I am not sure if this can be an extension, of it is just a good idea for a feature in MMF 2.5 or 3.
I have been playing around with Reiner's stuff, (he has some great resources in both MMF and bitmap formats). From a beginner's point of view, even ordering by x,y and using the Layer object still makes it hard to just get your character to walk around things easily.
I may illustrate this with a graphic, but here is the basic idea:
This object is a mask that can be applied to an Active Object, (maybe a future version of MMF could have it built-in).
Let's say we have a small mountain as the graphic in the AO. We first want an in-front, behind baseline. and points where the player or cpu character stops. If the character approaches the mountain from the sides, it cannot pass through the object.
That would be the normal mode and the character would simply follow the shape of the object and automatically go behind or in front of it.
However, there is an addition here. If you have a mountain graphic, there may be two things you want your character to do.
1) Walk behind the mountain AS IF it were walking around the an edge that is much lower than the top of the graphic. That could simply be another baseline or an offset.
2) You want some options when the character is in front of the object:
a) Either the character can only to move along the graphic edge, in front of the object.
b) It is able to move along the edge with an offset that lets it walk along the stones and pebbles at the bottom but stopping at the offset.
c) It is able to walk up the mountain and is restricted from going off the edges or the top, (unless you have an event that let's it jump off the top, for instance). So, that would take into account on the outer edge of the graphic from the inside.
I hope that idea is clear enough as it is presented. Perhaps you have come across this situation and wondered if there was a better way to do it?
First, I am wondering if this can be done in an extension, or would it be a good feature for the wish-list only?
Second, I wonder if it could be done with little user intervention and based on only the graphic of the AO being reference? If not, could it work from a representation of the graphic, (somewhat like the Overlay) where the user defines the zones outlined above?
The idea is that setup and using has to be simple and easy to understand.
If we had something like this, a character could easily be restricted and controlled when walking around, on, and behind any object, no matter what size or shape.
In order to make MMF2 easier to use, going a step above and beyond stop/bounce/to back/to front, etc., would make a huge difference.
If we could get a prototype of this as an extension, that would be a great step in the right direction. Maybe MMF3 could have it as a built-in detection, even = Object collides with object --> Walk -around (parameters/mask).
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