Swerdnik:
"i like it! now go make the game!"
Ha, HA!
I needed to know what I was going to be making before I could start in earnest. I would have just wasted a bunch of effort if I'd started when I thought I was going to have the customers line up in a queue or at the door, or when I thought the player character was going to move about with the mouse.
Now that I know what I'm going to do, I can move forward with the code and code it nice and cleanly, unlike a certain game where robots build things that I recently completed whose code was a mess. :-)
It's not like it matters, I can't sell it till the art is done anyway and I can tell that's gonna be a while.
77777777:
No, the character is definitely going to be in the scene. At worst, he will be standing to the right of center, or be semi-transparent. I'm not so dead set against those options that I would rather get rid of the character entirely. The character is very important to the game. Without him, it would feel a lot more like what you're doing is just clicking the mouse on hotspots, rather than telling someone what to do. And telling a character what to do is almost always more fun than simply performing the actions yourself, especially if they do what you tell them to in an amusing way.
With that said, I think the character is definitely going to have to move around and animate. And because the user will be able to stack actions, he will have to move around independently of the mouse. But damn, making him transparent so that the user can see what is behind him is just a really bad idea, it might slow the game down too much, and I'd almost certainly have to enable triple buffering which might kill the framerate on some cards.
But then again, if that BlitzPlus benchmark that what's his name did on the general forums is an indicator, reading from the video card is really slow, but writing to it is really fast on all the cards tested, and readong from ram is not slow. So unless there's some wildcard out there that hasn't been tested, triple buffering ought to be fast enough. Maybe.
Hm. One other option would be to have the player character somehow move out of the way of the mouse when blocking an area with a hotspot.
OR... Here's an idea! Since the hotspots in the game will display highlights when the mouse is over them, I could make those highlights display over the character. This would give the appearance of a kind of translucency but not actually involve any translucency at all. It would also not make the character look like a ghost which is another concern with translucency... it just looks wierd.
Now, if I just did that then the player would have to guess that the ice cream they are over is a certian flavor, knowing what was there before. The other items would be easily guessable by the shape. But maybe I could write the flavor of the ice cream in the middle of the highlight, or at the top of the screen in the center, or better yet, at the bottom of the screen where it will be more easy to read while looking down there to click items. Then the player would know what they are over even if they couldn't remember which favor was there, and the character should only rarely completely block one column of ice cream flavors. And maybe I could even make sure they never block the colors by creatively positioning him. He won't be sliding around, he will poof from location to location like the customers. So I could make sure he is centered between two rows, which would position his hand right for scooping the ice cream anyway, and then you'd be able to see the colors on either side of him!
Yeah that just might work! :-)
"i like it! now go make the game!"
Ha, HA!
I needed to know what I was going to be making before I could start in earnest. I would have just wasted a bunch of effort if I'd started when I thought I was going to have the customers line up in a queue or at the door, or when I thought the player character was going to move about with the mouse.
Now that I know what I'm going to do, I can move forward with the code and code it nice and cleanly, unlike a certain game where robots build things that I recently completed whose code was a mess. :-)
It's not like it matters, I can't sell it till the art is done anyway and I can tell that's gonna be a while.
77777777:
No, the character is definitely going to be in the scene. At worst, he will be standing to the right of center, or be semi-transparent. I'm not so dead set against those options that I would rather get rid of the character entirely. The character is very important to the game. Without him, it would feel a lot more like what you're doing is just clicking the mouse on hotspots, rather than telling someone what to do. And telling a character what to do is almost always more fun than simply performing the actions yourself, especially if they do what you tell them to in an amusing way.
With that said, I think the character is definitely going to have to move around and animate. And because the user will be able to stack actions, he will have to move around independently of the mouse. But damn, making him transparent so that the user can see what is behind him is just a really bad idea, it might slow the game down too much, and I'd almost certainly have to enable triple buffering which might kill the framerate on some cards.
But then again, if that BlitzPlus benchmark that what's his name did on the general forums is an indicator, reading from the video card is really slow, but writing to it is really fast on all the cards tested, and readong from ram is not slow. So unless there's some wildcard out there that hasn't been tested, triple buffering ought to be fast enough. Maybe.
Hm. One other option would be to have the player character somehow move out of the way of the mouse when blocking an area with a hotspot.
OR... Here's an idea! Since the hotspots in the game will display highlights when the mouse is over them, I could make those highlights display over the character. This would give the appearance of a kind of translucency but not actually involve any translucency at all. It would also not make the character look like a ghost which is another concern with translucency... it just looks wierd.
Now, if I just did that then the player would have to guess that the ice cream they are over is a certian flavor, knowing what was there before. The other items would be easily guessable by the shape. But maybe I could write the flavor of the ice cream in the middle of the highlight, or at the top of the screen in the center, or better yet, at the bottom of the screen where it will be more easy to read while looking down there to click items. Then the player would know what they are over even if they couldn't remember which favor was there, and the character should only rarely completely block one column of ice cream flavors. And maybe I could even make sure they never block the colors by creatively positioning him. He won't be sliding around, he will poof from location to location like the customers. So I could make sure he is centered between two rows, which would position his hand right for scooping the ice cream anyway, and then you'd be able to see the colors on either side of him!
Yeah that just might work! :-)