Yeah, I'm shamelessly trying to mimic the good old days in my 3D engine. Here are some of the problems: The first / second view are the same character positions, the camera is just rotated and zoomed. Same goes for the third and fourth. I'm looking for opinions. Is this acceptable? To be forced to rotate the camera in small areas like this to see everything? Or do I have to come up with some system to hide the foreground walls (and all objects hanging on or related to them)? Any other ideas? edit: I Forgot to mention there will be very little if any real-time combat in these invironnments. I appreciate any feedback.

I think it would be a nice "feature" if you were able to place your cursor over a wall and have it become transparent...or at least have some sort of colored outline over objects that are hidden by the wall, so the player can mouse over then. I think the second is perfectly acceptable.

PS. Those are some nice looking screenies.

It could be annoying if you miss many things just because of the camera angle. I would wote for walls desapearing.

btw. I think there was a thread in the OpenGL forum (or was it the graphics one?) about how to do the transparent walls.

oooh. pretty pictures. Really though, I would vote for transparent foreground walls too. Easiest way I found to do it in OpenGL was simply to cull back facing polygons.

glEnable(GL_CULL_FACE);
glCullFace(GL_BACK);

and voila.

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Original post by visage I think it would be a nice "feature" if you were able to place your cursor over a wall and have it become transparent...

As crazy as it sounds, there won't be a cursor :P - You control your character in real-time style with the WASD keys and use action buttons to interact. So I would have to make the wall transparency or vanishment automatic.

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PS. Those are some nice looking screenies.

Thanks man :D
That's a village cabin just being started. What's there still needs a bit of work.

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Original post by nefthy It could be annoying if you miss many things just because of the camera angle

That's the thing I'm struggling with. It's easy to make those walls and any objects hanging on those walls invisible (need inside end caps for the corners though). The problem is that by making those objects invisible, you're still missing many things because of the camera angle. You would have to rotate the camera around to view that wall. I suppose you would miss less, though.

By the way, I hope no one mentions The Sims ;)

Make them semi-transparent.

Is the movement relative to the view angle?

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Original post by nefthy Make them semi-transparent.

You encounter lots of visual artifacts doing this. You can literally see the insides of how the meshes are put together. There might be ways around the problem, though.

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Is the movement relative to the view angle?

Of course. But I'm not sure why this is relevant?

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Original post by Jiia Quote: Original post by nefthy Make them semi-transparent. You encounter lots of visual artifacts doing this. You can literally see the insides of how the meshes are put together. There might be ways around the problem, though.

Look for the thread I was talking about. It was excactly about this issue.

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Quote: Is the movement relative to the view angle? Of course. But I'm not sure why this is relevant?

It is relevant only in that it tends to give me a hard time when view angle changes very often.

I just noticed something very horrible. Those walls are 128 inches high. That's roughly 10 feet. I could easily cut them down to 7 or 8 feet for the inside view. That might make a huge difference. If not, I'll probably try fading them in or out based on the wall normal and camera normal. So the view will end up looking like the old-school game, Immortal. Good view, I think.

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It is relevant only in that it tends to give me a hard time when view angle changes very often.

As far as I know, there are only three choices. Camera-relative, character-relative, or world-relative. Character relative movement feels too much like driving a tank (the old GTA games played like this I think). And unless you want to move back by pressing left, world-relative is out.

The camera will never zoom or rotate unless you control it to do so. There are automatic camera options, but they are options and off by default. I assume you're talking about the Mario 64 syndrome - when you walk through doorways and your view is jerked into another angle? My camera is no different than that of Diablo until you decide you want to change it.

Thanks for the suggestions.