Pseudo 3D water scaling?

[Super196]

Hi all, I'm a bit confused as to how I would go about making water scale to look 3D.
The best example I can think of at the moment is Sonic 3's hydrocity zone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...Hu_qIjxQ#t=11s

Notice how the water scales to follow the character to give the illusion of depth.

Any idea how this would be accomplished in MMF2?

[Corlen]

Maybe look into the mode 7 object or the perspective object. I don't think the former is optimized for HWA mode however. Maybe someone else has a better solution?

[Pixelthief]

To get the scaling of the water surface is easy- just have it be a flag 2d object which you rescale its Y coefficient relative to your distance.
But in order to get it to parallax properly as you scroll along the X (top scrolls slower than bottom), thats where it gets tricky.
You *could* do that with just using multiple parallaxing objects, maybe 5-8 different water actives, which give an individual X offset
or, you could find a repeating pattern of the LCM of the parallax offsets at some given lower resolution, and have your object graphic be cleverly designed to repeat over that interval
for example, if you had them at an X coefficient of 1:2:4:8:16, then you could have a 16 pixel or 32 pixel long repeating pattern, and simply repeatedly blit that with a text blitter or something
or even have 16 different animations for 1 object that is rescaled, and choose between them based on the modulo of the camera's x position

[King_Cool]

How about just using mulple layers with differet X and or Y coefficients?

[Super196]

Thanks guys, I think I'll try Pixelthief's suggestion, I have no idea how to use mode 7.

Would anyone know of an existing example for this?

[nivram]

There is several examples in your Examples Folder in the MMF2 directory.

Marv

[Looki]

Haha, the moment I read the thread title I immediately thought 'Hydrocity Zone'. The exact same effect is a bit tricky to pull off nicely in MMF because it kind of requires drawing only parts of the water parallax surfaces. If you don't want your water to be split up into multiple layers and just need a similar 3D effect (based on one texture that is projected in 3D), you could probably use a shader for HWA (Werbad's 3D shader?) or the Perspective Object or whatever.

[Monokkel]

I made an almost identical effect using the parallaxer-object. Works fine, but still looks a bit off when scrolling along the x-axis.

[Super196]

Actually, I think this will work quite nicely. Thanks!

[Corlen]

Haha, the moment I read the thread title I immediately thought 'Hydrocity Zone'. The exact same effect is a bit tricky to pull off nicely in MMF because it kind of requires drawing only parts of the water parallax surfaces. If you don't want your water to be split up into multiple layers and just need a similar 3D effect (based on one texture that is projected in 3D), you could probably use a shader for HWA (Werbad's 3D shader?) or the Perspective Object or whatever.

Also I think it's Donkey Kong Country 2 that uses this exact same effect.