Character customization

YouKnowMe

Hi,

I want to create a character customization menu with about 40 characters to choose from. is there a way to create just one scene where 1 of the 40 characters can spawn instead of 40 scenes each for one character?

thanks

scitunes

If all of the actors are very different you could have an actor for each and an integer game attribute called playerID or something. Then in the spawner have 40 rules. When game.playerID = 1 spawn player1, when game.spawner=2 spawn player2 etc.

If the only difference about each actor is the image. Then you could bypass the spawner all together. Have one actor called player and use the same game attribute with a change image behavior instead of a spawn behavior (you will still need 40 of these rules)

rebump

Don't know how different all the actors are so this may not work for you but...

If you have a monochrome image (i.e. all its pixels are white with various levels of transparency for different shades of the background), when you assign that image to an actor, you can then set the color of the actor's RGB color values. This has the effect of shading that actor to that color (and thus why white is preferred for truer color intention).

It's an easy way to add custom colors to an image/sprite...assuming the image can be shades of one color. Also, your transparency should not be to severe if you have a multi-colored background. If your background is mostly monochrome or mostly light or dark, it should still work for the most part.

Add to this, you can then create overlay actors that you constrain position wise on the top of the aforementioned monochrome actor. This has the effect of adding more color, features, clothes, armor, etc. to the monochrome actor. This can mask some of the tranparency bleed through too if your background is multi-colored. Downside is if the monochrome actor is animated, your overlays will need to be animated too.

For example, you could have a "naked" monochrome image (in white and with various transparencies in the image to create shadow/depth and what not). When the actor is instantiated in a scene, you could assign a skin tone color to its RGB values (i.e. white, tan, brown, dark brown). Then constrain an overlay image to give it some additional color, features, clothes, etc.

These methods work great for space games, "glowing" imagery games, and games with mostly monochrome backgrounds or dark backgrounds.

And of course, the overlay method would work with any image/sprite (i.e. not just monochrome).

The selection logic for overlays would parallel what scitunes mentioned above.

YouKnowMe

Ive made about 4 characters with flash CS4 right now, all have different animations when doing something. The problem is that every character has a different animation when performing a action. So i do think the best solution is to create multible scenes

thanks everyone

kirkland

is there any templates for this