Ocean waves (smoke and birds) animation

[Fred Five]

Hi!

I'm currently working on some backgrounds for an adventure/castaway/survial game. One thing I really want to have implemented in the game is the island as a character.
The island needs to be "alive" -birds, smoke from fires, palmtree leaves waving in the wind etc.
But above all, as the setting is a tropical island, the shoreline with the waves from the ocean is crucial for the imersive feeling.

So the question is, I want to have an animated ocean. It does not need to be large stormy breaking waves, but the ocean needs to more than static. Maybe just gentle waves in a loop. I'm not looking for the animating backgrounds as I'll need more than 5 frames of animation.

Any help would be much appreciated! Been looking through the forums for quite some time, and came across the object.animate function -would this be a good way to implement a shoreline (and the birds, smoke etc.)?

Attached is an image of a basic concept for the island I've been working on, just to give a visual idea of what I'm trying to achieve. (verbs are just templates from MI2, as I haven't worked on that part yet)


-Fred

[Gurok]

Yes, objects would be a good way to implement shoreline animations. If you're looking for a way to make them behave like they're part of the background, objects have a Clickable property which you can set to false. You can also set the baseline (override baseline) of these objects to something low like 0, 1 or 2, so that they'll always be behind the player.

For the shoreline that you want to animate, you'll need to create a view with 1 loop containing the frames of the animation. Then you just call object.Animate with the appropriate view on repeat.

The birds might be a little more complicated. You'll probably want a script in your repeatedly_execute function that moves the bird objects across the screen each turn. e.g. oBird1.X += 1;

[Fred Five]

Thanks a lot for the quick response Gurok! Good to know before actually creating the different frames of animation.