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[MurrayL]

Hi guys; sorry for the long post. The main thrust of the query is emboldened at the bottom.

I'm working on a game at the moment which includes several player-controlled characters displayed simultaneously in 3D, in mid-air. Using analogue controls, they can move in all 3 dimensions.

Playtesting has shown that most players spend a fair amount of time sort of trying to float into each other but missing entirely when it turns out that they were on different vertical planes.

I know the problem stems from a lack of clear landmarks that high up in the sky, but I'd like to avoid things like overlaying a massive 3D grid if possible.
Due to the height of the play area, I'm finding it difficult to provide the players with enough depth cues that they can intuitively tell where they are in all 3 dimensions.



I've tried looking at similar games like the skydiving mini-game in Wii Sports Resort, but I can't nail down exactly what it is that they've done to solve the problem other than not give the players as much capacity for movement in the first place.

At the moment I have a separate GUI element (per player) on the left side of the screen which moves up and down according to the player's height, but it seems that this isn't visible enough during more frantic moment-to-moment gameplay, so I'd prefer a much more obvious way of doing it.

The discs around each player also point towards the box (an objective item), and that has been seen to help a lot. Unfortunately it only shows position in 2D relative to that one element, not in 3D and to the other players.

Does anyone have any thoughts on a way of providing all players with an intuitive way of knowing exactly where they are in 3D space, relative to the others, at the same time?

[randomnine]

Altitude bars shouldn't be necessary to convey something you should be able to just see. Remove em

Widen the field of view (and shift the camera closer to compensate). This exaggerates perspective effects, so characters further away from the camera will be more obviously distant.

Shadows. Your people are a long way up, but you could add shadows on clouds.

Fog. Moderate fog will make differences in distance from the camera more obvious.

As a last resort, you could simplify vertical movement into sliding between multiple horizontal planes which are spaced far enough apart that differences in current plane are obvious.

The main thing is scale, though. If you don't want to use a wide field of view, another trick is to directly scale characters based on height/distance from the camera - so low/distant characters are shrunk, and high/near characters are larger. Be careful with this effect. Applying it too heavily can make things behave in counter-intuitive ways, like appearing to move a lot faster if they're further away.

[gimymblert]

Maybe the problem is not depth cue but proximity cue?

[MurrayL]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I've actually already tried most of the things you suggested randomnine
The game camera shifts its FOV based on how far apart the players are (to keep them all on-screen), so I can't really use that to show depth as well.
I also played around with modifying the scale of the player object based on their distance from the camera, but (as you said) it was tricky to get it looking satisfactory.

The main problem isn't so much the horizontal dimensions as the vertical one, for which shadows would be a good solution if the players were grounded.
Unfortunately without a Unity Pro license I can't do any sort of real-time shadowing or depth-of-field effects, so that kind of trickery is out.

What I'm currently experimenting with is a sort of old-school alternative to true real-time shadowing, where each player projects a sprite downwards, along with a visible 'beam' between them and it. It visually 'anchors' them to a lower-limit of altitude, and while I'm not happy with it yet I'm going to keep poking at it and see if I can make it a bit more useful.

(As an aside, I'm thinking of removing the movement on the side-bars, but they do also show other game info so unless that is ported to other display methods the bars will stay put.)

@Gimmy; the only proximity cues I have at the moment are the rings around the players. They point towards the player currently in possession of the objective, and they change to a 'target' and spin when a player is within attack range.
What sort of things were you thinking?

[gimymblert]

Excuse me but the shadowing thing is a non issue. You may use cookie light, projector, custom projected mesh, and someone made a custom shadow system for free version too: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/102079-Dynamic-shadows-in-Unity-Free-Pro-possibly-Mobile

It's not like the game design need uber dynamic shadow either, we have been using fake shadow for year to great enough effect, like you plan to do.

On proximity cue, is this enough to tell player that they will successfully bump into each other? If the signal does not match the interaction (or provide a clear enough information) it will fail.

Another depth cue is fog, which can stop right at when people are close enough (giving a contrast that hint proximity), you may also introduce a bit of "snapping" if you want them to bump into things, ie when they are in a margin of influence they are subtly magnet to each other.