Hi Tom Now indeed I can totally see the trouble and amount of work that attempting that would generate. It's now understandable how much more there is doing that with a side scroller game. Thanks for the explanation.
Take care Ron ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Ward" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Gamers Discussion list" <gamers@audyssey.org> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 2:21 PM Subject: Re: [Audyssey] MOTA Clasic vs New Levels Hi Ron, That's a very good question. Unfortunately, do to the way side-scrollers are designed randomly placing items and monsters is a very very difficult process. I can't really do it without doing a lot of work placing each item and creature in rooms randomly. Here is a very simple example of the problem involved with the kind of random placement people are asking about. In a game like Shades of Doom if I want to randomly place an ammo pack, sword, or monster in a room all I have to do is randomly generate an x and y value, make sure there is no doors or walls in the way, and drop it on the world map. Because you have full movement and the world is flat you don't have a problem walking over and picking up that item or targeting that monster. You also don't necessarily have to worry about items and creatures winding up plastered to the ceiling either. Side-scrollers are different in that the x axis moves left and right and the y axis is up and down. As a result if you tried to generate an x and y value items and monsters would wind up floating in mid air or end up plastered to the ceiling or some place you can't get to. As a result the only way to randomly place a monster or item in a side-scroller like MOTA is to write a function that gets the current level, randomly generates a room, and places the item based on those two factors. Here is an example of what I mean. // Randomly place some gold coins. int room = calculate.GetRandomNumber(1, 25); // Place coins on level 1. if (isCurrentLevel == 1) { if (room == 1) { gold.SetAmount(10); gold.SetArea(1); gold.SetLocation(10, 0, 1); gold.SetName("gold coins"); gold.SetPoints(1000*isExperienceLevel); } if (room == 2) { gold.SetAmount(10); gold.SetArea(2); gold.SetLocation(45, 0, 1); gold.SetName("gold coins"); gold.SetPoints(1000*isExperienceLevel); } } As you can see if I have to do that sort of thing for 25 rooms for every singl level I am going to have several hundred lines of code generated to just randomly place one single item on the map. That's unrealistic, and the reason why I am not going to randomly place items in the game. It is just to difficult to do if I want to get this game out by the spring. In Genesis 3D the full engine items can be randomly placed because all I need to do is randomly generat an x and z coordinate and supply a manual y coordinate to place something in the game world. In side-scrollers like MOTA it can't be done that way just because of the way the levels are laid out. Cheers. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]