Quote Originally Posted by tpascal
When I am talking about what to rotate/translate - the ship, or the arena, I mean that in version #1, the ship would be in the center of the screen, and not apear to move or rotate, but the area would move and rotate around the ship.
Then yes, use option #1, almost all 2d scroll side type game i have seen does that, the player is cenetered in the monitor and the world scrolls, except when the player arrive to the world limits.

Note that even when the user ship most the time will be phisically draw at 160,120 in the monitor you still need to keep your ship coordinates in the world, and have to be updated as it is "moving" in the virtual world, those coordinates are used for colision with enemies ships and everithing else you normally do as if the ships is moving, so dont worry about the maths, it is exactly the same in both option #1 and #2, just in option #1 you use the user´s ship world coordinate to calc which part of the arena to draw.

good luck.

tp.
Sorry if I wasn't quite clear enough, but the game isn't a side scroller, but a 360 degree scrolling 2d top view, and with #1, the arena would rotate/translate around the user's ship, with the user's ship appearing to not move in the view port. Not sure if this affects what you wrote :-)

With #2, the ship would rotate and move around the non-rotating arena (like Subspace Continuum I'm assuming - not played it yet), and the camera would be centered around the user's ship so the arena translates around the ship in the view port.

cheers,
Paul