3D Objects in 2D Scene?

[groonie]

We think about an rpg in an unlimited world.
We wanted to have 3D Persons and create the World in 2D.


Is there a way with ogre3D to get these objects into a 2D Scene?

[okki]

you could fix your camera above the ground and look downwards... thats kind of 2d but ogre might be a bit oversized for that

[Game_Ender]

By "2D World" do you mean one that is flat? I imagine you are thinking of something like Diablo. I beleive you want to use just a basic set of tiled 2D textures (possibly bilboards) with the 3D characters rendered on top.

[Vectrex]

or you might means overlaying 3d objects onto 2d backgrounds?
Either way you might want to use the Orthagonal camera (Isometric) so there's no perspective, like older 2d rpgs like Diablo

[groonie]

We want to mix 3D Characters with a 2D world, similar to diablo. It has a very huge world, that grows, if you want to reach the end. This can't be done with a 3D world, imagine the space in memory you must have, or the generation time for the new world parts. We thought of storing textures and sprites in the memory, so we can puzzle the world together. Like a good old typical 2D rpg. But it would be great, if we could have our character's in 3D, so that we can hack code for the movements once and use it for nearly every creature in our world.

Finally, the 3D creatures should either be rendered to a buffer and copied (without background) to our world, or there's a better method, where these objects are directly rendered.

[DWORD]

This is certainly possible in a 3d world. You just have to take care of only having the nearest tiles in memory at the same time, just like in a 2d version. I'd suggest using textured quads for the tiles, and then positioning the 3d models on top of them.

For performance reasons it's best if you keep together those tiles in as few render operations as possible, and fit together as many 'tile pictures' into each texture as possible, to reduce the number of state changes needed.

There have been some discussion before about this on the forum, e.g. in this thread.

[Vectrex]

couldn't you have 3d 'tiles' that snap together just like 2d tiles do? Basically just smaller square chunks of geometry. They could easily extend over multi tiles in the 2d map data aswell, so you could model big things and not worry about segmenting them.

[AssiDragon]

There was a tile based landscape manager around - you might find it suitable. Also about making landscape from tiles, PLSM does that already, afaik.

[Robomaniac]

*random note*
if you can't figure out how to have 3d objects ontop of a 2d scene, maybe you shouldn't be attempting a "RPG with an unlimited world"...

*/random note*