Bah.. I mistyped my password so the whole 3 paragraph thing got deleted... *re-types the whole thing*..
OK, in the old days, adventure games ruled, they had hand-drawn backgrounds, and players. The players would walk around in a map like this:
Of course the players could walk infront or behind of the trees and such, so the game engine used a second bitmap to determine when to draw the map -- before or after the actor is drawn. The engine would take a bitmap like this:
And determine which should be drawn first based on the Y position of the character (they might have used an emaginary Z.. but in KQ3< it is pretty aparent they dont ^_^).
The problem is, that was then. Back then 160x200 (double-x pixels) was the resolution the engine worked in. In my current engine, it is running in 800x600, and uses OpenGL 3D textured polygons with alphatransprency layers, rotation, and scaling.. Obviously pixel-by-pixel rendering is NOT a good idea.
My idea was to 'cut out' the portions of the scene that the actors can be drawn infront or behind (like trees, fences, etc), and draw them off after-the-fact -- before or after the actor has been drawn, depending off its emaginary Z value.
So far it seems to work great (although cutting out the scene chunks take a decent ammount of time).
I wanted to know if there are faster ways to do this (faster game-wise, not prep-wise). I know the FF7-9 games, along with a lot of other PSX games used pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters, so its nothing new I'm sure; but I highly doubt they did what I am doing.
Does anyone know of any other techniques to have pre-drawn backgrounds and 2D characters walking around in an OpenGL 3d based environment (ortho mode is off of course ^_^).
Thanks
- Dreq
[edited by - dreq on March 11, 2004 10:32:39 PM]
