3D SpaceGame?

[fizgog]

Still thinking about new ideas for my next game.

I tried 3Deep Space from The BBC Games archive with my new glasses and couldn't for the life of me make out the 3D effect

So after work I started to have a go myself and came up with this, at the moment it's just showing the backdrop and fonts and you also need the red / blue glasses to see it properly, but it looks ok with my glasses.

Was thinking maybe some sort of space shooter, who knows...

[paulb]

So after work I started to have a go myself and came up with this, at the moment it's just showing the backdrop and fonts and you also need the red / blue glasses to see it properly, but it looks ok with my glasses.

I found that at full size on my 17-inch screen, I had to be a few metres away to get the effect.

[fizgog]

Still been playing around with 3D on the beeb in-between finishing LaserZone.

This beeb video shows a masked sprite ship with some missile fire on a 3D backdrop, let me know what you think

NB You need the red / cyan glasses to view it

https://youtu.be/T0xOjJlRjc4

[paulb]

Still been playing around with 3D on the beeb in-between finishing LaserZone.

This beeb video shows a masked sprite ship with some missile fire on a 3D backdrop, let me know what you think

I had to stand about 5 metres away to get the depth effect on the different mountains.

I also had a look at that 3Deep Space game: a classic early Beeb game, I would say, being totally incoherent and yet needing several pages of instructions. The pyramids emerging from the screen do have a depth effect for me, although I'm sitting not quite a metre away from my screen. I don't know what the author was aiming for with the player's spacecraft moving in the third dimension, though. You have to consciously refocus on it, which is usually the kind of thing you have to do to get into those "magic eye" scenes.

What would be interesting for your game might be the appearance of objects at different depths that may also be obscured by the scenery. Also, I found that the best anaglyph scenes often have a kind of continuum of depth that helps guide the viewer's focus into the scene. I guess that is what the 3Deep Space author was aiming for with his pyramids, which don't seem to have any relationship to the game itself, at least for someone who has not read the instructions.

[fizgog]

5 metres is not very good, think I'll add it to the back of the list of things to do.

[paulb]

5 metres is not very good, think I'll add it to the back of the list of things to do.

I don't want to put you off. It's just the separation of the component images that needs changing, as far as I can tell.

To give you some ideas and to give me an excuse to show old holiday photos, I've attached a few examples. You'll need to click on them and probably view them in full-screen mode to eliminate visual distractions.

This picture probably demonstrates the range you can get out of the screen. On my monitor the components probably have a separation of about 1cm. Any more than that, and you have to concentrate on refocusing.

This picture has a similar separation in the foreground, but the image is slightly harder to get into, probably because it is difficult for your eyes to settle at a particular depth within the image and then gradually refocus by moving around in the scene.

Although the separation is high in this picture, there is enough depth in the foreground object to allow your eyes to "lock on" to it.

If you're interested, the pictures were taken from a moving ship in a three-image burst mode on a compact camera about 14 years ago. I was intrigued by the possibility of taking anaglyph images, and then it occurred to me that if you are moving laterally across a scene, you only need to take images in succession to get the pair of images you need. Things have to remain fairly static, though, to avoid motion issues as demonstrated by the cyclist in the following picture:

Colour choices also make a difference. Red and cyan are already unbalanced with regard to intensity, and it is easy to end up with an uncomfortable image to look at through red-cyan glasses. With most of the above pictures, the fairly muted greens, greys and the washed-out blues lend themselves to this style of anaglyph. Anyway, I hope this is helpful!

[fizgog]

Thanks for explanation and very nice images, I'm not put off, just not as enthusiastic as I once was.

I was planning on doing something like the aliens in Attack on Alpha Centauri were they appear to come out at you.

I'll keep playing with the concept, but it won't be my next number one project after LaserZone.

[fizgog]

In my dinner I had another go with the image and made the separation closer, but might have gone too far the other way

Let me know what you think of this picture

[paulb]

In my dinner I had another go with the image and made the separation closer, but might have gone too far the other way

Let me know what you think of this picture

It is more viewable closer up, but the depth of the image seems a bit less. One improvement in the deepest parts of the image is the disappearance of some "speckling" to the right of the furthest peaks, which was a bit distracting in the earlier image. I do wonder about some of the colouring. For example, yellow does come through in both components, but I think it makes it difficult to focus on the nearest features of the image. Having said that, I still find those nearest features difficult to focus on. Meanwhile, the blue regions cause an imbalance in intensity, making me wonder if dithering might help with that somehow. Certainly, when dealing with photographic images, such concerns are significantly mitigated by the increase in colour depth and the nature of most of the colours likely to appear.

[fizgog]

It is more viewable closer up, but the depth of the image seems a bit less. One improvement in the deepest parts of the image is the disappearance of some "speckling" to the right of the furthest peaks, which was a bit distracting in the earlier image. I do wonder about some of the colouring. For example, yellow does come through in both components, but I think it makes it difficult to focus on the nearest features of the image. Having said that, I still find those nearest features difficult to focus on. Meanwhile, the blue regions cause an imbalance in intensity, making me wonder if dithering might help with that somehow. Certainly, when dealing with photographic images, such concerns are significantly mitigated by the increase in colour depth and the nature of most of the colours likely to appear.

Yellow was for the rocks, but what about if I changed the yellow to blue as in this picture?

[paulb]

Yellow was for the rocks, but what about if I changed the yellow to blue as in this picture?

I think the problem with blue is that it provides detail for one eye but not the other. Reflecting on this, I can't help feeling that the best approach is to provide enough texture or detail to the image features so that there is enough for each eye to resolve. To an extent, I am reminded of those magic eye pictures. For those of us who could stare into them and get the depth effect, the way that many of those pictures provided some kind of patterning or texture that was unintrusive and even repetitive arguably guided the eyes into the scene. Certainly, the choice of only primary and secondary colours on the Beeb and Electron do not help, but dithering could provide some kind of remedy.

I would put together something to demonstrate this, but I really should be getting on with other tasks at the moment. I did find another image that might also provide some guidance in that it largely emphasises the use of depth in the scene rather than having objects stand out of the scene.

Here, the red-cyan separation of the posts clearly increases as the posts recede into the scene. This is arguably less demanding on the eyes, and you can see how the closest objects rapidly become increasingly difficult to focus on.