Airplane Shooter Design Question [solved]

[Jgoldnight]

Hello,

I'm prototyping my next project which is a 3d airplane shooter. The camera is a top-down (bird's eye) perspective that simulates a 2D feel, but I'm using 3d coordinates because it seems like an obvious choice when using meshes and not sprites. Firstly, should I just convert to 2d coordinates to simplify the process while not sacrificing the use of 3d objects?

My problem is that I want to copy a 2D implementation, where anything (enemies, bullets, etc) outside of the boundaries of the current screen (determined by the device's width and height) would be made inactive/deallocated. The problem is that with my camera at a given Y-intercept (height), I am unsure about how to determine crossing the boundaries; the device's width and height are not correct measures of the viewport's bounds. I was thinking of somehow using the camera's field of view to determine the bounds, but it seemed a bit tedious and troublesome. Before diving into that implementation, I just wanted to get some feedback on alternate design choices.

Thanks!

[CuteAlien]

You can check the corners of the screen (or the of the area used for your display in case you don't need the whole screen) with ray = SceneCollisionManager::getRayFromScreenCoordinates. The resulting rays be collided with the plane on which your objects are. plane3d::getIntersectionWithLine can do that for you (as parameters use: ray.start, ray.start+ray.end). Then you have the corners of your visible area in units.

[Jgoldnight]

Thanks CuteAlien!