Isometric Rendering

[BOZO]

Question for the Smirftsch:

I have been wondering if we could modify the Unreal Engine rendering code slightly to perform isometric rendering.

My thought is this would require some slight modification of the rendering code (basically take out some of the z distance scaling calculations) to eliminate the perspective scaling change.

The Unreal Engine could then be used by folks to support this specific type of rendering for special use scenarios. I personally want to use it to build maps in Unreal for use as display maps in other - isometric based games. Another thing I thought it may be useful for is creating walkthrough maps of various games. Perhaps develop an isometric projection game within Unreal....

I'm sure folks could come up with all kinds of uses for this particular option...

[Smirftsch]

Hey Bozo old friend!!
Where have you been hiding? Was wondering if you show up somewhere again
Interesting idea. But no clue yet if it is that easy. I'm afraid this will require way more work than eliminating Z.
Mhhh....need to look....

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

DT_RopeSprite?

I dunno relaly what this is.

[BOZO]

Well Howdy!!

Good to hear from you too.

Busy busy Real World life and family time is eating all of my free time this year. I have been meaning to stop in and see how things are going with the whole crew but you know how that goes.

Stress and burnout has mostly kept me away from the online world.

I have recently started poking around with some new development ideas and looking at putting together some new utilities to help folks with mesh related work but nothing serious has resulted as of yet. Just cannot get motivated for long enough to make something happen.

I have also been playing a few other games to try to get out of the rut. Thus the isometric query.

This is by no means a high priority item. Just something I though should be feasible (isometric should be easier to implement than true 3d) and would add an interesing capability to any planned future Unreal development mix. You would have to make the call on if you think it could be done. I certainly think it would be fun to mess around with if it can be done.

And finally, DT_RopeSprite has nothing to do with isometric rendering as far as I know.

I'll stop by a bit more often - promise.

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

Hey bozo, you should check out this page:

http://www.gildor.org/en/projects/umodel

I guarantee it will blow your mind

[GreatEmerald]

What's isometric rendering? Google brings me back to this thread... :-/

[Skw]

Isometric:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_projection

Like in Diablo 2. Or Age of Empires.

List of isometric games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game ... c_graphics

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:V ... c_graphics

[GreatEmerald]

Oh, that's like Red Alert 2! But how would this look in Unreal? Shouldn't it have buildings with only one storey, then? It kinda reminds me of USkaarj mod for UT2004, they managed to turn it to a strategy game somehow.

[[§Ŕ] ŤhěxĐâŕkśîđěŕ]

I can't possibly think how would this look in Unreal. :\

[BOZO]

Casey,

Thanks for pointing out that UModelExtractor program. Very Nice. It seems to work well with the limited testing I have done with it and it also can handle some older formats (pre ver 224) without confusion. I'm certain I will be using this quite often in the future. It is capable of extracting files that UTPT and other utilities failed miserably on.

The only significant issue I see right now is a problem that is endemic to all extraction programs. They all split the polygons seperately into their constituent vertices but do not recongnize when a vertex is really the same vertex referenced by a neighboring polygon. Thus the extracted models contain many more vertices than the original base files. Memory is therefore wasted and meshes do not look as good when reimported.

In addition, it does not capture the vertex style assignments properly (two-sided, translucent, etc.) Instead it splits them out into their own seperate material assignment. No big deal as you can fix this manually with UnrealFX but definately worth noting.

Overall a nice utility worth having in everyones toolbox.

I plan on putting together a small utility myself at some point in the future to allow me to re-merge these split vertices and clean up the raw mesh *_d and *_a files (and get rid of obsolete settings).

Definately need to take the time to write up all the details related to vertex mesh support I have figured out over the years on the OldUnreal Wiki.

[[]KAOS[]Casey]

Interesting.. we were planning to use that to "restore" the models when we compile upak with ucc. perhaps using the "hack" method is actually better.