Tempest: Basic 3D

Prior to adding enemies, I thought it best to get a working proof of concept third dimension for Tempest.

Allowing for perspective #

This was mostly fine, except for the minor hiccup that retrowars assumes all games want an OrthographicCamera.

I’m not very happy with my solution of passing in a flag if you want perspective, and will likely refactor that later, but for now it works well. Here is a discussion on why flag arguments are normally not the solution to a problem you face.

Here are the results:

Offsetting the perspective #

After patting myself on the back about how it mostly looked like the YouTube videos of original Tempest, I quickly noticed that the perspective in the original game is actually offset a little. The camera doesn’t look directly down the centre of the level, but starts a bit below centre.

After accounting for this by translating the camera in my version down slightly, it really is starting to shape up nicely.

Next steps #

Next I will tighten up some of the measurements (currently the depth is just arbitrarily chosen as a fixed value). After that, I think shooting from the players current position, then the addition of enemies.