environment*
Some kind of Spherical world or tubes and animates through a path or something.
The camera pans and rotates all around and doesn’t show dead areas of the game (seems tricky to do in unity, haven’t seen any games with this specific world view and camera animation.)
The camera is the players move-able area[easy, already in my game/unity] yet on parts of stages it swaps out to a move-able area bigger than the camera [Not hard to do either, has been done before]
The perspectives in that game look really difficult to map out in unity, not sure how you would have a player flying down into something then able to collide with it all while scrolling into new areas…
Looking for some unity examples close to Gradius V if anyone has a game with a similar world or camera method.
The first level of Gradius V looks like a static skybox and rotated scene. Pay attention on this free asset, it Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making looks like environment in that game.
If you keep watching the camera can rotate in a entire sphere shape and the ship can fly inside of tube like ships where it can crash into walls of the ship and stuff. It’s much different from nebula, way more complex.
Skip ahead to a ship scene or satellite scene with your mouse.
down to second page almost third already…
Give me some time marks you’re talking about.
Honestly the first part flying through the ship. The background looks more like a large pre-rendered image (probably tiled) that is panned around in the background while the level is played straight on, giving the illusion of flying through the level. The image seems to have some slight distortion applied to it (maybe a slight fisheye effect, ever so slightly, to give that “spherical/tube” effect).
Note when the level opens up at the end and you fight the satellite thing, and the big orbs and what not. You’re no longer in the ship. Now it’s just a big planet in the background. This is when you’re given the freedom to move freely about and the camera follows you. This way the background image doesn’t look weird wherever you go… where as the earlier area where you’re tracking through the ship, it would have looked off.
Most of this seems like artistry slight of hand.
Move the background diagonally, while the ship actually doesn’t move at all, and it LOOKS like you’re moving diagonally. Like how they used to do car scenes in old movies… standing still car, and rolling background image on set.
Note further when you get to the later stages and you’re back in the ship. It doesn’t move as fast, and the ship itself is more in the foreground and you can crash into it. It looks and acts a lot different than the 1st level does.
It doesn’t have to be pre-rendered either.
You could do something where you set up the background in one place, and the foreground in the other. Then you have 2 cameras. One is on an animation path through the background area doing the twisting and what not. And that stuff is rendered to a back layer. And the foreground is rendered on top of that. At the same time.
This is really heavy, because it’s about implementing a SHMUP in OpenGL, but you should look at the sections where he talked about moving the world behind the player, and the section on layers.
The background layer cannot be interacted with. The walls would be on the enemy layer since they can hit the player.
The basics of it are just as lordofduct says. The camera moves the exact same way every time the level is played. Ie: the player cannot control the rate the background is moving. The background can really be thought of as having nothing to do with the game.
Anything that you can crash into is NOT part of the background! The artists may have made the dangerous walls and everything look like it syncs up with the background, but it only looks that way. Because the rate the background moves is the same every time, the walls can line up with the background every time.
This is all stuff that’s figured out before hand, not at runtime. You can precalculate how the background camera is moving, or even just play a movie file in the background. The camera that actually has the player’s ship isn’t moving at all.
Okay I watched it again, and while there is a background layer, there is definitely a model poking into the foreground too (might still be on a different camera!). HOWEVER, most of the model has no colliders attached. There may be only some basic box colliders placed to match up with the play area, while the rest of the giant structure art has no colliders.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire giant structure art is really a part of the background camera, and there are only invisible box colliders in the game camera.
I think the camera panning and everything can literally just be an animation curve controlling the background camera’s transform and moving it through the tunnels. You just play the animation and the camera moves on whatever rail an artist thought looked fun.
When are you seeing that?
All the places I see foreground models, you can tell theres a distinction between it and the background (even the shading is slightly different). At best lined up to mask the point where the layers meet.
This is the part that makes me thing the foreground art and background art aren’t completely separated. There could totally be a seam between the foreground and background there, but it’s hard to see.
I think we both agree the background or background camera is moving on rails, while the player and enemies are on their own camera.
EDIT: I keep watching it. The only thing I can say for sure is that the camera or background is on rails and so what the player can see is carefully controlled.
I could see that happening either way. Some of that could just be foreground stuff, and background stuff.
You can see differences in the shading again.
@OP - In the end, it’s still tricks.
Okay thanks I will look into animating camera see if it’s something I’m interested in.
Could it just be some kind of POV / Stretch wrap around effect? Quake 1 / Doom 130% POV
Consoles are wierd still though it’s one of the best shumps since we kind of quit making impressive ones. PSP had some decent ones but not graphically better than V.
Hmm it is back from when games had spheres instead of sky boxes… Konami and Capcom are pretty ridiculous with some of their stuff, I might just try to find something that looks good enough the spinning/ panning is really cool though.
Uuuuuh, haven’t seen that before haha.
I have Ikaruga, Soldner X, Ziet2, Ptero Glider. Was seeking out - peaking around for a shump better than Gradius V graphically. And of course the space shooter tutorial in learning which I never finished, made a sideways one instead out of it and tweaked a lot of things before completing my mod on it.
Working on a lot of the graphics right now and a few sound effects.
While Ziet2 is the most HD and Ikaruga, Gradius V has graphical features that haven’t been improved upon in this genre which probably isn’t very interesting to most people but there are a lot of ways I can see it being made more interesting which I am working on and toying around with the idea of having a more 3d looking world like Gradius V.
