hi tramazio. first, make sure you've studied the jitter-opengl tutorials, as they are essential for learning this stuff.

second, you will get more specific help, if you post a patch showing what you've tried, and describing what's not working.

third, if you want to try out the max 6 beta, we have many new tools for opengl. you would be interested in the new jit.gl.camera object, the jit.anim.drive object to move, pan and tilt the camera, and the jit.gl.skybox object.

here's a quick max 6 patch to get you started:

hi robert -

1. in the jit.anim.drive object, how does one refer to non-alphanumeric keys (such as the arrow keys)? Is there a reference somewhere to the ui dictionary names that are being used in jit.anim.drive?

2. in the jit.anim.drive reference page, for the move message it says:

"Move the attached object along the axis provided, relative to the space indicated by the objects's movemode attribute. "

I can't find any other reference to the movemode attribute. Does it exist? Is there any way to specify whether the move command refers to world space, object space, etc?

Related question: is it possible to use the jit.anim.drive object to make a walking (instead of flying) camera - that is, one that stays on a ground plane?

Thanks.

pH

hi Pseudostereo, I am not sure if I understood right, but I've been messing around with a example provided by Robert Ramirez and I came up with one workaround (cause it's not elegant at all) for the following problem: I wanted to have a kind of "first person" view but the lookat parameter only could provide a look to an object and not from an object. So I made a second object, changed the position of the camera to the position of the original object and made it look at the second object. The trick was to lock the movements of the second object to the first object. The second object is bellow the "ground" therefor it is invisible. If you want this object to be over the ground but invisible, make it not "enable". Maybe it gives you some clue to the point you mentioned.

by the way, I still have good memories about your work "system maintenance" (if I can recall the name correctly) at V2_Org 1998. I was one of the guys from v2 (the Brazilian guy) who help trying to keep the system "maintained". I still use this work of yours as an important reference and really cool example of virtual/real juxtaposition for my students.

sandroid

hi perry. thanks for the feedback.

yes, arrow keys are currently impossible to map with the ui-map dictionary. one possible solution is to use a combination of key, trigger, and the ui_key message to anim.drive. not very elegant i know, but i'll try and come up with better solution for the next update. below is a patch showing what i mean.

the movemode attribute is to am anim.node object. you can set it to local, parent or world. gl objects have an attribute called "animmode" which will set both the movemode and turnmode attributes, if you are using a jit.anim.drive directly with the gl object.

i will update the documentation to make this more explicit for the next update.

hi robert -

did the ui-map dictionary ever get updated to deal with arrow keys? just wondering...

yes they did. it's briefly mentioned in the discussion section of the ref file. simply use "up", "down", "left", and "right" to map to the arrow keys. let me know if there's any problems with it.