Alright, boys and girls of the AGS community, I have a couple of questions that I was hoping could be picked up by the friendly neighbourhood code-gods: As a burgeoning sprite-artist (I submitted a punk to one of last month's sprite jams, as an example), I'm looking to slap together a little AGS game, more for my own benefit than anything else (though who knows, if I actually manage to complete the thing and it's not total crud...) and I was thinking of implementing my game in a top-down view a la Dreamweb and probably many other games whose names escape me. Now, as part of this, my first question regards layering my characters and backgrounds. That is, say we're talking about a street with overhanging roof-ledges from shops. So the player character wants to go into one of the shops and you move your mouse over the hotspot which is on the top of said over-hang, and it lights up with the place name etc. Click and he goes there, and goes under the roof before the game switches to the next scene. Dost ye think this is a possibility, or should I just have it change the moment the character comes into contact with the roof ledge?
Secondly: Rain. Now, from a top down point-of-view, this wouldn't be too hard to draw, I suspect. I could always move to an isometric or three-quarters view for those points during the game where I want to have rain. However, this does not help me because I could draw it, I just have no idea how to animate it to make it game friendly nor get it into the game. I have a feeling this might fall under the above heading of layering, in that I would, I don't know, make the rain a looped animation that runs over the top of the background and player character? I'd muchly appreciate a hand with these queries, ladies and gentlefogs. No doubt these kinds of questions are not new and have been answered many times before, but I appreciate your patience in advance.
Cheers,
Martin K (coyotejack)
Ah. Rain plugin. Yes, I'm a smart one. I really, really am. Read the site, I said to myself, read the site before you shamble into the forum like the living dead, and what do I do, I fail to read the site. Ahhh, such a bright child, I am. Sorry. :-[
The overhanging ledges would be both walkbehinds and hotspots, there isn't a problem with that, so you can do it exactly as you want, with default AGS features. Rain might be a little tougher, the rain plugin isn't suitable for a top down game iirc, I guess I'd do it coming from the sides of the screen falling inwards, fading out as it falls, but that would either require a new plugin to be written, or some advanced module magic from someone... or you do a whole screen animation that loops and overlay it.
2.) http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=20479
*claps* Aha! Thank you very much, both scotch and strazer! Both excellent suggestions, and I will follow them up accordingly. Much appreciated, indeed. :)