Sunday, October 12, 2008

Just when you think it's safe to move on...

Having made my changing room area discussed in my previous post, I set to work on developing how the character would arrive for the changing room scene. I considered just having a conversation node with the shopkeeper that would teleport the player to the changing room area, but this didn't feel right, so set to work on a script that had the shopkeeper saying "walk this way" before escorting the player to the changing room before doing the teleport (For those who've not been keeping up to date, I had to make a duplicate area with a corridor extension where the mirror should be so that the camera had a valid location to sit and give the illusion of viewing ones self in the mirror, so the teleport is a nescesity). Having successfully created the escort/teleport routine (with some help from Nereng and Axe Murderer whose suggestions helped me resolve player running when following the shopkeeper), I enabled the shopkeeper walking back to his waypoint when the player teleports back to the real shop at the end of the mirror viewing routine.
It was by no means easy. In fact at one stage I seriously considered dumping the whole routine, but with some perseverance managed to get past an issue with the initial camera setup for the duplicate area. No matter how hard I tried, the camera always started above the duplicate area... only for a brief second, but long enough to betray the fact that the area strangely lacked the rest of the shop and had a corridor extension not present in the "real" shop area. With me so far? *lol* Gives you an idea of what a nightmare this has been.
So... there I was, pleased that I'd resolved all of the above, feeling ready to move on to another part of the module, when BLAM! Last night I decided to show off the routine to a friend of mine, only to discover a bug that didn't surface when testing, yet became horribly apparent if you started the game normally instead of via the toolest. AAaaarrrgggghhhhHHHH!!! Why is my shopkeeper taking his clothes off in the changing room?!!!
Fortunately I managed to resolve this too. Phew. Now at last maybe I really can move on. Stay tuned!