Camera rotation.

[Kensu]

I do remember some months back, someone on the dev team was asking if there were anythings the users wanted to see in Exult.
Now mind you this may be completely useless, but have you considered allowing rotation of the viewpoint? You obviously can't change the altitude of the camera, but you should be able to change the azimuth.
Does the SDK library you're using allow sprite rotation?

[Scythifuge]

Exult 3d allowed such a thing, though interfaced needs some major tweaking. I can foresee great things with it if someone were to pick up on the project & complete it.

[Dominus]

Yes, Exult3D could do it and it made sense for it. *I* don't really see much sense for lock stock Exult, though if anyone would provide a working patch for that...

[Colourless]

Thinking that sprite rotation will allow viewport rotation is rather naive. It is significantly more complicated than that. Most of the sprites, if they were 'just' rotated would end up with the wrong perspective. General sprites wont need rotating beyond what exult already does to convert NS sprites into EW sprites. Only flat sprites that were effectively flat would need full rotation support.

What becomes significantly more difficult is there is no automatic way to transform the sprites and still have the perspective correct. Of course Exult can already do some of this because it can rotate sprites around on barges. Other sprites will need lookup tables to tell it how to transform then in rotated viewports.

3D sprites, basically anything with the slanted perspective, such as people, tress, building walls, in general would be relatively easy to have look correct, provided they have back frames or the front and backs are the same.

Flat ground tiles will be easy to transform as they just need plain rotation. Roof tiles and mountain tops, while also flat like ground tiles, will not rotate well as the inbuilt perspective will end up being the wrong way depending on the viewports rotation. Some special caseing would be necessary

There will be instances where objects can only be seen without rotating the viewport (anything up against a wall!) effectively breaking the game if you need those objects and don't know they are.

In general as far as I am concerned its too much trouble for what its worth considering the games were never designed to support it.

[Kensu]

Yeah, I was misremembering the U7 graphics; I was remembering the "camera" being at 90 degrees, but since we were able to see wall textures, it must've been somewhere between 90 and 45.