I had this idea for a 4-player dynamic splitscreen setup. Not sure if it's better than a traditional splitscreen setup, but I like the fact that you can see the relative locations of other players visually. Might write a blog post about this! #godot #gamedev

really interesting, the snap off when the players get too close feels wrong but there’s something here. i think the lines maybe need to be dynamic thickness or something hard to picture

Definitely agree. I noticed that line thickness corresponding to distance is something that's often done with the 2-player setups I've seen, and I need to see if I can make the transition less sudden.

@dante_eats It feels like the “snap” would be less jarring if you kept it at 4 cells and just did the union of the nearby cell shapes instead of switching to a different number of cells. But part of the snap also comes from the speed difference.

@dante_eats Yep, totally agree – I later on found that some else had made a Unity plugin that does exactly that and it makes the transitions much smoother, so I might steal the idea.

cool experiment, looks great and a really smart idea, but i think id get motion sick if i played a game with this

@updog_osaka Thanks! Definitely agree, I think that this is a drawback of this approach. I'll try to see if I can mitigate it with a deadzone or sorts; but I think that this would work best on slower-paced games where it's expected that players will often be far apart, like survival games.

@updog_osaka Alternately, this could be embraced into something like a party game, where it's already expected that chaos is part of the fun.

I think if you could change the color of the split, scale the alpha to zero as the splits are closer to merging, or darker colors = further away, something like that could provide some visual feedback to the players that might help alleviate the spacial confusion.

Some Lego games do this better than others; I would definitely play/study them for the “feel” of when to snap and combine and when to split again. That hysteresis is the key.

Totally. I couldn't figure out how to smoothly transition the split, it's very natural in the LEGO games. What I might do is try to figure out when two cells are close to merging, then slowly move the cameras towards the midpoint of those cells.

t’s frustrating on the split side, too. It can easily hold out too long to split, and easily spilt aggressively too soon. Best of luck!

Thanks!

Some blending when the segments merge and it's perfect.

You had this idea or you saw the GDC talk about the lego games? Even in their implementation I thought it was too confusing and chaotic, even with only 2 players. It's too hard to tell where things are in relation to everything else. Just zoom/pan the camera and work within those constraints. Whatever this buys you isn't worth it imo.

Never saw that conference, will need to watch it! I just saw similar 2-player setups and figured that I could try making a 4-player version. Zooming out only works if the map isn't too large. You could argue that in this case, a traditional 4-rectangle setup would also work.

Some of the old Lego games do this for local multiplayer actually, but it usually ends up being quite a nuisance, You’re often losing a lot of information and it can be really disorienting to keep your eyes on your constantly shifting view

(Grass tileset is courtesy of @KenneyNL)

That's so smart!! I like it a lot, the snapping together tho it kinda disorients me for a sec. Great work tho!

Thanks! Yes will definitely need to work on the snapping!

Cool idea but constantly changing field of vision would be really annoying. Like the Blue one in this moment has 0 visibility up and down.

Yeah, this is one the flaws of this method. Right now the algorithm tries to make every zone about the same area, but that means that super large rectangles like these are also valid shapes (1x4 rect is the same area as 2x2). I wonder if there's a better criteria than just area?

@mikinazz Yes, you can add ratio constraints. That's what I do with my voronoi charts. And what you have here is voronoi.

@mikinazz Oh, curious, what do you mean by ratio constraints?

You reminded me of this:

Oh neat! Quite an interesting read. Cool to see that I wasn't the first to notice the link with voronoi.

This is an amazing concept. Before reading your post, I assumed you were showing relative position - and you were. So you've got an extremely intuitive design. :)

Thanks! Yes, I like that this setup doesn't require offscreen indicators or minimaps; you can very easily tell where others are relative to you. I also need to add some way to tell distance!

I think conceptually its neat but the constantly moving borders I find visually overstimulating, my brain struggles to follow the character. Maybe a "spotlight" style so the camera's view stays mostly static until it merges might work? Would also be stylish depending on the game

Yup definitely something to explore. I was thinking of adding some sort of deadzone, that could help with the constantly moving zones.

This is super cool, and I got very fixated on it. My intuition about voronoi tessellations is that this can't actually preserve the "the direction you shoot at in your own cell is the true direction in real space" property you'd want when the number of players is large. An easy proof by contradiction is that when the number of cells increases (because one character moves far away from another) you see a "pop" in the location of *both* characters on screen, and the angle of the lines between each character seem to be *different*, which means it was either wrong before or after the pop (or both). Or maybe simpler: if you have 3 characters in a 2 vs 1 configuration, it should be impossible to have a bisection that preserves this aiming property because 1) you necessarily must have only 1 line separating the 2 characters from the other 1, and 2) for the property to hold, the bisecting line must be perpendicular to the true aim-vector for *both* of the 2 characters sharing a cell, and I think this is only possible if character A in the 2-character cell lies along the same line as character B in the cell. The tessellation I think you want is something like: draw a line between each character, enforce that each edge of the tessellation is perpendicular to that line, then solve for where exactly to place the edge along that line to maximize isotropy of the subdivided spaces. This is a really fun math problem. Probably LLM-able. I bet solving it exactly requires coming up with a novel kind of tessellation, and would require carefully thinking about not only where to cut space, but also where to place each character within its cell. Might not be possible when n gets really large even if you're very clever. But super cool thing to think about.

Make the transitions smoother and it'll be good. Make the lines adjust thickness dynamically too like Renegade ops does as one and another slowly merge.

Totally agreed!

Maybe not ideal for competitive games, but this would be fantastic for co-op campaigns. Dungeon crawlers or roguelikes immediately come to mind.

Yup, agree that it's less idea for competitive but co-op campains could definitely be a good application. I could see this working out in a game like Minecraft Dungeons (or Diablo). Chaotic party games are also another good application.

reminds me of the camera in some lego games, where it rotates up or down like this but in 3d

There's DEFINITELY something here but the current state is too dynamic to comfortably track with your eyes. I think with a few iterations it could be great but honestly if I played a game that had this as the split-screen camera I would lightly complain and then enjoy the game.

Yup, I need to explore what I can do about motion sickness. Fixing the popping will help, maybe having deadzones will help too. But as you said, I wonder if it's not something that you could get used to over time.

this is so dope, I always thought if something like this was possible. I wanna see that blog post!

Thank you very much! Working on it! 🙇‍♂️

This looks amazing if you want to play games with friends and also get a massive headache

I really like this! I think it shouldn’t be a sudden snap when players enter each other’s space, feels rather disorienting - especially since every player’s ‘viewport’ changes too. If you can find a way to make the transition smoother, I would prefer this to normal split screen.

that looks cool as hell and could be used for puzzles (make a symbol usin gthe screen borders) but it looks so much more confusing than regular split screen

thats a cool idea. does look fun! would like to see this more explored for different kind of games

When I was young I had such a hard time with split screens because there was so much going on. I still have trouble with stuff like SSB and things like it. I don't know if this would help or not. I love the concept, though, for local coop! Especially the color coded borders!

It's a Voronoi diagram. Lego LOTR did something similar IIRC, though they used a fade instead of a 'pop', which I find easier to visually track.

Very cool! With this you probably have the data to produce a lens warp effect where the world is squished rather than cut along the edges between the players? Then you can see the whole level at once! (more or less lol)

Great idea but I’d make the zone merging less jumpy

Would be perfect for something like Toejam and Earl

idk... it's a COOL idea, but it'd probably be WAY too disorienting, I already get disoriented playing any games with more than one player on the screen at a time, regular split-screen is perfectly fine. would be fire if it were just an optional setting tho.

Reminds me of the voronoi split screen from this GDC

Biggest limitation is reduced field of vision. If you give someone half the screen it’s fair for everyone But look at some of these characters being so close to the line (fog of war 1m from them)

lmao i cant believe we have voronoi diagram splitscreens

instead of sharp insta redraw lines, make it cloud-like and poof-away when they combine

Needs some rework on the lines merge but the idea looks cool af

This is a super cool idea but I definitely feel like the transition needs to be smoother as you approach another player. It’s super jarring in its current state when players merge into one cell.