I figure this is probably a good time to post this since there’s more talk about 3D since last time I tried to ask a question about 3D game making.
A while back, I posted a post about my plans for a Star Fox-style game with Senocular’s 3D engine shown in his tutorial. However, I couldn’t get the polygon depth sorted out and Senocular (or anyone else with the know-how) never responded to the post with anything helpful. So, I decided to just do something with simpler polygons or wireframe where I don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. I’m still up for that game if someone can explain why the “help dots” were in those particular places in the spaceship in Senocular’s demo, and how to determine where to put them in other models so that the polygons overlap correctly.
In any case, that’s not the main point of this message. The point is that Senocular’s tutorial on 3D leaves out something very important if you’re going to make a game out of it: collision detection. How you can stop the camera from going through walls, and that sort of thing. Is anyone able to help with that? For the Star Fox-style game, the collision detection works because the camera doesn’t change directions, but looks head-on. The only detection involved is if two movie clips collide when they have the same z value. But what should be done when the camera rotates? How do you tell it when it can’t go any further into a wall then?