In POG all the buildings were tiny and you couldnt enter them. How would one go about making a realistic sized town, with large buildings you could enter, streets, etc.... (My game is based completely inside a huge city. hopefully this is possible.)

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The buildings are simply pictures that you can not walk on. All tiles, unless otherwise specifyed, can be walked on. You just place a picture, then tell coldsone that no one can walk where the picture is.

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windowzsifortehfargots

Entering buildings shouldn't be too hard. I don't know if there's a way to trigger an event when you walk on a certain tile (which would be the door tile), but even if there isn't, all you need there is an invisible NPC. The event would take you to a new map, which is the inside of the building.

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Yeah your fine as far as Coldstone goes.... you can make it so if the player clicks on the door of a building they go to a new location, you could make the roof of the building a seperate layer from the walls... so when they walk into that area an event removes the roof so they can now see inside (I believe this would work)... you can make an event when they walk to a certain area that takes them to a new location.

If you look in the Coldstone manual you will notice screen shots of a tavern location... which is one way to do it... if you want locations where you don't 'walk around' but just click on an location screen... though you could make a new 'map' location as well.

Your challenge is going to be artwork I imagine. A large city is a hard thing in top down/isometric games... or at least I've always thought all these cities with one-story and two-story buildings look funny. And architecture is obviously a bit harder then a field of grass to make... but certainly doable.

it all depends on how you want it to 'feel' and your aesthetic approach I think.

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Quote

Originally posted by Starkiller:
**Entering buildings shouldn't be too hard. I don't know if there's a way to trigger an event when you walk on a certain tile (which would be the door tile), but even if there isn't, all you need there is an invisible NPC. The event would take you to a new map, which is the inside of the building.
**

Exactly. You can create a local event within the map editor and then link it to the tile (see the event mode part of the map editor section, in the user manual for complete details).

There is 2 ways to do such a thing:

1) Less memory, but longer loading
(The common way you would think about)

The map is one map (or multiple maps). Each house interior is another map. You then link the door within the map to an event that teleport the player to the appropriate house interior map. (see above)

2) More memory, instant loading
(this method would really be better I think)

You create a huge map. You create all the city in the left part of the map and all the house interiors in the right part of the map (so that everything will be loaded at once), at a reasonable distance from each other so that the player won't see the other interiors when in one. You fill the void in the right part of the map with black to create the "interior" illusion. You link each doors of your city to an event, like above, but you these events will only have a "Map Position" action that will instantly teleport the player into the house.

Note: you may want to put the "map position" action between a fade in and fade out effect and play some door sound to improve it.

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Dee Brown
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(This message has been edited by Dee (edited 01-18-2002).)

I forgot a detail, in case you want to use option #2, you would have to use a more custom way of displaying the map previews (only if you support them in your game, of course). You will have to generate separate map preview files (one for the city and one for each interior) and when you have to show the preview, you launch an event that will take care of showing the correct preview file (not the default one).

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Dee Brown
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This is a good idea (you have to load every time walking into and outo da house),
as Starkiller wrote, making an invisible npc (or an NPC that looks just like a door) would be the right thing to do, walking into the NPC will open up a dialog which asks "open the door?", your choises are "open" and "don´t open", simple, is it?

When "opening" a new map will be loaded.
The smartest thing to do here is not to make a big layer, instead, make some 32x32 (or whatever you want to use) tiles of walls and floors and then place tables and such as layers.

Going into other rooms:
Simple, make a "hole" into the wall or a door that u can go "trough".
Don´t make new maps for new rooms, make all rooms at the same map.

Going upstairs:
This is as simple as going into the house: make an invisible NPC (or an NPC that looks like a stair) with a dialog and so on....

I think that is all you need to make fully working houses (there will be kinda much loading time but it will look "nicer").

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Quote

Originally posted by PsycoAngel:
**This is a good idea (you have to load every time walking into and outo da house),
as Starkiller wrote, making an invisible npc (or an NPC that looks just like a door) would be the right thing to do, walking into the NPC will open up a dialog which asks "open the door?", your choises are "open" and "don´t open", simple, is it?

**

Mmm.. This isn't the best way to do it (in my opinion). If you have 50 doors, then it means you need 50 blank NPCs. This clutters your main list of NPCs unecessarily, And since you are going to have to keep them stationary (they are invisible so you need them right over the door), then ut us really just a strange way of doing what Map events are made to do.

The cleaner way to do it would be to, in the Map editor, make a map event for each door on the map. Then lay down these events by each door (using the 'Events' Mode.

A good example of this is the dragon cave on the north side of the Midieval game wizard template thingy (that you can select when creating a new game).

This is a lot cleaner to handle in a large project, and also I would guess it is a much better use of memory and might even help draw times a small bit (since it doesn't even have to waste time thinking about drawing a transparent graphic (like with the NPC idea).

But you can do it however you like best.

-Jeff

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I like Dee's second option. Neat idea, Dee.

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