Best way to do doors with characters behind said doors

[WHAM]

I've only briefly skimmed over this thread ... but I wanted to drop in and offer my $.02

First, if you make the game so there are only doors on one side of the corridor I doubt you'd have players questioning it.  While in the real world it doesn't make sense, in a game environment most players would never even consider it odd.  However, I'm with you.  I try to keep things very "real" like that too.

My suggestion would be to make it so that there are no "objects" floating inside the doors you open.  It's okay to have the doors on both sides of the corridors (and I really dig your game's style by the way) but having doors open only to reveal an object seems odd to me.  Make it so they must enter the room.  If you do it in this way you could use the transparent door idea (which I'm a fan of).

Something like this (forgive the change of style and resizing of the character):



The door itself could be an easily reusable object that animates open and then you can enter the room.  This might create many more rooms (if you have planned many of these doors with objects inside them) but you could always create one generic room and just change the little details of it as needed to make many rooms from one template.

This was just my thought and please forgive me if I completely misunderstood your intentions

I try to avoid objects appearing behind the doors, but as I have NPC's that move around and MIGHT end up behind such doors AND must be interacted with in order to survive the game, I can see more than one issue with this.

At the moment I'm re-designing the map so that I can explain the doors only appearing on one side of the corridors. The transparent doors idea will definitely go into use in some project, but I think it will end up causing too much interference in the current game.

[Ryan Timothy B]

[quoute][..], but I think it will end up causing too much interference in the current game.[/quote]

I'm so happy you've decided this.   

It makes it easier for the player in many ways.  Control, memory, navigation, etc.  And it looks cleaner.

[MrCheminee]

NPCs would certainly complicate the issue.

Or, how about having a unique design for your door that incorporates some sort of light or coloured frame when the door is operational? Then when it's not, the door is dark.

When the cursor moves on the open door, or an other entrance that I didn't mark with a closed door, a red arrow starts to animate.