Best practice for Myst III Exile style panorama scenes?
I'm making a game with full 360 degree panoramic images like Myst III or Scratches but I'm trying to develop a best practice for building scenes. Right now I render 6 images in Blender and create a 6-sided skybox in Unity which looks great. The problem is I have to manually establish hotspots by moving a temporary primitive around in game view because the skybox renders in the background so there's no point-of-reference in the scene view for placing objects.
If anyone else is making a first person panoramic Myst-like game that wants to talk shop about their method for setting up scenes I would love to hear it. My method works it's just clumsier than I expect and there are hardly any resources on doing a Myst-like game.
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If the original 3D scene is available in Blender, perhaps it's possible to add some e.g. Spheres / Cubes in a separate Collection that represent the locations of Hotspots.
I definitely considered that however I now realize without writing my own shader I can't animate the skybox. I think my best course of action is to project my 6-camera rig onto flat planes and treat them as textures which would at least simplify the problem of aligning objects in the scene. I am worried about warping in the corners of the cube but maybe I could cleanly project onto a sphere? Experiment time.
It amazes me how difficult something seemingly so simple is to implement with modern hardware. How did a 25 year old game pull it off so cleanly?
I'd guess that the main difference is that those old games would've been in 2D - with the camera panning over a background that loops horizontally rather than turning within a projected sphere.
Perhaps another approach would be to instead make a 2D game, and create your backgrounds as "360 panoramic" textures, place three down in a row horizontally, and then use scripting to have the camera "jump" to the opposite end when it goes too far.
Hotspots would then be able to be drawn in 2D using Box/Polygon Colliders - much easier. Check out this page on the AC wiki:
https://adventure-creator.fandom.com/wiki/Looping_2D_scenes
I wanted to follow up for anyone else interested in doing a 2D first person panoramic game. The best approach IMO is to use a 3D cube as your room with your camera in the center and treat it as a cubemap IE using a 6-camera rendering approach and mapping those images to your cube. The look and feel is spot on and it makes lining up hotspots as easy as overlapping your collider with your texture.
I'm new to working with 2D in a 3D engine but the best approach I'm finding to basically every problem is to just accept the solution is that it's easier to just work with the perspective, not against it.