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A new 3D Ultima online client is coming!
- Thread starter UODevTracker
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Fact: No new information on this client in over 2 years. Makes you wonder...
As for a 3D version of UO, that would make me tiny heart sing. I'd love to use the Guild Wars engine. Ok, I'd take just about any engine at this point. ;-)
-Grimm
As for a 3D version of UO, that would make me tiny heart sing. I'd love to use the Guild Wars engine. Ok, I'd take just about any engine at this point. ;-)
-Grimm
Well, Guild Wars has stunning environments, I didn't actually enjoy playing the game, but I loved running around in the world.
As for 3D, the EC is actually a true 3D game in every technical respect. Just not from an aesthic point of view.
-Grimm
As for 3D, the EC is actually a true 3D game in every technical respect. Just not from an aesthic point of view.
-Grimm
Oh dear. I hope you aren't referring to the perspective thing... ;-)
-Grimm
-Grimm
Oh yea, that's what I'm talking about. But the only way we'd be able to do something like that is to start over from scratch, I mean everything new- this would mean that most likely all the players would have to start over as well.
-Grimm
-Grimm
Lol! I'll post a little document I put together on UO perspective sometime. It explains why circles need to be perfectly round- and why sometimes they shouldn't be!
- Grimm
- Grimm
Hehe, well speaking in terms of UO, the hurdles boil down to time and resources. Not enough of either, but ain't that always the case?
-Grimm
You can use this page for additional reading if you’d like:
Graphical projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UO follows more closely to the Oblique projection method. You can see this in its most simple form in the floor tiles. Looking at the floor tiles, they look like a square tile that has been turned 45 degrees on the up axis (I use “UP” axis because Z and Y axis have both been used to define “UP”, so I use “UP” so that everyone can understand). Even though it's turned, it looks like you are looking straight down on it. All top surfaces that are parallel to the ground should mimic this in order to be true to the perspective. This means that if you have a circular fountain, the top of the fountain would be a perfect circle. I show this principle in the Red and Yellow Circles in the fountain picture below. You can see that by drawing a perfect circle, I can connect all four corners of the tile as well all edges with the yellow circle.
The problem is this: sometimes looking at things from this perspective isn't as aesthetically pleasing as if you "smudge" things a bit. If you look at the Green and Pink circles I’ve drawn, you can see that not only do they not follow the perspective as defined by the floor tiles, they don’t even follow the perspective of each other! The basin at the top is skewed more than the bottom basin. So this object doesn’t even adhere to its own perspective!
I still don’t think of this in terms of “right” and “wrong”. In game art, you’re always fighting the balance between aesthetics and technical accuracy. When you are creating artwork all in a 2D editor (photoshop, for example), it’s a lot easier to smudge the perspective because you don’t have to deal with other surfaces warping to compensate for you skewing the perspective a bit. With 3D, when we skew a surface, the other surfaces connected to it start reacting in ways that we don’t want, and that can get very tricky indeed.
What’s interesting is that the characters and environments in the Legacy UO do not use the same perspective, and we changed that slightly in UOKR so that they were a little closer to each other. In the Legacy client, the camera perspective on the environment art is about 45 degrees, give or take, but the players and creatures is closer to 20 or 30 degrees since you get a slightly more “head-on” look at the characters than you do the environment tiles.
Graphical projection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
UO follows more closely to the Oblique projection method. You can see this in its most simple form in the floor tiles. Looking at the floor tiles, they look like a square tile that has been turned 45 degrees on the up axis (I use “UP” axis because Z and Y axis have both been used to define “UP”, so I use “UP” so that everyone can understand). Even though it's turned, it looks like you are looking straight down on it. All top surfaces that are parallel to the ground should mimic this in order to be true to the perspective. This means that if you have a circular fountain, the top of the fountain would be a perfect circle. I show this principle in the Red and Yellow Circles in the fountain picture below. You can see that by drawing a perfect circle, I can connect all four corners of the tile as well all edges with the yellow circle.
The problem is this: sometimes looking at things from this perspective isn't as aesthetically pleasing as if you "smudge" things a bit. If you look at the Green and Pink circles I’ve drawn, you can see that not only do they not follow the perspective as defined by the floor tiles, they don’t even follow the perspective of each other! The basin at the top is skewed more than the bottom basin. So this object doesn’t even adhere to its own perspective!
I still don’t think of this in terms of “right” and “wrong”. In game art, you’re always fighting the balance between aesthetics and technical accuracy. When you are creating artwork all in a 2D editor (photoshop, for example), it’s a lot easier to smudge the perspective because you don’t have to deal with other surfaces warping to compensate for you skewing the perspective a bit. With 3D, when we skew a surface, the other surfaces connected to it start reacting in ways that we don’t want, and that can get very tricky indeed.
What’s interesting is that the characters and environments in the Legacy UO do not use the same perspective, and we changed that slightly in UOKR so that they were a little closer to each other. In the Legacy client, the camera perspective on the environment art is about 45 degrees, give or take, but the players and creatures is closer to 20 or 30 degrees since you get a slightly more “head-on” look at the characters than you do the environment tiles.
My pleasure!
-Grimm
-Grimm