Bit of a newbie question here... I''m trying to implement a 3rd person perspective using a 3D engine to mimic the view seen in popular isometric games like Diablo II and such. It is of course easy to fix a camera at an angle looking down at the world, but I''m having problems mapping mouse coordinates to 3D world coordinates. In fact, my brain kinda hurts right now. Thought it would be elementary but I haven''t been able to successfully re-position entities (like my player) in the game by clikcing on a new location. Don''t know if it is a matter of my 3D world misleading me into beliving I clicked on a certain point in space or if my math is just _THAT BAD_. I have taken into account that my mouse coordinates are based in client-space (ie, [0,0] is upper left corner with x-positive going right and y-positive going down), while World-Space is x-positive right, y-positive up, and z-positive into the screen. My camera is looking down at a 15 degree angle. I''ve tried several times to determine new world space coordinates by projecting my mouse coordinates relative to my camera''s world space coordinates. Is this incorrect?? Any help would be greatly appreciated as my wife would like me to spend time with her again! ;-) -aw --- "We are Indigenous. Welcome."

You can use just a print message on the screen

if (MS_DOWN)
{
sprintf(MsInfo, "MS_X:%d MS_Y:%d Wrld_X:%g Wrld_Y:%g Wrld_Z:%g", ms_x, ms_y, ms_worldx, ms_worldy, ms_worldz);
ScreenLinePrint(MsInfo);
}


ZoomBoy
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Thanks ZoomBoy... but it''s not that I don''t know how to display the mouse coordinates (or other debug info) onto the screen.

What I meant was that I need to determine where the user is clicking in 3D World Space.

I''m rethinking my whole mouse input-player movement deal now. I haven''t been able to find a single example where an isometric game was done entirely with a 3D engine. I do, however, find plenty of 2D examples and it does seem very straight forward to determine where a user is clicking via tiles.

Oh well..

-aw


---

"We are Indigenous. Welcome."

We use a touch screen to interact with our 3d enviornment. I am a little hazy on the code, but let me look into it and if nobody gives you a good response, I will put something up.

I know our old version looks at objects bounding sphere, and our newer one actually looks at the triangles of each polygon. We are able to reduce the number of things that are looked at by not making everything "touchable".



Edited by - Antknei on September 7, 2000 11:45:22 AM

Alpha Centauri is an example of Direct3D applied to an isometric engine. Check out the post entitled "Uneven terrain and mouse clicks," which I started a little while back. You might find what you''re looking for in there.

Thanks, this helps! I''ll be sure to check out Alpha Centauri.

Also, I found this thread helpful:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/Topic.asp?topic_id=23114&forum_id=13&Topic_Title=&forum_title=Isometric+Land

-aw


---

"We are Indigenous. Welcome."

Alpha Centauri was pretty ahead of its time in using D3D for an iso-map.

Try it, you''ll like it. You can do all the cool lighting, alpha, and other stuff which is not possible with DDraw.