Topic: zoooOOOOOOOOM!

[Alynn]

There are a few places on my game where a player will be behind some very fine lined areas (banisters, chainlink fences), and making sure everything lis lined up correct for my walkbehinds is no less than a headache...

Would it be possible to add a zoom view to the room editor, so we can get those details perfect?

[Pumaman]

It would be possible, but a better solution would be to create the walk-behind as a seperate layer in your paint package, and then import it as a mask. The AGS Editor isn't recommended for doing detailed mask work.

[Alynn]

Hrm... How many masks can you have at a time? (good thing I did do my stairwell banister as its own layer though, just gotta copy it...) The reason I ask is I planned on one room with chainlink fences that was shaped like
[code]
+============+
|    ____________|
|____________  |
|  ____________|
[/code]

So basicly there are 3 layers of walkbehinds if the bottom of that lame ascii drawing up there is the camera, he will be shown more as he moves downward... or am I trying for graphical mayham not precidented before?

I have a tendoncy to push a program to its very limit, very active imagination you see....

[Pumaman]

Well, each walk behind would be a differnet colour, so you just need a 256-colour mask, using colour 1 for the top bit, colour 2 for the second bit, and so forth.

[Alynn]

Ahh I gotcha... looking 'round in the manual helped me too.

[quintaros (at work)]

off topic but still appropriate to the thread's title:

Is there any way to zoom in/out on a background?  I'm looking to do a sequence where the player is in a moving vehicle.  I want to keep the vehicle stationary in the foreground while the background gets furthur away, like a process shot.  Currently I have it set up using an animating object behind the car with the frames of object's animation being the background  getting furthur away but because this uses frames it is more jerky than if the background was being zoomed out of at a constant rate.  

[Kweepa]

For that you could set up a walkable area with character scaling and have the background be a character that you move on the walkable area.
To make it a bit easier you could have an animating road, and trees and rocks and things moving as characters on the sides, which scale according to the walkable areas.

[Jodo Kast]

The manual says Masks are resized to 320x200 even for 640x400 games.  Did I read that incorrectly?

I sure did.  It says: NOTE: For hotspots and walkable areas, the mask must be the same size as the background, but at 320x200 resolution. So, if you had a normal sized 640x400 room, the mask should be 320x200. For walk-behind areas, the mask is the exact same size as the background image.

Correction: Walk-behind areas are the same size, but Walkable Areas are not, so be careful to give the proper border so your characters feet don't seem to walk 'under' the fence (and ground).  Specially by the last chained area...