• the method documentation does not say that this is going to happen
• there is a method called setCamera that performs this action

and most importantly

• if the user creates a camera for later use (e.g. using multiple cameras) then they must restore the current camera to its previous state.

Technically this isn't a bug rather a nuisance.

Personally I would like to see this changed so the method simply creates and returns a new camera. The user can easily use the new camera immediately or save it for later.

I am interested in hearing what others think.

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[davepagurek]

The docs actually do mention that this will happen (emphasis mine):

Creates a new p5.Camera object and sets it as the current (active) camera.

That said, I also ran into some bugs myself due to this, it's easy to miss in the docs and the method name doesn't indicate that this will happen. I think it could make sense to make people call setCamera(yourCamera) as a second step, but this would be a breaking change for sketches that currently rely on it getting automatically set.

Does p5 have a process for introducing breaking changes? If that's what major version number releases are for, we can potentially keep this on the backburner until then.

[quarks]

When I read that I didn't get past

Creates a new p5.Camera object

My mistake LOL, but I still believe this is an important issue and a breaking change is justified.

[quarks]

I believe this can be implemented without a breaking change as existing sketches would still set it as the current camera

p5.prototype.createCamera = function (makeCurrent = true) {
    this._assert3d('createCamera');
    const _cam = new p5.Camera(this._renderer);

    // compute default camera settings, then set a default camera
    _cam._computeCameraDefaultSettings();
    _cam._setDefaultCamera();

    // set renderer current camera to the new camera
    if (makeCurrent)
        this._renderer._curCamera = _cam;

    return _cam;
};

This change would make it easier to create and manage multiple cameras.

[davepagurek]

We ended up deciding to change this default in p5 2.0 because even though it's a breaking change, we think making it optional is maybe more confusing than just having saner defaults. The PR doing that is here if you're curious! #7102