Walking in smoke

[eddy]

Hello!

In my adventure game, my main character has to walk in a special room with smoke up to his knees.

In a first approach, it seemed that I have to draw every character's sprites one more time, but I wonder if there was a way to use the walk-behind area's properties "up to his knees"?

( like if y<= EGO.y - d, then character is in front, else he is behind...)

This would work for character walking in waters too...

[Joacim Andersson]

I don't know about that but here's another idea: Maybe you can use the new FOLLOW_EXACTLY value you can use together with FollowCharacterEx. This would envolve creating a new character that is the smog.

[YOke]

If you think of the fog as a box lying on the ground, can you see the top of it, or just the side?
If you can only see the side I would reccomend that you make the fog a semi-transparent object. Otherwise you have to go with the idea of the previous poster.

[stuh505]

i do not think it would look good if the fog followed the character....the fog isn't that smart

if you make the fog a transparent object, and place the reference line at the very bottom of the screen, then the player will be able to walk behind the fog

you could make multiple levels of fog on different layers by making the reference line higher up also

you could even animate the fog so that it was swirling around etc

if you did want the fog to be a transparent blob that followed over the character, you wouldn't need to make the fog a character..you could still have it be a regular object (animated or static) and just move it to follow the character

[Joacim Andersson]

i do not think it would look good if the fog followed the character....the fog isn't that smart

LOL, I didn't mean that the fog should be smart.... It all depends on what the fog looks like, I just gave an idea on how you can "hide" a part of the character.

[eddy]

Well, thanks for the ideas!
The fog transparency is not really important, in fact, you can't see through it, (in my story, I mean...) But it's nice to be able to do it as well.

About the FOLLOW_EXACTLY solution, I already tried itÃ,  (using it for my character's shadow) and I'm not quite satisfied of it, because it is sometimes in front or behind the character, depending (I suppose) of the zoom ratio.

Do you have any idea where it comes from and how I should do to keep it always behind (for the shadow) or in front (for the fog)?

If it works, I like the idea of an object which represents the "perturbation" of your character walking in the smoke (Or in water if I need to use it...)

[TerranRich]

In the repeatedly_execute function of that room, always have the smoke be the same X-coord, but maybe 2 or 3 pixels below the characters Y-coord.