In my case, I'm making a 2D game that camera always follow my character, but there will be scene limitations so I have to stop follow him when he is nearly beside scene borders. I also have to treat camera scale, so I have to decide whether to use CCFollow::actionWithTarget() or CCCamera.
In CCCamera.h it says:
Limitations:
- Some nodes, like CCParallaxNode, CCParticle uses world node coordinates, and they won't work properly if you move them (or any of their ancestors)
using the camera.
- It doesn't work on batched nodes like CCSprite objects when they are parented to a CCSpriteBatchNode object.
- It is recommended to use it ONLY if you are going to create 3D effects. For 2D effecs, use the action CCFollow or position/scale/rotate.
The last sentence is interesting, why ONLY use it in 3D effects? Seems CCCamera is not recommended by its producer. I know it's a shortcut to treat camera movements, but I just don't know why better not to use it in 2D games.
If you notice, the CCCamera.h file also says:
Useful to look at the object from different views.
The OpenGL gluLookAt() function is used to locate the
camera.
There's a good write up in the OpenGL Redbook on how the camera works. My understanding is, the camera is meant to setup the initial orientation, then you move the world by updating the model matrix (which is what I'm guessing CCFollow does for you). There's an answer here that may help if you still want to use the camera:
moving CCCamera
Related
Hello recently i started to mess around with SDL. Since i was interested in some 2D/2.5D games.So i started messing around with SDL in C++, I was looking to recreate something similar to Original Zelda.
So as far as i understand those game work with some kind of isometric prespective, or standard Orthogonal view but one thing i do not understand is how can you generate 3D-like Collisions between those objects on the map (tiles, sprites etc which are in 2D). Have a look at the video link below. Is this created purely in SDL, is it PerPixel collision or rectangular ? Or it might involve OpenGL as well ?
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFvAByqAuk0
The original was probably a simple Rectangular collision.
I believe that your "3D collision" is the partial collision present in some objects. For example, Link can go through the leaves, but not through the trunk.
You can do it easily in 2 ways:
Layers of rendering and collision. The trunk is located in one layer and is covered by some collision boxes. Link is present in a intermediary layer. And the leaves are in another layer, on top of Link. Then you can check collision between Link's Layer and the layer with the trunk and other objects, for example.
Additionally you can create a property for your tiles in which you can store the type of collision you hope to obtain. For example, 'box' collision will tell your engine that the object is collidable on every side. Or 'bottom' collision will tell your engine that Link will collide with this object only if he is walking down into the object (this is the effect of you will see on some 2D sidescrollers: jump through a tile but then fall into it solid.
Per pixel collision in those simple cases is not worth it. I find it much better to personalize the collision ourselves, using creativity, masks and layers.
BTW: This topic would fit better on https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/
I was wondering how exactly cameras are programmed in a 2D platform game. How is it programmed only to render whats in the view of the camera without rendering the whole map? Also, whats the proper way to do this?
Lazy foo has some good tutorials on this subject and further http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/index.php
navigate to the scrolling tutorial, its in c++ with SDL but the logic should be universal.
There is no secret about that, you can simple check which tiles and which sprites are inside the rectangle that defines the screen and only draw those.
Another trick is to make the cameras always follows the player, but when it gets to the corner of the scenario you stop moving the camera, so you do not show the scenario borders.
I am working on a simple 2D openGL project. It contains a main actor you can control with the keyboard arrows. I got that to work okay. What I am wanting is something that can help explain how to make another actor object follow the main actor. Maybe a tutorial on openGL. The three main things I need to learn are the actor following, collision detection, and some kind of way to create gravity. Any good books or tutorials to help get me in the right direction would be great.
You could use a physics library like Chipmunk Physics, which lets you attach springs and things between the two objects and detect when they hit each other and other things.
A pre-rolled library would be good, but the concepts you describe are ones you need to know if you are going to do any sort of game programming anyways:
A simple way to make one actor follow behind another is to have the lead actor store its position every time it moves. Feed these positions to a trailing actor with a delay of a few values - the longer the delay, the further behind they travel. Simple, but doesn't handle dynamic collision (other actors moving the block collision.)
Collision detection in 2D can simply be axis aligned (AA) bounding boxes. Search for this and you'll see the 4 ifs or so that are needed.
Gravity is just adding a fixed velocity (usually down) to every object every game loop. This is constant acceleration which is exactly how gravity works.
I am working on a 2d game. Imagine a XY plane and you are a character. As your character walks, the rest of the scene comes into view.
Imagine that the XY plane is quite large and there are other characters outside of your current view.
Here is my question, with opengl, if those objects aren't rendered outside of the current view, do they eat up processing time?
Also, what are some approaches to avoid having parts of the scene rendered that aren't in view. If I have a cube that is 1000 units away from my current position, I don't want that object rendered. How could I have opengl not render that.
I guess the easiest approaches is to calculate the position and then not draw that cube/object if it is too far away.
OpenGL faq on "Clipping, Culling and Visibility Testing" says this:
OpenGL provides no direct support for determining whether a given primitive will be visible in a scene for a given viewpoint. At worst, an application will need to perform these tests manually. The previous question contains information on how to do this.
Go ahead and read the rest of that link, it's all relevant.
If you've set up your scene graph correctly objects outside your field of view should be culled early on in the display pipeline. It will require a box check in your code to verify that the object is invisible, so there will be some processing overhead (but not much).
If you organise your objects into a sensible hierarchy then you could cull large sections of the scene with only one box check.
Typically your application must perform these optimisations - OpenGL is literally just the rendering part, and doesn't perform object management or anything like that. If you pass in data for something invisible it still has to transform the relevant coordinates into view space before it can determine that it's entirely off-screen or beyond one of your clip planes.
There are several ways of culling invisible objects from the pipeline. Checking if an object is behind the camera is probably the easiest and cheapest check to perform since you can reject half your data set on average with a simple calculation per object. It's not much harder to perform the same sort of test against the actual view frustrum to reject everything that isn't at all visible.
Obviously in a complex game you won't want to have to do this for every tiny object, so it's typical to group them, either hierarchically (eg. you wouldn't render a gun if you've already determined that you're not rendering the character that holds it), spatially (eg. dividing the world up into a grid/quadtree/octree and rejecting any object that you know is within a zone that you have already determined is currently invisible), or more commonly a combination of both.
"the only winning move is not to play"
Every glVertex etc is going to be a performance hit regardless of whether it ultimately gets rendered on your screen. The only way to get around that is to not draw (i.e. cull) objects which wont ever be rendered anyways.
most common method is to have a viewing frustum tied to your camera. Couple that with an octtree or quadtree depending on whether your game is 3d/2d so you dont need to check every single game object against the frustum.
The underlying driver may do some culling behind the scenes, but you can't depend on that since it's not part of the OpenGL standard. Maybe your computer's driver does it, but maybe someone else's (who might run your game) doesn't. It's best for you do to your own culling.
I guess I'll illustrate with an example:
In this game you are able to draw 2D shapes using the mouse and what you draw is rendered to the screen in real-time. I want to know what the best ways are to render this type of drawing using hardware acceleration (OpenGL). I had two ideas:
Create a screen-size texture when drawing is started, update this when drawing, and blit this to the screen
Create a series of line segments to represent the drawing, and render these using either lines or thin polygons
Are there any other ideas? Which of these methods is likely to be best/most efficient/easiest? Any suggestions are welcome.
I love crayon physics (music gets me every time). Great game!
But back to the point... He has created brush sprites that follow your mouse position. He's created a few brushes that account for a little variation. Once the mouse goes down, I imagine he is adding these sprites to a data structure and sending that structure through his drawing and collision functions to loop through. Thus popping out the real-time effect. He is using Simple DirectMedia Layer library, which I give two thumbs up.
I'm pretty sure the second idea is the way to go.
First option if the player draws pure freehand (rather than lines), and what they draw doesn't need to be animated.
Second option if it is animated or is primarily lines. If you do choose this, it seems like you'd need to draw thin polygons rather than regular lines to get any kind of interesting look (as in the crayon example).