On Tue, 02 Jun 1998 16:31:44 +1200, Oliver Batchelor
<bat### [at] netaccessconz> wrote:

>I am making a graphical RPG game with tiled land and a directly overhead
>camera and need some help.
>
>I created a highfield and scaled it by 30, 1, 30 translated it by -15,
>0, -15 to put it back in the middle of the whole thing, put the camera
>directly overhead at 0, 40, 0, changed the renderer to render at 100 by
>100 resolution. And I had 3 problems.
>
>1) Firstly the Land didnt come  out square at all  it came out as a
>rectangle, being higher than it was wide.!!!

This is probably because your camera expects to create an image that
is 4/3 as wide as high.  If you change the declaration of your right
vector to have the same length as your up vector, it should work as
you expect.  For more information, see section 7.4.4.5.1 of the
manual.

>2)I don't know where to  put the camera to get all of the highfeild
>exacly fitting into the rendered screen. (The Resulting tga had parts of
>black around the sides or It didnt contain the very edges of the
>highfeild)

Unless you use an orthographic camera or have perfectly flat edges on
your heightfield, there's no way to make this happen.  I suggest the
orthographic camera.  The default perspective camera just won't cut it
for this application, unless you move it really far away and zoom way
in.  See section 7.4.1 for information on different projections,
including orthographic.

>This is essential because the pattern I use to get the file going into
>the highfeild is a tiled pattern and the result needs also to be tilable
>to be able to put the images next to each other with no clear meeting of
>the 2 tiles.

Your light source will have to be very far away to prevent the shadows
from changing abruptly from one tile to the next. 

>3)What type of tga files does Pov produce, and is there any way of
>making pov produce 16 bit Uncompressed tga files only ? (I can only load
>16 bit uncompressed files not any other type of tga)

POV can output compressed or uncompressed Targa-24 files.  The only
format with a variable bit depth is PNG format.  You must have missed
this in section 6.2.2.3.1 of the fine manual.

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