Hey everyone,

I am currently working on the camera code of my 2D game project. Now, although I have said "2D", entities have a 3D location, which is to be used both for a free parallax effect, as well as gameplay. I initially had an orthographic projection set up, in the following way :

mProjection = Matrix.CreateOrthographic(mRenderer.backBufferWidth * mDistance, mRenderer.backBufferHeight * mDistance, mNear, mFar);

The code is quite explicit, apart from mDistance maybe. This variable simply represents the distance/scaling factor of the camera, and otherwise expands the projection range to show a bigger part of the screen (in essence, zooming in and out).

I have switched this method to using "CreatePerspective" in the following way :

mProjection = Matrix.CreatePerspective(mRenderer.backBufferWidth, mRenderer.backBufferHeight, mNear, mFar);

The mDistance variable was moved to the actual view matrix computation, which is why it does not appear here. Although it works "visually", I found that the BoundingFrustum I compute for my Camera is no longer valid :

mFrustum.Matrix = this.view * this.projection;

The frustum is used for the culling of my entities, and the algorithm will work with the original orthographic projection, and perspective projection matrices defined in the following way :

mProjection = Matrix.CreatePerspective(1.0f, 1.0f/1.33f, mNear, mFar);

I am slightly confused, and failing to see why my solution fails : shouldn't I be allowed to project coordinates as I like. Essentially, with my setup, I am trying to map a unit to a single pixel. In other words, I would like an object of size 64*64 to be exactly 64*64 pixels on the screen, when it sits on the near plane.

Where have I gone wrong with my thinking process?

Your help and explanations would be appreciated !

Hey,

Thanks for your reply.

I have found a temporary solution to my frustum problem. I say temporary, because even though it works and is stable, I am not happy with the overall implications/code. Essentially, I adapt the far plane according to the camera distance, because by using a fixed constant, it seems to stretch the far plane out too much, and include entities which are otherwise within the frustum, but not actually visible :

float adaptiveFar = mDistance + 1.0f;
mProjection = Matrix.CreatePerspective(mRenderer.backBufferWidth, mRenderer.backBufferHeight, mNear, adaptiveFar);

This solution outputs a valid frustum, and also provides me with a more suitable far plane distance, which is proportional to the zooming level I require for my game.

I am still open to explanations as to why my frustum is invalid when using a constant value .