this is what I've been trying to do - maybe you can help me out, though...
I'm *wanting* to make my game at a sort of 3/4 angle by taking pictures of everything in the game at that angle (I'm creating characters in a 3D program, then taking pictures of them so that the animations come out smoothly and consistent). But the problem is that in order to make a game have that "pop out" feel, you need to have it set so that *part* of the player actor *vanishes* when it goes around certain objects...
Take a fountain, for example. If a player were to go "around" (really he'd just be moving past the fountain by going farther up on the y-axis) the fountain, because of the camera angle, parts of the character (depending on the "height" of the fountain) SHOULD disappear. But with the collision settings, the fountain will instead appear flat, because your character would not be able to go "behind" parts of it. I think that makes sense.
What I did before was I made a separate invisible collision actor for the top area of the fountain (it was actually a statue) and then created a script that would initiate no physical response, but would change the player actor's Z transparency to *just beneath* the Z transparency of the statue actor. As I'm sure you can imagine, this process was extremely tedious, because if the fountain has that action, everything else has to. And the end result was not attractive at all. It was very obvious that there was merely a box which would change the transparency when passed through, whereas another box would register a collision. Didn't run smoothly, and was a total waste of time, so I ditched that idea.
This concept is fairly similar to what I want to do, but if you know a way to *do* what it is I just explained up ^there^, that would be extremely helpful. Not sure if I'll use it in my game seeing as I'm already a ways into the image making, and it's already taking up quite a bit of space to have the multiple views and sprites in the game (plus it takes forever to combine the images and such since there are SOOO many), but I'm sure it would be helpful to me for future reference *and* it would certainly benefit the "2D-to-3D" abilities of game makers who use GE if someone knew how to do something like that...
Whoa that was long... alright - thanks for reading that.
And this is slightly off-topic, but Hblade you said you use gimp? Do you know of an easy way to load files and create a sprite sheet instantly? Because I have all these pictures and such, and I've just been having to click, drag, adjust, click, drag, adjust, click, drag, adjust over and over and over for a character that will - in the end - have over 320 images combined in its sprite sheet. This is reallyyyy frustrating (and it hurts my hand), so if you know of an easier way to use gimp for sprite sheets, let me know! I've been using the "snap-to-grid", but it doesn't make it much easier... Thanks man - and your tutorials are really helpful!