Continuious 3D Walking

[MrColossal]

yea you better apologize! who do you think you are? stick to giving advice in the beginners tech that actually helps people and leave the big questions to the big boys...

now if you'll excuse me i'll go back to moderating a forum full of fart and poop jokes.........

Eric "Big Boy" Colossal

[shbaz]

You could seperate it with a fence or something weird like that, or have it transport you to a new identical room, but that wouldn't be seamless.

I like the idea, personally.

[Scorpiorus]

I guess you are refering to panoramic viewing (like in Quest for Glory V or Myst III: Exile)

Try googling for "panoramic view" or "panoviewer"

For instace, look here for the implementation via the opengl functions http://glscene.sourceforge.net/gallery_users.htm Spherical Panorama Viewer (exe + delphi source)

[edit]
direct link: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/glscene/PanoViewer.zip?download

Something like that can't <edit> can </edit> be build into AGS as a plugin, for example.

[Layabout]

I can't remember, but i'm pretty sure a continueous loop can be done. I might be imagining things though. CJ will know.

[Gilbert]

It can be done, with some tricks and scripting though, as illustrated by Kairus' looping demo (which was later incorporated into teh demo game I think).

[Ashen]

That's what I said a few posts ago.
There isn't actually a 'Loop Room' function, as far as I know, but the scripting needed to do it is in Demo Quest.

Sorry for repeating myself, but....

[Scorpiorus]

With scrolling only the background view would be too flat in my opinion, thus it wouldn't provide the desired effect.

[Ishmael]

I got the thruts of this... Who do I give credit to if and when I use this in my game? To Evil?

[Ginny]

I really like this idea. Wouldn't it be possible to use character.x and character.y settings for the main char and use something like SetViewport to make the room loop?

[Davis]

I got the thruts of this... Who do I give credit to if and when I use this in my game? To Evil?

To yourself.

[Evil]

With scrolling only the background view would be too flat in my opinion, thus it wouldn't provide the desired effect.

Thats the thing, you make the image panoramic and set some scaling and it looks as if the building is actually 3D, like a 3D inviorment.

[Scorpiorus]

While the scaling will suit well for the character, the background needs to be passed though some sort of the distortion filter on the fly. If you open these jpegs that provided along with the ponoviewer with some ordinary viewer or paintbrush you'll see they are not look like a panoramic image yet.

[Ali]

I think Evil meant for walking around the inside of a 4 sided building...if this were for walking around the outside the lines would be going the opposite direction...

If I stand in the middleÃ,  of a room and rotate (as so often I do) the corners are further awaf from me than the middles of the walls. If this is an interior the 'bulges' in the walls should come down from the corners, not up, a character getting larger at the bottoms of the bulges.

Since the bulges go up, I presume we are outside a building, tracking around it with a character who gets larger at the corners.

And I think Scorpius is right, games with 360 degree viewing display flat images through a kind of fish-eye lens that simulates 3D. I was thinking though- if AGS allowed frame by frame control of AVIs or other video files and allowed you to use a video as a backdrop (which might be possible and I just can't work it out) then you could achieve this effect by creating an animation using 3D software that pans 360 degrees inside a 3D interior or around a flat image (with distortion).

Then a character could stand in the centre of the screen and the video would play forwards when you click to it's right and backwards when you click to its left and so on...

[shbaz]

you could achieve this effect by creating an animation using 3D software that pans 360 degrees inside a 3D interior or around a flat image (with distortion).

You could do that and stitch the files together to form a panorama and use Evil's method too, depending on how complex the scene is. Blender and any other worthy 3d app have Panorama Renderer's anyways, but they look outward rather than inward.

[Evil]

Ali, you couldnt have explained it better. However, I had just planed to draw it that way using a two point perspective with one point in the middle of each wall. I'll wip something up to try to explain my idea.

Like this...


I added some people to it.

[Ali]

That looks terrific, better than I thought it would.

With a detailed background, it'd be really lovely. I hope you'll see a lot of people have a go at putting this into practice.

[Evil]

Didn't turn out as 3D as I wanted but I didnt want to spend an hour on it. Though I'm glad people caught on so I didnt look like a complete fool.

[TerranRich]

That somehow doesn't look right. Maybe it's too fast, or maybe the perspectives are off. But it just doesn't convince me that it's the outside of a building.

[Evil]

Well, I didnt intend for it to look great, just an example of how it might work.

[Pessi]

I think the problem terranRICH is talking about is that the lines are curved. They'd be pretty much straight in reality only the angle would be changing. Now it's changing but because the walls are so short, they appear pretty curved. I think that might be causing the off-look.

Works pretty well for me though. I would prefer this over a regular 2-dimensional scrolling room, for a change at the least. It would work a lot better if the background was drawn, as Ali mentioned. When drawing it, it would probably be a good idea to make more of those curved lines on the wall for reference so everything would be in perspective, so to say. A grid would probably be the best. With the vertical lines closer to each other in the middle of the wall as it's kind of further away.