i've been watching bits of breath of fire 4 longplays, and one of the first interesting things i noticed is that there's actually a lot of perspective camera work in the cutscenes -- the game literally opens with a horizon shot (i think the reason the sandflier has railings is in part to hide everybody's feet, since otherwise they wouldn't look right. or maybe not; it's hard to tell), followed almost immediately by a shot where the sandstrider appears over the horizon. likewise, in the cutscene where ryu first shows up, there's another camera tilt that goes over the horizon.
uh this is interesting b/c breath of fire 3/4 generally use an orthographic camera with no vanishing perspective, so the use of a perspective camera w/ a vanishing line at the horizon (or using tricks to fake it) is pretty unusual. like a genuine orthographic camera can't elegantly look up, since the moment it tilts up enough for the horizon to become visible you realize that the horizon isn't converging with distance at all.
also i THINK the way breath of fire 4 maps work is that there's a grid/nonplanar graph of tiles, with height values at corners, where movement is allowed onto any open tile with a matching edge. i think movement is actually aligned to the grid, it's just that each grid unit is like, half the size of a sprite footprint.
basically there're a lot of very subdued height slopes in some early maps that you can walk along, and all maps generally have some pretty distinct clifflike height differences. i don't really know to what degree the rendered geometry is associated with the walkable tiles, though presumably there's some connection. but that's the kind of thing you can't just eyeball from an lp.
anyway blah blah blah video games are tough
uh this is interesting b/c breath of fire 3/4 generally use an orthographic camera with no vanishing perspective, so the use of a perspective camera w/ a vanishing line at the horizon (or using tricks to fake it) is pretty unusual. like a genuine orthographic camera can't elegantly look up, since the moment it tilts up enough for the horizon to become visible you realize that the horizon isn't converging with distance at all.
also i THINK the way breath of fire 4 maps work is that there's a grid/nonplanar graph of tiles, with height values at corners, where movement is allowed onto any open tile with a matching edge. i think movement is actually aligned to the grid, it's just that each grid unit is like, half the size of a sprite footprint.
basically there're a lot of very subdued height slopes in some early maps that you can walk along, and all maps generally have some pretty distinct clifflike height differences. i don't really know to what degree the rendered geometry is associated with the walkable tiles, though presumably there's some connection. but that's the kind of thing you can't just eyeball from an lp.
anyway blah blah blah video games are tough
