Picking in a 3D world

Game Play & Game Design
#1

I’ve creating simple 3D world in which the user can walk around, enter buildings, and pick up objects using OpenGl and of course Java. I’d love to be able to allow the user the ‘shoot’ objects by clicking on them. I’ve seen picking tutorials out there by all of them assume a 2D world. Is there a good tutorial for doing selection/picking in a 3D world WITHOUT using the Java3D API?

Thanks alot for your help

#2

First you’ll need to create a ray for the users click- unproject a couple of points with gluUnproject (with different window depths) and make a ray though them. Then you ‘just’ need to check that ray against your world and see what it intersects, the math for that is the same regardless of what API you use. Probably find something useful here: http://www.magic-software.com/