In the spare time between our contract work I’ve been developing technology for our future game. One piece of tech that we feel will feature heavily in the game is interactive monitors and consoles. While going through my thoughts I immediately remembered the strong impression that was made on me when I first played Doom 3 and came across their interactive monitors. I loved how they integrated more functionality into an area of games that was traditionally just an ‘on/off’ switch-style game entity.

I wanted to create something simple and effective similar to what Doom 3 achieved.

So, with the decision to do some tech prototyping I went about wanting the monitors to be as flexible as possible. It’s still early days but I intend to have lots of different monitor types supported. In my eyes the system should support quick access, full focus in-environment and total immersion monitors. So, here are the initial set of types I am dwelling over:

So… with those types in mind I went to create a prototype. You can see my efforts below in the Youtube video.

As you can see, it’s very early days but this proves the concept pretty well. Now… how is this implemented? As we’re using Unity Pro this is where a Pro specific feature steps in – RenderTexture. It allows a camera to render, or draw, its view to a texture. This texture then can be used on, for example, a Plane. By setting up a scene where the cubes can be viewed; the Plane can show this. By doing some raycasting on the Plane, then continuing the raycast from the intended camera – you can detect hits on the objects and then trigger the interaction.

In general this approach works well but I still have a few design choices to chew on. Firstly, while the camera and RenderTexture approach works really well for ‘real’ views such as Avatar or Security camera mode, since it’s looking at something in the ‘world’, it gets a little cloudy for the monitors and consoles. Where should the ‘view’ exist in the game scene for a monitor with just buttons / user interface options / typical computer interfaces and feedback? The two main trains of thought on this type of thing are:

I’ll have to give this issue a good bit of thought. I’m going to see if there are other options available to me that I’ve not thought up yet. I’m more inclined to go with the first option but we’ll see. One very interesting side effect I encountered has been getting an effect similar to Portal’s portals. By leaving a mouse controller active on the security camera monitor when it should be turned off gives a very similar effect to what it’s like to look through a portal.

We’ll see how the tech progresses – thanks for reading!