I would like to use classic “strategy” view, at ~45° angle. Do you recommend an orthographic camera, or perspective camera with very narrow FOV?
I would like to implement some zoom function. I simply increase size of ortho camera and move if further away along local Z to prevent any visible clipping. If i used perspective camera, I would only move it further away. Is there some drawback of using one, or another? I would expect the perspective to draw stuff further away less carefully = less expensive when zooming out.
Is there some simple way to visualize the “darkness” of the deep ocean? Something, that makes shallow seabed visible, but darkens the bottom of the ocean as it goes deeper? I use my own water plane, with simple low poly shader. It looks great without transparency, but is subpar when the transparency is used, as the ocean floor is slightly tinted, but visible no matter the depth. The simplest way I know is to apply height fog to the camera, but that only works for the perspective cam and the effect is not very appealing. Another way is to make several layers of dark semi-transparent planes, but that doesn’t create smooth transition, obviously.
Is there some other way, that would possibly work with both ortho and perspective?
2.5) My wave script is not very demanding and it works fine even with thousands of polygons. It would work fine even with a box, that would have bunch of vertices only on top. It would look like box container full of wavy water - Is it possible for some shader to make the box semi-transparent, but taking the volume into account?
The last question is about reflections… This is far beyond my knowledge of shaders and scripts… I can implement the planar reflection with no problem. But that only works for a totally flat sea mesh. When I move the vertices of the sea mesh to simulate waves, the reflection obviously doesn’t work as it still reflects the surroundings as it was flat. That looks obviously terrible
Whichever you like better. Personally, I’d use a perspective camera, because I like the look of it better.
Rather than moving the camera, I would just change the FOV.
No. The math done by the computer is pretty much identical (only the camera transform matrix is different). There is no difference in performance.
I think you should simply paint the sea floor accordingly (or, to make the artwork easier, you could use a shader that darkens the floor model according to its depth). Unless your game includes some way to remove the water (like a Moses unit, with a Part Sea ability), there is no sense having a uniformly-colored seafloor which you then try to color as if it has a bunch of water on top — just color it that way to begin with.
Cool, sounds like you’ve got a great script there! I’m not sure what you’re asking there, though.
Yeah, reflections on nonplanar surfaces are hard. Possible, but hard.
However, unless your game is 99% finished and it’s time for the finishing touches, I think you may have the cart before the horse. None of this stuff affects how much fun the game is to play. So, make sure it’s fun first! Then you can easily add this sort of eye candy at the end.
- Is it possible for some shader to make the box semi-transparent, but taking the volume into account?