I’ve been working on a special camera for rendering a “true” 2.5d isometric view (also called cavalier or oblique projection) - as in “oldschool”: think SimCity, Double Dragon, and other flat topdown or flat sideview games or technical illustrations. It’s particularly useful if you want to combine front view sprites with meshes.
This camera renders the front completely flat (no distortion) and then shows a bit of two sides (you choose how much and which). You can’t achieve this effect with Unity’s orthographic camera.
I can set up a webplayer demo, although I’ll have to build something that showcases it properly first. The project I use it for myself is a bad example (as it won’t be playable yet for months). What you see on the pictures is just something I mocked up in an hour to demostrate what it looks like.
What would you guys like to see in a webplayer demo? I could make the view scrollable, but it’s just like panning a picture, really (since there is no perspective).
For now I have to see if there’s enough interest in this for it to be worth putting more time into it, to make it a solid asset store product.
As you can see from the left screenshot, you can definitely accomplish that sim city look (with ease, I’d say). I don’t have time to build a sim city to showcase it though
Is there something in particular that I could demonstrate with the camera to show you that it works?
Just something similar, larger scale (repetition is ok, / copy paste) with scrolling ability and a fps counter would do, preferably as a standalone demo instead of a web player (i realized today that, regardless of the favorite vidcard i pick, webplayer always uses my integrated intel instead of my nvidia 540M). Nothing fancy really.
Fair enough, I’ll see in the next days if I can put something together for you. Stay tuned
Of course, if you want to do the legwork and assemble a city for me, I can show you results much faster - and maybe focus on a script that showcases more camera features.
Same here! But like I said before, there’s not much to see - it’s just like scrolling around on a static picture, since there is no perspective. In fact, I could just put a screenshot there, and you wouldn’t see the difference.
Good point, fair enough. I will use a fixed resolution, though, since the current version of the isocam will just stretch to meet the resolution. Of course I’ll fix that, should I go through with releasing the camera for the asset store.
This does look interesting, although I can’t think of a use I have for it right now I’d happily spend $10-$15 to just experiment with the effect- especially if the source is included so I can see how you manipulate the camera in this way,
I do get a pretty good framerate here, but do note that the IsoCam underlies the same performance restrictions as any normal camera - and the example city has 1.6m polygons. So if you zoom all the way out or side view the city, you might get lowered FPS.
Since I still have to put quite some work into it, to make the camera component user-friendly, it’ll probably be 20€ / 26$. I also don’t plan to release the source, since it would be quite possible to copy what I did without me being able to prove it. I do hope the IsoCam does have enough options to allow you to build anything you need it for, though. If there’s something missing, do tell me, and I might add it, if it makes sense and is within my abilities.
I’m curious to hear what you guys think of the demo.
If you do not release the source, do you plan on maintaining the software for the next year or so? Also, to those that are more fluent in Unity than I… Without the source, can I still use this for Linux build, Mac, IOS, etc?
Yes indeed, although I expect it will be solid enough to not need (much or any) maintenance. It is, like most other scripts, completely platform independent. So it would even work for new, unreleased platforms.
