Games with no player character on screen?

[Matagot]

I'm not sure if this is the correct topic to put this in. Move if you need to.

Just to plan a few things before I dive in - I take it that games like Heart of China where you see what the character sees rather than 'control' a character sprite across the screen is possible, what advice and codes can you give me if I were to make such a game?

[Khris]

It's quite simple really, just disable the walk cursor and turn the player character invisible and not clickable.
You still need to use player.ChangeRoom() to go to another room though.

That's it, all the rest works just like in a 3rd person game.

[Lewis]

It's not even that complicated.

When you create a new room, there's a flag in the properties window for 'player character visible?'. Set it to 'false'. This removes your character sprite and disables the 'walk to' function.

[Khris]

It's not even that complicated.

Not sure about that; sure, you can turn off the option and save the room as _blank.crm so every new one has the option turned off, or turn it off in each room manually.
But the actual purpose of the option seems to be to turn off some rooms in an otherwise 3rd person game.

My way is to put this in game start

Code: ags

  mouse.DisableMode(eModeWalkto);
  player.Clickable = false;
  player.y = -1;

And it's all taken care of for good.
Doing the same thing over and over again in programming is almost always the wrong way to go.

[Matagot]

Thanks everyone!

I'm hoping to do a murder mystery game, so figuring out how to do it in the style of Heart of China for me is half the battle  8)

[steptoe]

Khris

Would -1 not make any Say commands awkward, if he talks that is? (without using SayAt)

What about if the character has transparent sprites view?

I've never played  Heart of China so can't comment on that.

[Arjunaz78]

Glad to hear you make a game like that...currently i working on my third games now that doesn't have a character too..and just have an arrow movement for player to 'walk to' and move...i call it Silent Hill : The Hospital aka Silent Hill mobile remake..

I just following the way like Khris mention before...I just disabled the walk cursor and turn off walkto function to all room but not using script,I just use the cursor properties to disable & turn it off,and finally it works perfectly without syntax error or other error..

[Khris]

Would -1 not make any Say commands awkward, if he talks that is? (without using SayAt)

It's just an easy way to make sure the player character isn't visible, there are other ways of course that might be more practical in certain circumstances.