Meant to be Seen

Hello everyone!

I need your opinion about additional M3GA scenarios.

Currently, it is reasonably easy to understand a combined depth and pop-out experience for first person shooters. However, we need to consider racing games, third person games (e.g. Avatar: The Game), flight simulators, and RTS (e.g. top down games).

I'd be interested in hearing your opinions as to what you consider the optimal experience for each? I think we need to still force combined depth and pop-out to weed out the anomalies and flaws, but we need markers that people can understand. For example, with Need For Speed SHIFT, we wanted to make sure that the steering wheel could pop out of the screen. With Avatar: The Game, the main character has the flexibility to float in front of the screen in third person view.

I don't think we will be able to come up with the perfect position, but I'd value your opinions on this.

Regards,
Neil

Some opinions (not rules. )
My fave genre is definitely "3'rd-person adventure games" and generally i prefer having the main character at or just behind screendepth (Tomb raiders, assassins creed etc etc). Then adjust separation until i'm satisfied with the effect.

For first person shooters (hl2 series) i use to stand as close as possible to a wall and adjust stereo until the wall is 5-10 centimetres "popouted", then check if depth is proper and adjust again if necessary. There are quite a few exceptions for this regarding how the gun and hud looks.

Racing games: In trackmania i prefer having the view where my car isn't visible (gives the most feeling of speed but is also most difficult to play i think). I adjust stereo until the visible track itself is just below screendepth (no popout). Things at the sides or above the track usually popouts a bit. In flat out i have a similar setting as with trackmania (the track visible only by depth). There are a lot of things flying out of the screen when playing this though.

The best things with 3d-gaming is that the effect can be adjusted til every persons like. So one setting that looks good for someone might need a slight adjustment to suit another.

Hi, Its cool to see gaming almost a priority in stereo3d for enhancments. What 3d gaming to me brings is seeing all the details with the depth. When I play crysis I always look at the gun in zoom or lift up mode and like to see the little holes and attachments on the gun itself. Bringing popout/volume to details is the most important function to have. Like racing games it would be better to have the internal car with internal components popout the dashboard and stereo deck along with the signaling stick and stickshift. Looking at this detail stuff adds realism and aweshock to S3D.

In overhead looking down games, I remember playing grandtheft auto2 and when you sped up the camera would come out more so you could see the areas more. Like this changing the FOV for different actions and running a character inplay or hiding or talking/speech and fighting sequences will give more of the detail/art and imersion.

As far as adding more popout/volume gaming structures I would recommend setting spectacular popouts as acheivements/goals and accomplishment rewards. For Example in Mario 64 from nintendo.. If this game had the star you capture at the end of the mission like capturing all the coins and this star popped out of screen as an acheivement then this would behold the game player and let them know you won with an out of screen goal. Other games this could be done with points that float out of screen or dollars. Something mainly to do with goals and acheivments.


Also I don't know if this would work but maybe trying to change the FOV for each object that is in a scene, making it easier, farther and wider to see either based on you in a car/vehicle or turing a corner or jumping/capturing an objetive would be out more, running would be closer FOV and looking at an object or door or in a tight space would give almost 180 degree viewing possible in game.

Not every game is going to have this "combined depth and popout" experience. In fact, I find most games it is nearly impossible to get much popout at all. If there is some popout it is rendered weird such as a gun popping out while being clipped by the edge of the screen in a FPS game. By the very nature of most 3D engines things behind the camera (ie popping out) are hidden anyway so its not even possible to have a full pop-out experience. I mainly adjust my settings so the direct foreground elements are at screen depth (ie the gun in a FPS, the character in a 3rd person game) and try to set the background to go as deep as I can while still having a comfortable experience (which may be different for everyone). I am not sure there is a perfect setting that will work for everybody.

some rather random toughs about this:

Top-down:
I think in RTS I don't want any pop-out at all. I want to play it like looking into a box of toys. Since RTS as well as MMOs traditionally have a lot of Info for the player > heavy GUI, the implementation of the GUI is also a quality issue. Besides that selecting you units has to be done well.

3d-person
one of the important quality issues with 3rd person games in s3d (and 2d as well) is the handling of the camera that follows the avatar. If it shifts to the wrong position, gets to close to other objects or even clips into geometry it can literally hurt the eyes in S-3D. I think my personal preference would be to also skip almost all pop-out effects because to me its more like following a theatric play then something that would be "in your face".

MMO (mostly 3rd person as well) often suffer from issues where the player and NPC names are not at the right position in S-3D and also rely heavy on a GUI. With a lot of GUI on the screen again there is danger that a pop-out effect and the GUI layer don't mix well causing eye-strain if done wrong.

All these I think are a bit tougher to develop then a 1st person shooter since you often have to add tons of interface stuff like chat window, player/NPC names, text-dialogs, skill buttons and so on. So for all of these game types a factor on how much the GUI disturbs the s3d comes to my mind. From my experience in the above genres, the less GUI is there and the more Text to Speech is done, the better the S-3D experience gets. As for pop-out effects I think I would skip them for all.