Panning

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

When I say "panning", I mean both the Zork Nemesis horizontal pan and the Black Dahlia vertical pan.

I know this is simply not possible in AGS. At least, not realisticaly - from what I've seen, these pans, which are like rotating the player on his own axis, rely heavily on some sort of change that gets made to the picture which dynamically relocates the... the... damn, how do you say "ponto de fuga"... well, that point in the horizon to which lines converge. Without that dynamic relocation, it wouldn't look as tough we were rotating, but "strafing" - like sliding to the left or the right. Like the looping room in the demo game - it doesn't look as though it's rotating around an axis, it looks as though it's scrolling left/right.

I'm not suggesting OR asking for a plugin/ags function that would do this, because I have an idea it would be VERY hard. But I'd like to know HOW FEASIBLE would this be to implement, some time in the future, possibly by plugin, by someone, if not CJ himself.

[poc301]

I remember a game a while back called the 7th Guest.  I remember that being a point-click and move type game.

Would it be possible to make a long screen (something like 1280x240).  The first 320 pixels would be the view of the screen 'looking left', the second 320 pixels would be the view of the 'camera turning left' (which would need to be done with perspective and motion blur in mind).  The 3rd 320 pixels would be the 'straight ahead' view.  Then the 4th and 5th would be like the 1st and 2nd but to the right hand side.

I think it might work, but it'd take some artistic ability.

[Snarky]

No, the effect cannot be achieved with a static image.

Have a look at some VR Panorama pictures to observe how it works. Different parts of the picture are stretched and scaled differently, somewhat like a "pinch" deformation around the centre. (The word you're looking for Rui is "vanishing point".)

Doing the perspective effect itself seems simple enough, both to work out the formula and to do the mapping. There are probably other issues you'd have to deal with too, though.

I don't really care for the first-person POV, and making it 360-degrees just makes it worse. However, I think it could be a cool effect for third-person games. (Did QFG5 do this, or did it just scale and move the background around?) Of course, then you'd have to transform the character, walkable areas and walkbehinds as well as the hotspots.

[Babar]

ponto de fuga= vanishing point??
I think I know what you are talking about. I think Evil designed something like this a while back (at least I think it was evil). It involved some scripting, a "circular" type BG. It was as if the point of view was one, but it could be rotated around (like a circular building with the camera in the middle). Maybe someone will tell you who knows what they are talking about.

EDIT: Dang nabbit (or something). I really have a bad memory. All I remember is someone posting a black and white wireframe image of a circular room and having it animated to give the "panning" effect (rotating the camera at one fixed point), while explaining how it could be done

EDIT EDIT: Woohoo! I ares teh king. I hope this is what you are looking for Rui:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=13672.0
unfortunately, most of the image links are broken.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Thank you for the link, Babar. Just in case Evil doesn't stumble upon this thread, I'll PM him about it.

Doing the perspective effect itself seems simple enough, both to work out the formula and to do the mapping.

I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. I mean, I can understand doing that for a single image, but not for umpteen images... which is probably not what you meant, anyway. I get the feeling you have a solid idea of how to do it, though. Could you please expand?

[Snarky]

Thank you for the link, Babar. Just in case Evil doesn't stumble upon this thread, I'll PM him about it.

Doing the perspective effect itself seems simple enough, both to work out the formula and to do the mapping.

I'm sorry, but I don't quite understand. I mean, I can understand doing that for a single image, but not for umpteen images... which is probably not what you meant, anyway. I get the feeling you have a solid idea of how to do it, though. Could you please expand?

I meant the task of implementing a panorama lense filter. Weren't you asking whether it would be feasible to add something like that to AGS? The math and coding required to transform suitable images into a nice rotating panorama is not hard. (Of course, whether it would be hard to add it to AGS is a very different question.)

I have no idea how difficult it is to draw backgrounds that look right with the panorama distortion. Many people have difficulty with regular perspective, so I'm sure it would be a challenge. I was pretty much assuming that you'd use 3D rendered backgrounds to get around this problem.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Ah, ok. Sorry. That was indeed my question. I musta been thinking about something else.

...wonder if anyone ever will. Implement that filter in a plugin or AGS itself, I mean.

[Doctor Oakroot]

Old cartoons achieved this by having several layers of background that could be scrolled at different speeds.

Any reason why you couldn't build a background from, say, four objects (that cover more than the whole room in size but have transparent areas) and scroll by repositioning the objects at different rates? Haven't tried this, but I suspect it would work.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

*cough*you're-talking-about-parallax-scrolling,-not-panning*cough*

[Evil]

Well, Rui PMed me about my old topic and after 10 minutes of searching I found some old pictures.

The theroy behind my thread was that you could walk all the way around a city block in the same 'room'. People could map out entire cities only using several rooms. My threory had a good base but the images weren't the best.



In order for the character too look like it was walking around the corner, there was extensive character sizing and scrolling. Not only that but the images have to be HUGE in order for it to gradually move.

I did some other tests but this one was the best. The box with the circle represented character size. It's still rough and far too small, but it put a new perspective on moving around a building.

[Doctor Oakroot]

*cough*you're-talking-about-parallax-scrolling,-not-panning*cough*

I think you could achieve panning using parallax scrolling. But, as I said, I haven't tried it.

Probably true that there would be unresolvable perspective errors (but that's true of my drawings anyway  )

[Necro]

YEah actually I remember a scroll in full throttle , i belive it was a above view of the open road that achieved the effect perfectly, and it was just a larger static image, but when scrolled at the right resolution *appeared* to be rotating the camera, i tried it once myself , but the perspective is hard to get a handle on