Is there anyway to make a displacement or relief map that the V.B. Understands. A displacement map is a grey graphic that is not displayed but the light levels when viewed are seen as rising from the surface. The dark levels are seen as sunken into the surface. It’s usually a grey image that has 256 levels of grey. I know that I’ll probably get a message like
READ THE WIKI! (From some of you more seasoned programmers) But I’m an animator not a programmer and I don’t even know what a Wiki is.

A wiki is an editable set of webpages; e.g. Wikipedia. Ours is all about VB development, and it’s located here: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/dokuwiki/

However, you will not find what you seek there, since that type of graphic manipulation is far beyond the VB’s capabilities. The VB is pretty much restricted to moving groups of 4-shade (2-bit) grey-scale pixels around. The most advanced thing it can do is the affine transform, which can be used for scaling, rotating, and skewing four-sided “chunks” of bitmap.

RunnerPack wrote:

“you will not find what you seek there, since that type of graphic manipulation is far beyond the VB’s capabilities. The VB is pretty much restricted to moving groups of 4-shade (2-bit) grey-scale pixels around. The most advanced thing it can do is the affine transform, which can be used for scaling, rotating, and skewing four-sided “chunks” of bitmap.”

Ok I get what your saying about how it can’t be done but what about putting a 3d object in a background you see this in almost every V.B. Game on the market. Can we not do that either. And if the Wiki allows you to do that why won’t it just raise some pixels on the z axis (toward the viewer) and lower some on the z axis (away from the viewer) by some kind of map or some other way of specifing instead of drawing each level and saying ok this is level one away from the eye-level 3 closer to the eye. Could it be added to the Mad Scientist Laboratory. I mean did Nintendo model all of their objects or did they have some kind of displacement tools. I guess I see it as a modeling tool just another way of making a 3d object on the Virtual Boy. Please tell me what I’m missing.

Of course we can put 3D objects in a background, but it has nothing to do with raising or lowering pixels.

3D images on VB can be done in two ways, both invloving showing slightly different screens to each eye.

The “cheapest” (and most common) way is to show the exact same sprite to both eyes, but with a few pixels horizontal displacement. This gives the illusion of cardboard cut-out flat objects at different depth in the screen.

The better result, with actual 3D objects, is done by pre-rendering your models at two different angles, putting both of them in a background map, and showing each model to a separate eye.

And your height map idea can certainly be done too, but you would have to code it all in software, as there are no dedicated hardware functions for it. Look at RunnerPack’s water demo for something similar?

DanB wrote:

3D images on VB can be done in two ways, both invloving showing slightly different screens to each eye.

The “cheapest” (and most common) way is to show the exact same sprite to both eyes, but with a few pixels horizontal displacement. This gives the illusion of cardboard cut-out flat objects at different depth in the screen.

The better result, with actual 3D objects, is done by pre-rendering your models at two different angles, putting both of them in a background map, and showing each model to a separate eye.

As far as 3d models I was’nt talking about renders that were from differant angles like 3d movies. I was talking about objects that are modeled in 3d modeling programs like Max and Maya that were placed in the Virtual Boy’s Virtual space. I guess there is no way to do that. Are their programmers that are working on polygon engines that are good enough for games and would consider working on making a displacement engine for the V.B. as well. I mean think of the possibilities once we had the tools. I’ve seen DanB’s Zelda screenshots and even though very impressive if the buildings and the river actually had depth how much more impressive would that be. The way I see it is we can only go so far with 2d games on a 3d level the next step is displacement, and then polygon generated graphics. But I know I’m not telling you anything that you already don’t know.

You mean something like this 😉