screen dimensions in Open GL units?

[Raloth]

Is there a way to find out what the dimensions are based on where the camera is? Even from (0,0,0) would work in my case. I can use simple triginometry to calculate what it is from the camera height I decide to use and store it in a final. I am working on a 2d-3d overhead game and I need to know to keep the "sprites" from going off the screen. Right now I am just using textured quads, but in the future I hope these will be come actual models so I can do some cool effects with the z coordinate (for example, enemies fly up and shoot down at you).

[cfmdobbie]

I'm afraid that's a bit confused - in a perspective mode the "world" extents you can see depends on how far away you're looking, and whether the surface you're looking at is perpendicular to the camera etc.  You should be able to work out things like that, but it's down to you to do the math (since you set up the world and objects in the first place).

You might want to use an orthogonal view - look at gl.ortho().  The viewing volume generated is a "rectangular parallelepiped" (a box) rather than a frustum.

[Raloth]

All I need is a way to tell if a vertice is in the current camera view. I'm not sure what I was thinking before.

I did think about using ortho, but that limits the game to only looking good at one resolution.

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[Orangy Tang]

Theres code for a GL Frustum class in the shared code section somewhere, that should do what you want.

[Harley Rana]

http://www.markmorley.com/opengl/frustumculling.html
Explains the situtation really well.

[Raloth]

I think I might just go to ortho view. How well does open gl resize the textures? I wanted the game to be playable on any resolution but it doesn't look like it is going to happen.

[jbanes]

Just use a bigger or smaller square. Bigger square == resized  image.

[Raloth]

I'm just worried that the image will get too distorted at really high or low resolutions.

[cfmdobbie]

No more so than with a perspective view, surely?

[princec]

Use the highest resolution texture you can get away with. Get GLU to generate mipmaps of it. Use linear_mipmap_nearest minification.

Cas

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[Raloth]

Thanks guys, everything is working pretty well now. One thing is kind of bothering me though. My particles end up going on top of the sprites and I would like them underneath, and I can't figure out how to change the order. Turning off blending before rendering the sprites and then turning it back on before the particles doesn't seem to work.

[cfmdobbie]

If you're using a Z buffer in an orthogonal viewing transform, just give the particles a larger Z-value.  If you can't afford to have them moved far, just "budge" them a little - by 0.001f or something.

If you're not Z-buffering, just draw the particles first.