2d shooter in 3d

tpk · 2006-04-12T00:03:43

I've been working on a game in the same style as top down shooters lately, and came across a problem. Objects exist at various heights, from underwater platforms to ground targets to enemy ships flying at the same height as the player, but I want the gameplay to remain on a basically 3d playing field. Traditional top-down shooters were from a completely top-down view, lacking any perspective (at least on the functional playing field) and thus the actual height of ships/structures could be ignored in terms of visual effect (the missle/laser/etc. appears to hit it no matter what height it's at). My game has the camera above the player, but also trailing and angled slightly off from 90 degrees, resulting in a visual issue - the 'bullets' fired travel on a straight path, along the plane the player is on, but not all targets are on this plane. Detecting a hit is simple enough, I simply ignore height and see if it hit an enemy/structure/etc., but the player still sees it as having not hit the target if it's at a different height. I've been considering how to fix this, but haven't come up with a solution I particularly like yet. My first idea was to simply determine what the player is targeting, and alter the path of the projectile upward/downward accordingly. Unfortunately, I soon realised how difficult this would be considering that almost all targets are mobile...the player may be leading to hit a moving ship, or may be targeting the missle platform along the same path, but further back and down. In other words, determining the intended target is impossible from what I see. The best idea I have is to have multiple bullet types - air-to-air, air-to-ground, and air-to-sea. I wanted to do this for the sake of adding depth before deciding to use a 3d view anyway. Air-to-ground and sea could simply drop from the player's ship and then follow a straight path on the appropriate plane once dropping far enough, but I still think it would seem rather awkward looking, at least for air-to-ground weapons. So, that's an overview of the biggest problem area of the game I'm working on. Ideas/comments/suggestions/etc are welcome.