The Harvest Moon Consortium

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Fading (unedited post)

Here's a tile fade question. Can you have more than one fading level? If I want to make a tower with fifteen segments each fading over 3 meters, is that possible? Or, do I just make everything above the first level one object and have it fade at once?
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Tileset height increments, must be whole numbers.

If you use a non whole number such as 2.5 when you place features or groups the surrounding terrain will change to the next lower height when placing at any non whole number height. (terrains and crossers do not exhibit this problem)

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Before we get to the specifics or your tower in question, the basic rule on tilefade: if it's triggered for that tile, everything goes. It's all-or-nothing. There's no levels or whatnot (indeed, as the game doesn't have any sense of z-depth there'd be nothing to base a multi-level trigger on even if it was possible.)

Now, there's a work-around if you want multiple tilefades on something. I pioneered this when I was working on Lothlorien waaaaay back in the day. Basically the deal was this: I had a massive tree with covered walkways winding up the tree that stopped at various edifices along the way. Now, I wanted the walkway covers to fade as you went under them, but not all of them at once. Also, I wanted edifice roofs to fade as you went under them. Initially, the second you walked under the first walkway cover the whole she-bang would fade and you'd have a vary non-impressive looking tree city on your hands. What I did was to increase the trees tile group size and parented elements in my central tile to the surrounding tiles. Although most of the elements were located in the central tile they had their own tilefade and wouldn't trigger the others. Obviously, this is a less than optimal work-around as you need more tiles... but if, for example, your tower is a large group that has some surrounding tiles that doesn't have any elements using tilefade you can "borrow" it's tilefade to set up a secondary fade for another tile in that group.

As to your tower question in particular: everything above or below your character would fade so tilefade (no matter how many extra fades you parent in from other tiles) is not a workable solution. The PC would appear to be standing on nothing most of the time and the tilefade would (as always) be unpredictable depending on the current rotation/location of the player's camera. Also, one should take into account that a multi-level tower that can be navigated by a PC would be very difficult to make without overlapping walkmeshes (which are a big no-no in tilemaking land.)

Cheers,
Mr. X

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Gribo:

In tower situation, if the walkable area is outside of the tower (a catwalk, a bridge or similiar) then you dont need tilefade much. In my tileset, I used tilefade only when obstructing polygons affected gameplay, not where it would have been a 'nice to have'

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