Fooling around with 3D

[Burning Beard 14]

I have an Nvdia 260 GTX which is 3D capable and I figured what the heck I would give it a go. Much to my amazement it actually works and is easy to set up. You get a real good 3D feel for the cockpit and the plane in general, outside of the it is fairly normal. Long distances dont give you much depth (as is normal) but there is a feel for it on midrange. I am viewing this the simplest way, using red and cyan flip ups for my normal glasses. There is some loss or distortion of color, but not overly bad. The menus and such are still in 2D and it works with TracIR. There is a fps hit but the game is still easily playable, I did not find it necessary to turn down my graphics settings. Also, it does not seem to make the card run hotter.

 

This also works on Wings of Prey (probably a little better), the color doesn't seem to be as distorted.

 

I haven't tried with any of the more sophisticated methods of achieving 3D.

 

Beard

[+Polovski 460]

There's a few views of the post but no comment, might be worth pointing to the specific 3D settings or link you used there Beard

[Burning Beard 14]

There is no specific link or anything. The later model Nvidia Cards are 3D capable is all. You set it up via the Nvidia Control Panel. They give you the options of a hardware solution (wired or unwired glasses or box or something) and the old fashioned Red and Cyan tinted lens glasses (which I just happened to have a set of). Set up via the control panel was very simple, you just select what you are using (in my case the glasses). Then they showed a screen that asked what you saw with your left and right eye. You click those then proceed to a screen to see if it worked and walla, you have 3D. Really very easy. I know the option wasn't there on my 8800GT, but I have it on the 260GTX. I'll grab a srceen shot later and post it so you guys with reds and blues will be able to see what I am talking about.

 

What really got this whole mess started is my father took a ton of pictures with an old stereoptican camera (has two lenses eye width apart) and I was looking for a way to view the slides on the computer. This required downloading a program that would accept stereo pairs, once I set that up (also easy) I was off to the races. OFF was just a happy by-product of setting up the 3D slides. The cool thing is you can save the double image pictures as a regular jpg or bmp and view them on anything. I downloaded a couple to my Nookcolor and viewed them there. The Nvidia software will convert the images in OFF to stereo pairs automatically in the game, so you do not need any other special software to view that, just the glasses.

 

So if you just want to play in 3D all you need is the Nvidia card. If you want make your own stereo pairs from pictures you need some other software.

 

Beard

[Burning Beard 14]

OK, I found out you can't capture the 3D effect in fraps, but it works with the Print Screen button. Anywho, here is a screen capture. I used the SE5A because of the tube site. Unfortunately this screen will not give you the total effect, maybe it was reducing the size, but it aint right. If you have ever been to a 3D movie you will recognize the two separate images. The original screen was a little to large to download.

 

 

Beard

Edited August 17, 2011 by Burning Beard

[Creaghorn 10]

i tried exactly the same about a year ago. fooling around with navidia 3d. overall it is indeed quite cool. especially when seeing flak and other AC around you etc.

 

but there were some IMO important points why i turned it down again. mainly the FPS hit. it was still playable but it's another fun to have FPS between 50 and 60 permanently or having FPS between 20 and 40 or so.

the other thing was the overall colour of the virtual world. was kind of too psychadellic and desert and apocalypticl-ike for my taste.

usually when flying a sortie one is completely immersed in the screen and also has a feel for distances and sizes. that means that when sitting in the cockpit and looking at the guns etc., then they look like guns with the correct size. but strangely with 3d the guns seemed to rather look like small toyguns because of the effect. they seemed to stick out of the screen and like you could touch them. that's actually the purpose of 3d of course, but in that case it looked rather funny and was an immersionkiller for me. that's the same like watching star wars, knowing that if darth vader could leave the screen, he would be 2 inches tall .