Game Maker View explanation

You might have to zoom in to see it, but what I'm trying to show here is Hbor and Vbor. By assigning these two values, you create a buffer of that many pixels between the edge of your player, and the edge of the screen. Hsp and Vsp are the speed of the camera, if I remember correctly. Setting them to -1 will teleport them to the right spot without any wait. If it's not -1, then the camera will move to the right spot at that speed.

This is a demonstration of this in action. The view follows the player, with a distance from the border.