Question

I’m actually looking after technical solutions to program a study assistant for the game of Go. What annoy me in existing programs is tha fact that the real life perspective of the player’s eye looking at a Goban isn’t respected.

GlGo exists, but while the number of stones increases, the rendering dramatically slows down due to the number of stones, disabling to possibility to add frames with statistical information on to of the Goban, that would break the real-timeness of the application.

So, my Question is:
Would it be possible to realize an interpolation of a simple 2D Goban to make the board & stones looks-like 3D, but without 3D rendering engine? The board movement would only be along one axis.

Answer 1

Certainly: All you have to do is doing the 3D to 2D transformation. Then simply draw your stones using sprites. If you scale them, you only need a white and a black one.

As for transformation, a simple one could be something like this:

x = left_border + board_x * gridwidth;
y = top_border + board_y * gridwidth / 2;

If you want perspective etc. it’s getting a bit more complicated, but in general it shouldn’t slow you down significantly unless you’re doing something wrong.