Jacks_Smart Vestigial Appendage
This is why I started the Smart Defense with a bunch of proof of concepts. I decided to abandon my pseudo-3D method of display. It is getting way too convoluted and it is not looking as good as I thought it would. So I am going to knock the graphics down to 2D. Somewhere in the process of putting the proof together, I decided that I was going to have someone else do the sprites anyway. My artistic talent is too weak to chance the popularity of this game.
So, let me explain what I was trying to do. I did not want to go full 3D with Papervision, because I thought that was overkill for Flash. The objects would not move around in 3D space either. You would always be looking top down. The idea was to add depth to that top down view. So, you see the full top of the object and some of the side. The side you see and how much you see is calculated based on the location relative to the view point. For example, the default location of the lens was in the middle of the screen. So the object in the upper left would show the lower right side. Also, if the object is directly below the lens it would not show any sides. All of this is working just fine. There is also the ability to change the lens size. So the object would have to be x distance from the lens before it shows the whole side. Or the object must be x from the lens before it shows any depth. It sounds great in theory.
The big problem with this approach is that it is a bit unusual. In a 500px by 300px area to show 20px of depth just looks weird. With some tweaking it would look more natural, but then it will only be showing like 2px or 3px of depth, which is hardly worth all the calculations. It is just over kill for something that will not make that much difference.
However it is not a loss, there are some very interesting things I learned from this proof. All the calculations I came up with from scratch. I would like to highlight some of them but thats not gonna be easy with my blogging software in the state it is in. Maybe I'll post them at a later date.