Mode7-like perspective transform in canvas?
I'm making a canvas-based game engine and am wondering if anyone has any good info on how to achieve an overhead view perspective. What I'm looking for is somewhere halfway between the traditional birds eye view and the old SNES mode7 view. Just a slight angle to give the illusion of 3D.
I'm trying to figure out what is going to be the best way to deal with the perspective skewing. I'm not doing rotations so 3D matrix stuff would be going overboard, but I need to be able to deal with rendering the map layers at a consistent angle and it'd be nice if the angle was adjustable. I also need to deal with the depth warp. Basically, the bottom row of pixels should be 1:1 pixel width and height, then for each row it'd get, for example, 5% smaller or something like that. What I'd like is to be able to supply a large canvas as a texture and then supply a camera angle between 0 and 90 where 0 is perfectly horizontal and 90 is birds eye view.
Anyone have any related tutorials or sample code? I've searched online a bit, but everything I've found seems to either be unsuitable for use in this particular application or overly complex, doing all sorts of crazy 3D skewing and rotation stuff. All I want is to take the normal tiled grid and lean it back a bit, no rotations or complicated stuff like that.
Here's an example of what I want; Here's an example. http://img801.imageshack.us/img801/2176/perspectivesample.jpg
The bottom pixel row is 1:1 pixel ratio, and each row above that progressively gets shorter horizontally and vertically. The source texture of the top center region is normally about half the height of the bottom center region, but it has been shrunk vertically and horizontally to fit the perspective.
What I'm thinking might work best is to render the current viewport state to another canvas in flat, birds eye view, with approximately 50% extra space on the top and sides, then slice an upside triangular region from that and draw that to the actual visible canvas.
Only problem is, I suck at math when it comes to calculating angles and such.
