> Roughly what I was dreaming of doing was to marry the type of drawn map 
> info in Google Maps with the camera freedom of Google Earth, but without 
> any of the sophisticated resolution adjustment in either presentation. All 
> I was really envisioning was to control the movement of a camera around 
> say a box with a diagram on it and maybe a coupla other boxes to mark 
> buildings.  But rotating and zooming the object would be a little 
> underwhelming without being able to dolly the camera too.  Because 
> dollying a character through a game scene seemed such a common thing to do 
> I was a little surprised at my initial findings.

If you write something that uses a 3D API like OpenGL or DirectX, you 
basically can set the camera in exactly the same way as you would in POV. 
So in your code you just need to calculate the camera position and "look at" 
vector, then pass that on to the API before drawing your scene.

Creating some code to take keyboard/mouse input and generate the camera 
vectors is relatively straightforward if you're comfortable working with 3D 
vectors and geometry.  For example, you could use the arrow keys to move 
left/right and forward/back relative to the camera look_at direction, and 
the mouse x/y inputs to set the look_at vector.

Post a reply to this message