Possible camera perspectives and graphic styles?

by **Darthcast** » Mon Jul 20, 2020 4:10 pm

I'm currently wondering what would be possible in module creation concerning graphic style and camera perspective. Are there even different camera perspectives possible, or am I missing something?

Maps drawn in overhead / top-down perspective with character tokens like in Augury of Chaos
Maps and character sprites in the camera perspective from KoTC 1 / Ultima VII (oblique projection?)
Complete overhead/top down perspective with animated sprites as well (like eg. Alien Breed)
Complete module in Isometric perspective ?

What about other items that are needed, like treasure chests, dropped weapons, loot etc.? Could such object be replaced in a module to fit a different graphic style?

by **felipepepe** » Tue Jul 21, 2020 3:46 am

The game will always be a grid of squares seen top-down, but it supports custom tokens, art, background and animated sprites. It includes the KOTC1 sprites, if you use them an oblique map background, it would look exactly like KotC1.

That's the trick, there's no "camera", what matters is the art you are using. Fallout 1 & 2 are set on a grid of hexagons, but all its art is isometric, so it looks isometric.

When making a custom module you can import your custom art, there's no need to use the included treasure chests, tokens, sprites, weapons or loot art. You could make it oblique or isometric if you want. Just did a test with Fallout 2:

Apparently the animated sprites only have 3 frames of animation for movement, so you could use custom sprites from Alien Breed too, but only 3 frames of animation and there won't be unique animations for attack, spell, etc.

by **Darthcast** » Tue Jul 21, 2020 3:22 pm

Thanks for testing that!

So right now using different graphic styles is already possible and the most obvious limitation is the choppy sprite animation... Hopefully BlueSalamander will find the time to improve on that later on.
Did you already see a way for the "foreground layer" in isometric perspective, like roofs, trees or the statue in your example to be in front of the characters?

by **felipepepe** » Tue Jul 21, 2020 5:29 pm

You could do it in limited amounts by setting an activable zone with the roof artwork that has a script to become "hidden" you a character enters the trigger zones beneath them.

But it's a lot of work, and the result will still be choppy. It's basically trying to fit a round peg on a square hole.

by **Darthcast** » Tue Jul 21, 2020 8:59 pm

I guess my question was quite ambigous, but this would have been my next question anyway. :lol:

I was actually wondering how to eg. insert a background map image and then make sure the characters don't walk "over" or in front of objects (example image) that are drawn on the map, like roofs, trees, statues or other objects. I quess you assumed those are inserted as props instead of being drawn on the background image, which would not lead to that problem anyway... Still, the problem you named would still exist, to remove a roof when a character enters a room (which could of course be avoided by changing maps when entering something) or walks behind larger objects that are in the front...
I guess at the moment an isometric perspective would be the most difficult to use in a module. I hope this will change in the future, because isometric is actually the perspective I'd like the most of these options.

by **felipepepe** » Wed Jul 22, 2020 5:05 am

Darthcast wrote:I guess my question was quite ambigous, but this would have been my next question anyway.
I was actually wondering how to eg. insert a background map image and then make sure the characters don't walk "over" or in front of objects (example image) that are drawn on the map, like roofs, trees, statues or other objects.

You haven't used the KOTC2 editor yet, have you? You can just paint squares as high obstacles, low obstacles, always visible, inaccessible, etc...

by **BlueSalamander** » Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:13 pm

For the village map, I used a special type of square called the Transparency square, which means your characters get displayed with 50% transparency when standing on those squares.

I suppose, if we really wanted to have trees and such being displayed on top, and the characters behind, for any map I could allow loading a second PNG which would contain only those things (the trees, everything else being transparent pixels); and then the game would always display this PNG on top of everything else. The PNG would have to be of the same size as the backdrop PNG. Might get implemented. If anyone is interested, please feel free to post here. Cheers