   what perspectives come into play
Im a bit lost in the perspective topic Could someone tall me what perspectives come into play when doing computer graphics/3d games at least i heard about 4 kind of perspectives so far - ortho- x' = x/z (i dont know the name, heard somewhere that it is called perspective of the poor)- perspective done with some projection matrix (I dont know the name - probably used by ogl)- spherical perspective could someone say somthing about this things, is one of them used everywhereor many of them are used - are some kind not supported by ogl?  
The correct word is projection. Here it means the way how to map the 3 dimensional space (the scene, e.g. the world space in front of the camera) into the 2 dimensional space (the screen, e.g. the camera's film). If the projecting rays are all in parallel, it is called a parallel projection. If the rays pass through a single point, it is called a perspective projection. If, in a parallel projection, the rays hit the view plane in a 90° angle, it is especially called an orthographic projection. If they instead hit in another angle, it is called an oblique projection. Hence, "ortho" is (the short name for) a special kind of parallel projections and different from a perspective projection. How to compute a perspective projection depends on the circumstances. The common thing is that the lateral dimensions are altered with the depth dimension, i.e.   x' = f( x, z ) and y' = f( y, z )There is no "correct" or "wrong" way per se. Perspective projection and orthographic projection are both directly supported by graphics APIs; and both are used frequently in games. Pictorial orthographic projections (the axonometric projections from which the (pseudo) isometric and the dimetric projections is often used in 2D games) are possible, too. Oblique projections are also possible, but AFAIK seldom used for games; their original use case is technical drawing. Not possible are in general all projections that cannot be realized by a homogenous matrix multiplication, like as to my knowledge e.g.* inverse perspective projection, or* projections that do not use a flat view plane.However, also those can simply be used with ray-tracing.  Some literature:- Wikipedia's page about Graphical projection- an article copy here on GDnet: Axonometric Projections - A Technical Overview- the internet search engine of your choice;@haegarrallright tnx, this explains me quite a bit;See also: A Layman's Guide to Projection in Videogames.