While developing my first Unity prototype – which I will present in the next few days on this blog – I came across the problem of scales and distances.
I had to change the scale of my two-dimensional objects based on their distance from the camera (the player). I know it depends on the lens of the camera, and I quickly saw that a linear scale didn’t work.
Then I turn to trigonometry, which I haven’t used for decades. After some reading on the web – thank you wikipedia – I manage to insert a tangent-based formula on my objects. It was better but not good enough.
Then, I remembered something I learned many years ago while doing my photolithography vocational studies, the law of luminance. He says that the luminance of an object is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. In my mind, this seems like a good rule to apply when scaling my objects. And so far, this is the best result I have had in my prototype.
I will have to push my research further, but for the moment and this prototype, I will stay on this formula that I can easily evolve. The goal is to have the best result for the user, even if it does not fully reflect reality.