[Suggestion] Buttons in GUI to rotate view 90°

[kongoman]

I think it would be pretty neat to be able to rotate the view 90° left or right.
I know it's primarily used in isometric building games like Sim City, but I think it would be nice if you could look at your prison from other angles too.

My suggestion is therefore to add keys in the GUI similar to:
http://postimage.org/image/6myc214jl/



- What do you guys think ?

[tradami]

Do you realize the complexity of this request?

[xyzyxx]

I don't see how it would be super complex, really. At the same time, it's not a feature I would care about or ever use.

[Illanair]

I really don't see why - It is a FLAT two dimensional game. Nothing obscures any other object, unlike Isometric building games and similar titles.

[a__gun]

This would be a lot of work. With a fixed view as you have now you can get away with a very simple system for lighting and shadows, as well as lots of other things. All of these systems would need a lot of work to make alternative viewing angles possible. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the sprites in game don;t currently have sides, so these would all need updating too.

[MrBrown]

The rendering should be a piece of cake as I read it's using OpenGL as a backend, so it should be easy to just use a different view/projection matrix. If you rotate the view, the light sources rotate with it, so with a top down 2D perspective the shadows don't change their shape. For the shadows it's just like printing the screen on paper and then turning it by 90°. The objects (doors/tables/TVs/chairs/toilets/etc) would have to be rotated properly though, as they are not flat top-down 2D, but kinda isometric/oblique perspective. But this doesn't really affect the shadow rendering.

I guess the more complicated problem to solve would be the user interface (scrolling, placing objects with the mouse). The calculations which screen coordinates correspond to which map coordinates would need to consider the current rotation.

That being said, I really don't need this feature as the buildings are all flat anyway.

[Masochist]

Really no use or reason unless the game is 2.5d or 3d in nature.