Edited 28 July: new version to download
I made a kind of cylindrical camera by sticking ordinary cameras together. Works quite nicely.
I thought this would be cool for a game played primarily on a horizontal plane- like a rotate and thrust thing, tank game etc. You can change the horizontal fov so it goes up to very large numbers. I capped it to 500 degrees. 180 degrees you can't do with an ordinary perspective camera, and approaching this you get nasty stretching at the edges. With the cylindrical camera you don't. You can go up to 360 degrees and beyond.
In latest version i have tried to make the equations generalised
and have provided comments so that you can change the parameters easily, like number of cameras, display mode, letterboxing etc, and hopefully be able to stick it into a game.
I think it would be interesting in a first person shooter. A person has a perhipheral field of vision of over 180 degrees horizontally, and you don't normally get this in games, but you can do it with this. However, a person cannot look DIRECTLY at something 90 degrees to the side without turning their head, but you can with this. Try "peeking" around the corner of a box, or going through the line- you can check to the side without moving the mouse.
Obviously the more cameras, the less "bumpy" stuff looks (straight lines instead of looking like curved lines look like kinked lines). 10 seems like enough cameras below 180 degrees or so. I figure too many cameras might make it run slow. I haven't experienced significant slowdown, but then my test scene is quite uncomplicated.
I attach a zip with the exe and the source and media. It's 1.9 megs.
Mouselook and mouseclick to move. Arrows to change the angular range. Other parameters can be changed at the start of the prog without too much difficulty i hope.
I'd like to have a spherical camera too, and you can't really do that practically this way. Hope someone finds this useful/interesting.
You'll be able to click on this someday.
