7 réponses à ce sujet

[sea-]

What it says on the tin.  Short of placing double walls everywhere to ensure the camera can't poke "behind the scenes" in a level, is there any way to define collision for the tactical isometric camera?  Reason being that it can be a bit annoying to have to build outdoor levels with both the "inside" and "outside" in mind.  A lot of my level design can involve placing models which only look good one way, so an easy way to stop players from moving the camera where it shouldn't be would be useful (and would potentially save on some performance by reducing the number of models necessary).

[DarthParametric]

Have you tried using invisible boxes? Basically they are just collision objects with no actual geometry.

[sea-]

Sounds like a start. I'll have to take a look into it a bit more and see if there's an easier way, and I'm not sure invisible boxes will help, if only because the camera seems to like to pass through plenty of walls anyway. The biggest issue is that there's little consistency for whether the camera can pass through a particular object... sometimes it seems to quite readily, but other times it does a good job of keeping outside the walls.

Anyway, thanks for the idea, I'll try it out and see how it goes.

[DarthParametric]

The camera should respect collision objects and avoid clipping through them, but it can get a little screwy at times, especially in cramped quarters.

[sea-]

I did some more testing with invisible walls and ran into some strange issues. I noticed that zooming the camera out would cause it to clip through objects, but trying to rotate it through the walls made it honor collision objects. I might just end up having to do more extensive modeling of the outer areas of my levels, in order to help compensate for that. Kind of annoying, but in practice I doubt most players run around in the tactical mode during exploration stages of the game, so it won't be as big an issue in most of these outdoor areas.

Still leaves me wondering how BioWare did it. I took a look at some of the official maps and it doesn't seem like there's anything too special... maybe they have some tricks I don't know about, but it seems to me they just placed walls as normal.

[sea-]

I took a closer look at some of BioWare's official stuff and it seems to me like they take a lot of pains in designing around problems... I noticed, for instance, than rather than relying on walls etc., they placed lots of clutter objects to stop the camera from even getting near the borders of the level. Notice in Denerim how there are walls visible, but there's only a few areas where you can actually get near them, and the rest of the space is filled up with houses, junk piles, etc.? I'm thinking that was primarily to reduce camera clipping.

Interestingly, if you go right to the entrance of the Market District, and zoom the camera out... you'll find it goes right through the wall no problem. Plenty of other spots where problems are evident, too.  When you're looking for it, it's very easy to expose a lot of mapping errors (I also found that you could get past the area transition at Lake Calenhad and run around in the back of the level, for instance). I suppose the moral of the story is, do your best in reducing errors, but don't sweat it too much.

Modifié par sea-, 24 avril 2011 - 12:36 .

[DarthParametric]

Ultimately, you are limited by the engine, and the Eclipse engine is certainly not short of limitations.

[sea-]

Yep. The upside, at least, is that I got to flesh out some of my exterior areas a lot more than I otherwise would have, resulting in more consistent and generally pleasing visuals. The bad? Well, of course, it takes longer, but I find once I've got the basic layout down it's not too much extra work.

Thanks for your feedback!