What about some of the basics of what you can and can't do? Are there variable wall heights or are you stuck with one specific height for all walls? Can you at least pick what the one height is? I'm also wondering if you can use different textures for different parts of the ground, or if you have to pick one texture for the entire "level".
I'm trying to figure out if you can do more than just build a first person shooter. Like use it to make some "3D" buildings for a background.
Well if you saw the demo posted you would see that their are multiple textures for walls in one level. Specifically the beginning level. Also the walls are animated.
I ordered it, so when it comes in I'll see if I can make something with it.
Yeah I analyzed that little video as much as I could. I know you can do different textures for the walls and I read you could animate them as well. But from what I can tell the ground is the same throughout the whole thing. I'd like to be able to have grass in one place and a rock path in another or something like that. I'm also a little worried about how separate the functionality of the raycaster extension is from the functionality of mm2. Like if I create a bouncy ball object could I have that bouncing around inside the maze? Or are movements of sprites in the maze going to be restricted to specific movements that come with the extension? I'm also hoping there's potential for 45 degree walls so everything isn't square.
At the very minimum it looks like this extension could at least be used to scale objects around in a 3D environment but I hope it's more than that.
I didn't think about the floor. That is a good point.
As for diagonal walls it doesn't appear to support those right out of the "box" however I suppose one could create their own editor that does?
and reprogram it for the Xlua/HWA combo, which could easily have it run at 50 FPS and allow for all the things you guys were discussing (floors, custom moving sprites, etc). It just takes a little bit of time, which is something that unfortunately I've not had any of lately
But from what I can tell the ground is the same throughout the whole thing. I'd like to be able to have grass in one place and a rock path in another or something like that.
I'd like to be able to do that too. However from what I can tell it isn't possible
I'm also a little worried about how separate the functionality of the raycaster extension is from the functionality of mm2. Like if I create a bouncy ball object could I have that bouncing around inside the maze? Or are movements of sprites in the maze going to be restricted to specific movements that come with the extension?
After playing around with it a bit I'm pretty sure you'll be able to make something move however you wont. The levels are created on the playing aria as 2D maps. Kind of like how the mode 7 extension worked. it then used those for the collision detection and for the placing of the player. So I'm guessing if you made a sprite bounding box and linked it with a sprite it would bounce around in the maze.
I'm also hoping there's potential for 45 degree walls so everything isn't square.
Again, as fare as I can tell this is not possible right now. Though it's another thing I think would be really cool. Another think I'd really like to see is being able to have walls/doors that had see through parts. So if you wonted to have a glass door or a chain link fence blocking off an arya. This dose seem possible but with a little fiddling around.
Also, I am definatly no expert on this. It's just what I've found so fare. If I'm wrong about anything I've saind pleas correct me.
Pixelthief, that would be realy good. Though people would probably wont it to be relatively easy to use as well.
"Oh, my god! A lightning monster just ripped out this poor woman's eyes, and your mocking her shrubbery!" - The Spoony One
As far as see through walls, I don't know what kind of file formats are supported for the textures (I'm guessing it uses external images for this) but maybe if you could use a png with alpha channel you could do this?
Its a pretty good extention but IMO it's also very bare-bones at the moment (and yes I purchased the KlikDisc) with limitations. Then again I'm still getting to grips with it.
Anyway, I was playing around with the ray caster extension demo file. I was trying to figure out if you could make walls with see through
parts. I PNGs but there alpha layers were not recognised, I guess. Anyway I discovered that if you put pure black on a wall texture it
will render transparent. But not transparent like you can see the arias behind it, transparent like you can see through the ray caster
extension itself. If you go into the extensions properties and turn off transparent it renders those parts as black, turn it on and you
can see the map drawn underneath the extension.
So what I did was I cloned the extension and put the second one directly on top of the first. Then I made some maps where the walls and
windows were on the top extension and the outside was in the bottom one. I even made a map that had inside and outside arias. I thought it
was a pretty cool effect. Though I wish I could do transparent walls and different floor/ceiling tiles natively. Also what I've done now
has a LOT of limitations.
Also, I can't manage to build the dam thing properly. When I run it from MMF it goes fine but every time I try to compile it I get the
red "I can't find your texture" walls. It seems to find the maps ok. Strange. Is anyone else having this problem. You know if you've
bought it you can download it now.
"Oh, my god! A lightning monster just ripped out this poor woman's eyes, and your mocking her shrubbery!" - The Spoony One
Yeah I saw this http://www.klikdisc.com/site/ which has a tutorial for doing the transparency. As soon as I saw that pic there I figured it would do exactly what you said.
Hopefully these issues will be resolved in updated versions and the extension won't be left to get stale like mmf extensions often do.
One other thing if anyone has had time to figure it out: Does the movement need to be coded in and is collision built in? For example, in the mode 7 extension you use the events to change the position on the map. I guess I'm trying to figure out if I can use the movement "as a camera" that follows around a character within the maze.
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