Anyone know of a way to make backgrounds that look like final fantasy 7,8,9 but tilebased. I can make backgrounds like that but Im not sure how to test if the character is behind an object such as a railing or table. Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking blt top left to bottom right and if the player is ontop of a tile that is walkable then blt that tile before the character. Also have another tilelike map that is like 2x2 pixel tiles and those are used to test walkablity. OoMMMoO

I''m not sure if this is what you''re looking for but here goes. You could draw all the tiles, then draw the sprites (railings, tables, player character). The order in which the tiles are drawn isn''t important. However, the sprites are going to be drawn based on how ''low'' on the screen they are. A sprite that''s higher up on the screen will be drawn before a sprite that''s lower down on the screen. This would be done via testing all sprite''s yPos + width (the bigger it is, the lower down on the screen the sprite will be).

I hope that was clear...I can''t think straight now.

Games with prerendered, fixed cameras like the PSX FinalFantasy series and Resident Evil series use a Z buffer to determine which pixels get blocked. When an object is rendered, its pixels are checked against this Z buffer, and if the objects pixel has a closer value than that of the backgrounds Z buffer, it gets drawn; and, of course, if the backgrounds Z buffer value is closer, the new pixel doesn''t get drawn.

You could implement this with tiles; keep a Z buffer with the associated tiles. Rather than having a prerendered Z buffer with the prerendered background image, create the Z buffer as you draw your tiles.

+travois+

Would rpg''s like grim fandango && monkey island 4 use z-buffers?
I was thinking about how they would do they collisions on the tables and all that prerendered stuff and i was wondering if it would be viable to extract all the polygon information and each camera location then work out the collisions and drawing order from that?

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-cow_in_the_well

''When in doubt, empty your magazine.'' - Murphy''s Combat Law