[MUD-Dev] Blending graphics with text

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> text.  There are also fairly clear advantages to more
> visual/subjective interfaces.

Just nitpicking, but text is really more subjective than 2D graphics, as it
is more abstract.
 
(I typically use the term subjective to denote that different users see
different things in the same place though, for instance due to heterogeneous
presentation between different clients.)

> The view on screen is akin to that photo, rolled out flat -- except
> that it is a real time image and is updated as the environment
> changes and the player moves.

Are you showing 360 degrees on the screen at once? Can you spell motion
sickness? (Have you looked at QuicktimeVR?) What I'd like to test is to use
povray to generate 360 degree fisheye textures and map them to tessellated
hemispheres with portals. It would be very easy to generate and set up, and
with cards like the TNT2, it should be achievable even for hobbyists. 

> Expensive: yes.  All the normal tricks to minimise the active field
> and working set no longer apply.

Why not?  Portals and visisbilitysets and most other subdivision and
bounding strategies could still work?  But are you able to preserve straight
lines as straight???  I suspect that you will have to use fine-grained
tessellation and perhaps even give up using homogenous coordinates and
linear transforms, which would be a _serious_ problem.  I could be wrong,
but I don't quite see how one would get beyond 159 degrees. Hmm...

I'd personally like to try rendering 3 frustrums to get peripheral vision
which is a real problem in 3D virtual worlds, but I think it would make me
sick. :(  Unless I can get hold of 3 screens... In 10 years maybe.

If you don't mind defects then you could use 30 frustrums or something.
Kinda like looking out of a prism.
--
Ola 

(comp.graphics.algorithms is a very good and friendly newsgroup btw)


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev maillist  -  MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
http://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev