Stereoscopic (3D) glasses and Elemental

Sigh. Why must technology keep coming up with new and awesome ways for me to irradiate my brain?

Dont forget the Novint Falcon... If I had some spare money I would get me one of them... Then there is the OCZ neural impulse actuator I would buy that just for the awesome factor alone. Playing Star Wars BF2 and using the force with my mind is just an awesome thought...

3d glasses? Really?

Why not just go the whole hog and bring back VR helmets?

Cos they made everybody sick  The new 3d glasses sound totally amazing though I read this awesome article on Tom's Hardware at some point about using them with a high quality projector.. so you can have a wall sized image in 3d, playing an FPS like that.. man...that's an idea so cool I litterally can't keep it in my head!!!

I don't want to mess with any of that until I can get a pair of *comfortable* datagloves. No other input device I know of works with my poor wetware--I can't make the leap from 2D pointer control to 3D pointer control via mouse/trackball/joystick/keyboard.

$500 + dollars for 3D PC gaming glasses which only work for a few games??   Almost as crazy as when I heard people buying a star or property on another planet.  

I'm sure if you send Stardock two or three pairs of these glasses they'll do some testing with them.   Not sure if any changes would be done, but I'm sure they'd be happy to test them.

Well, from what I understood at the Intel booth at GDC last year, getting them to work is really easy.  You just have to have the rendering engine be able (and ready) to render the same image from slightly different angles.   In theory (again, intel rep talking) the production cost will not change much to provide support for it.

A game like Elemental doesn't need 3D glasses, FPS's, Adventure games, those kind of games would rock with 3D glasses, but a TBS? Nah, no need for one, imho

Well from what I understand Nvidia’s 3D glasses work on every game as long as you have an Nvidia graphics card. The actually 3D calculations are performed at the graphics card driver level but some games lend themselves better to this process than others. Nvidia has been trying to get developers to release patches and beef up support for their new 3D glasses although they haven’t had much time to get anything major together I believe. It sounds like Nvidia hopes that they can get the drivers refined enough to work with every game and then developers can just focus on adding cool effects and features but I would assume some level of cooperation between the developer and Nvidia will be necessary for the best experience.

 As for the benefits this could have for Elemental I see 3 places where Stardock could really add some awesome 3D effects. The cinematic battles with thousands of soldiers Brad has talked about sound like they would be awesome and tailor made for 3D effects. The late game world wrecking spells we’ve heard about could really benefit from 3D effects. Lastly, if Stardock did implement some kind of dueling system similar to what was discussed in the ideas section of the forum 3D effects would make duels even more epic.  

Well, the 3D view wouldn't hurt.  The pointer would be able to actually move around on a flat surface above the plane on which the rest of the game would exist.  It would be good depth perception practice to click on things.

the battles would look great

they made everyone sick cause the tech was crap. The stereoscopic glasses make people SLIGHTLY sick from what i heard (well, only people who get carsick). But it would still be easier to get proper QUALITY VR helmet... what makes VR helmets possible now that wasn't before? OLED! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oled

the way the nvidia glasses work, the driver actually renders twice, once from a point of view slightly to the right, and once from slightly to the left. (since it has detailed 3d structures of everything and is responsible for rendering in the first place, that comes out right). You need a 120fps monitor too. And the glasses.

Anyways the problem with certain games have to with mixing of 2d and 3d mostly.

For example, if they put a name tag above a person head in 2d, aka, at screen level, and then you use the nvidia driver to do a 3d render for the glasses, you will see a person standing 5 feet ahead of you, with his name floating near YOUR head, not hear HIS head. If you were to relocate it to be above his head, than you will take slightly more effort to render it, or maybe program, but it will hover above his head instead of in your face.

So for elemental, it means having the cursor be a 3d object on ground level, instead of having it as a 2d overlay at camera level (aka, floating in the air above the ground). From what i read, this is actually a technology that works really well with FPS top down games.

The only real problem with 3d systems like these is that they are not fully immersive unless you have a screen that curves all the way around your field of vision. If you rely on a projection that is flat then the perspective will become skewed and the border where the 3d ends will stand out.

I must say that I don't see any reason to include this in Elemental. (as others stated already) Its a turnbased fantasy strategy game, not a racer, fps or anything were I can see benefits of including it.

Rather see Stardock spending their limited time on more important issues. (Balance, modabilty ect.)

Well balance and modability we know they are planing to do.

Rather than stereoscopic 3D glasses, I'd rather see duel-moniter support and windowed mode support.  That would be the same people doing it, unlike balance which I'd imagine might not be the 3D interface guys (like the same parts of the team that COULD make stereoscopic 3D glasses would be making duel-moniter support),

Duel-moniters are MUCH more common than 3D glasses.  And even if I had 3D glasses, I'd probebly still use windowed mode or duel-moniters more since I'm a fiend when it comes to chatting or doing other things that cause me to minimize my game on a regular basis.

Dual (not duel) monitor support would be amazing. Especially in a TBS game.

landisaurus, the subtext of the Elemental project is building a game engine that become a baseline for the future effort on Galactic Civilizations 3.

GC2 is already darned friendly about running in window mode, so I'm pretty sure that even the beta for Elemental will play nicely for folks who want to run the game while also keeping an eye on this forum, headlines, homework, etc.

One thing I want them to work out in window mode/dual screen mode: side-scrolling. I want to be able to side-scroll by pushing the mouse to the side even if I'm just using one screen for the game, but I also want to be able to move the mouse from one screen to the other. I don't know the best way to do this; but I want it to be done!

The thought of having proper 3D in games is always going to be a big attraction as its the next major step in making games more immersive. However, I don't see Stardock doing anything to optimise this feature in game as it would be a waste of their time, mainly due to the lack of users out there. I can't there are many people who want to/already have spent a large chunck of cash on upgrading to a 120Hz monitor plus paying out for the glasses and possibly the graphics card is they currently use ATI.

IMO this technology still needs to be polished further before it can really be considered mainstream enough for widespread use. The issue that taltamir was talking about is what I think is the biggest stumbling block as this is something that would really annoy me. I read somewhere that this happens to a lot of targeting reticles in FPS games making targeting somewhat harder than normal. I also don't really see the need for something like this in Elemental, and dual-screen support sounds like a better use of SD's time.

Just my thoughts though  

Hmm, the best way would be to have a key modifier for scrolling. So the mouse goes everywhere but the map will only scroll (left or right monitor) when you hold Ctrl for example.

By the way, for anyone wanting to try out a game-with-3D-glasses without having to spend $1200, pick up Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (NB this is not Serious Sam 2), which has a mode for Red/Blue 3D glasses. Sure it's not the quality of those nVidia things but you can buy a pair for only $2 or you can make them yourself (and the first Serious Sam games are great shooters to boot :))

Hmmm and yes it does get one a bit nauseated