We're 3D at Last

Manchester finally makes its leap into 3D graphics. Last time, we had a renderer working with 3D primitives, but it generated a firmly two-dimensional result. This session, we move the camera into 3D space, and give it a tilt to emphasize the perspective effect. We also get our entities drawing again, and most important of all, we fix the garish terrain colors. Notes/highlights - Quaternion, an expanded complex number used for representing rotations and orientations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion - Quaternions are notoriously difficult to understand! This video from 3blue1brown is a great way to get the visual intuition for them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EgbgTm0Bg - Marc Ten Bosch, creator of the ground-breaking 4D game Miegakure, proposes that quaternions are so difficult to understand that we should use the concept of “rotors” instead: https://youtu.be/Idlv83CxP-8 - Dom asked whether the value of the far plane matters. Aside from allowing more distant objects to render, a large distance between near and far plane can cause visual artifacts, due to the degradation of depth buffer precision: https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Depth_Buffer_Precision - The vintage game Spectre is one of our main visual inspirations. You can play it online: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/spectre-19k - The 737 MAX’s chief technical issues surround a system ominously named the “Maneurvering Characteristics Augmentation System”, around which much confusion remains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System