Studio B Game Development
Home Screenshots Blog About Us Contact	March 2006 - Walking plane and layered alpha channels
		March was spent fixing up the stove and sink to make them look more realistic. I found some neat textures for a beat up sink and stove and some really great chipped painted texture for the door and window. One activity will be a view of the countertop, displaying a letter which our character will have to pick up. I made a quick envelope and texture for it, but have yet to integrate it into our scene. In the meantime, Patrick was busily working on the engine we would use to run our game on. With a 2D image of my kitchen scene, he downloaded a free dummy character named Tiny from Microsoft's DirectX site to use until I started to make our own character. Since we wanted a 3D character to walk in a 2D picture, we needed Tiny to walk in specified X, Y, and Z coordinates, or in other words, a specified walking plane. It was tedious getting the plane and the kitchen "plane" to line up exactly but eventually he figured it out and Tiny was finally walking around our kitchen! This was our first sign of real progress! Now we had to figure out how to make her NOT walk on top of the stove and sink. Instead, she needed to walk BEHIND them. Somehow, we needed to set up layers, kind of what you would use in Photoshop. The thing is, we had to use an alpha channel, or transparency, to allow us to see the layers behind the alpha layer. After DAYS of trial and error, Tiny FINALLY walked behind the stove! Our neighbors probably heard a sudden "WAAHHOOOOOO!!!!" and wondered if we've gone mad. Now that Tiny can go to Timbuktu and back, she needed boundaries, transparent shadows that contoured with objects she walked around, and some walking sophistication. By sophistication, I mean sliding. Sliding happens when a character walks into an object and slides along until they're past it instead of simply walking around it. A more defined walking plane was created and Patrick somehow geniously figured out shadows. Our game was coming along very nicely! He also created a nice export script where the camera, the position of character, and dummy positions of the transparent objects were selected and transported to show in the DirectX viewer. Back
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