Not a lot of news on the shmup kit.
But i have been doing a lot of experimental coding.
I've recently written a quaternion camera routine. Teaching myself Quaternion's as i went.
Quaternion's if anyone doesn't know are another way of doing rotations instead of using a Euler rotation matrix ( pitch , yaw , roll ).
An easy way to think of a Quaternion, as a way to represent a rotation, is to think of a long handled sweeping brush. Holding the brush at the handle and swinging it about represents the Quaternion vector part. The direction the brush handle points, is analagous to it's direction vector.
And twisting the brush handle, so that the brush spins around is analagous to Roll.
Thus a direction vector and roll are all thats needeed to represent any rotation.
Only 4 variables are needed for a quaternion rather than 9 for a rotation matrix.
Anyway, i've been experiementing with software 3d in Blitzmax, as it's natively only a 2d system.
Using scaled sprites in 3d instead of textured polygons, as is normally used these days.
This technique was really popular in the arcades with games like Afterburner and Powerdrift by Sega.
I'm not sure if i'll do anything with the code, but it was good experience and was a lot of fun.
TMC
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