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by lloeki 903 days ago
>> The 2011 co-op twin-stick shooting action game Renegade Ops was the first time I encountered a system which varies the screen layout in multiplayer based on the relative position on the players in world space.

> the LEGO series had some interesting approaches to dealing with this

Indeed, LEGO Indiana Jones (2008) for sure had it on 360, but IIRC LEGO Star Wars I (2005) and II (2006) did not.

Here it is on The Force Awakens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T04B2coSN0Y

In some ways, it was awesome, in others, it was terrible!

- When the viewpoints are very close but still split, things from both views are only slightly offset which gave some weird effect like stereoscopic stuff. Visible at 0:07, 0:11, 2:05 in the SW video above.

- FOV is more or less fixed, so on a 16:9 screen with a fixed FOV you get either fixed wide FOV for a vertical-ish split (nice) but also for horizontal-ish (everything is super small), at the cost of a fisheyesque warp; OR you get fixed narrow FOV and you can't see much left-right on vertical-ish split nor up-down on horizontal-ish.

Overall the combination of both made the games extremely headache inducing for me.

> IIRC LEGO Marvel Super Heroes gave players control of their camera when in the open world

Here one can see the open world sections with the POV control, non-dynamic split screen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLRDzNy0t2g

1 comments

2008? Pah! How about 1991’s Toejam & Earl on the Sega Genesis ?

https://youtu.be/SPQXmZR7JWo?feature=shared (From about 2:30)

Now get off my lawn.

Though this always created/merged a horizontal split once characters were separated/close enough, while the modern games rotate the angle of the split based on the relative positions of the characters to each other.