1) Forced Perspective
Using BojanVO3's video on forced perspective, our group wanted to create a game mechanic similar to the likes of Superliminal. Forced perspective employs the usage of perspective and mathematics to create the illusion which will allow objects to seem closer or farther away than they appear.
By maintaining the angular distance of our object (the angle between two sight lines), forced perspective is thusly created. How can we do this in a game engine such as Unreal Engine?
Upon picking up the object, we will grab its current scale and distance from the player. Afterwards, we will push the object as far as possible until an impact has been made; this was done using line traces from the character to the middle of the object. Once an impact has been made, we will now grab its current scale and distance. The ratio of the current distance to the initial distance is how much we should scale our object by; therefore, forced perspective was created.
Despite our successes, we have yet to fix the forced perspective mechanic in order to increase efficiency and utter "smoothness" in our game because doing so will take longer than our 4 week period. Our forced perspective game mechanic will continue to be debugged in the days after quarter 3.
2) Long Tunnel, Short Tunnel
This mechanic is nevertheless impressive to the eye. Producing a tunnel requires knowledge of camera placement, portals, and overall debugging skills.
By placing portals on each end of the tunnel, we were able to give users the chance to travel through a tunnel in a matter of few seconds, whereas walking outside see the player walk a couple dozen seconds to go from the start and end points.
Despite its simplicity, the hardest part of constructing this tunnel was the portals. Since portal A must reflect what is being seen from the the player's camera and portal B, the illusion can be lost when improperly programmed; this is why games such as Portal take a long time to release due to this mechanic, amongst many things.
This begs the question: is this truly non-Euclidean? From the beginning of our game, we wanted to immerse a player in Euclidean space with occupational pockets of non-Euclidean space in order to give them the chance to create ideas of what can be real and what can not. Consequently, this portal mechanism, like many mechanics, will find themselves in Euclidean land while harnessing non-Euclidean aspects. Space inside the tunnel is being deformed, which can only happen in Non-Euclidean geoemtry.
3) TBC
Comments
Post a Comment