Pondering multi-tile actors.
Well, I haven’t put any time into this lately, partially because I just quit my job and have been in limbo (have I posted about that? I guess I should read my own blog).
Anyway, one of the things I always wanted to support in the game was characters of different sizes — so instead of fixed-size playable characters and NPC’s, I could define a set of dimensions and a larger sprite that the engine would handle correctly.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to update the motion processing to handle it… I just don’t know how I’m going to handle it in the rendering engine. The real problem is how to handle things like doorways. If I allow two-tile-wide characters, I either have to make sure all movement happens in one-tile increments or (if movement increments are equal to the size of the character, which is what I intended to do), that all doorways are wide enough to accomodate all character sizes.
Now, that seems simple until you consider that I wanted to build map rendering in such a way that where you start determines where your map view is… it just feels more dynamic. The implication here is that a 2×2 character won’t always fit onto a 2×2 grid, but a 1×1 grid — so the door would have to account for that character’s offset if he could move by any increment other than 1 tile at a time.
I’m not sure if that clearly illustrates the problem, but I think after typing this I may just go with limiting the movement distance to a single basic tile. It’ll feel slower for large characters, but that kind of makes sense, and it’ll keep doorway width predictable.
Um… thanks for listening!
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