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Hey guys, I've been thinking about ways of making levels and I thought of one that's exelent! First, make one layer called FLOOR, where EVERYTHING passable is on it, including the floor, walls, beds, and more. Then make a layer called ABOVE, where everything will be above the player, such as a roof for an RPG style, or a tree, or what ever ya want Then create another layer called BLOCKPLAYER, which will act as the collision for the player. This way when you collide into the wall, it wont stop the character right when the first stran of his hair touches the wall .

For the grahpics, use what ever art program your best at to create high quality levels that look realy nice. With this method you can include lighting effects if you use more advanced programs.

Tell me whatchya think Here's an example of the floor and the roof layers

You can simpler it.
Actualy you can make floor and roof as one actor.
Use a tile sprite, then just use switch(animpos)-case to determine which the floor and which the roof.

True, using cloneactors maybe. See remember that RPG's have a somewhat 3D effect where you can go a bit under the roof before you stop, know what I mean?

Yes. I do. You mean something like this?That orange dot is the player. Fighter001 from RMXP.

Kind of...

Nice graphics anyway, where did you find it?

Me? I made that picture in RMXP.

Lol, gimp for me :3

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!

Not quite sure how what you are asking for differs from this/these examples. Also do you mean zdepth when you say z transparency? It sounds like creating a tile actor for the collision map, and the player represented as a small rectangle would work.

Hm.. I guess I don't understand the layers, then. Is there a way to do layers in Game Editor? I thought this was simply a reference to creating images using layers in a graphics program, but in the end that's all saved as one file without layers. How would I go about making separate layers in GE..? If that's possible it would greatly simplify a lot of my attempts to make 2D into 3D. And yes I did mean Z-Depth - sorry, was thinking of something else when I mentioned that..
Thanks!

select actor and in it's actor menu... z depth (near top left corner of window)... drag the slider left to lower and right to raise it's graphic below and above others.... Mind you this isn't perfect and gets difficult to place the depths with 3 or more different height levels...

It creates a 'layered' effect...

Better yet set the zdepth by the y position, since that is how it works in 3/4 view. Also in code you can specify values beyond what the slider permits, making it far easier to manipulate everything. For the collision map, it would just be a tile actor that you set the zdepth below your level graphics. I can make a demo if you want, its pretty standard 3/4 view code, in fact I'm not sure it is at all different from this topic's method (besides the tiles).

hm yeah I think I know what you're saying, but I demo would be nice - especially since my coding skills aren't quite that great so I'm not sure if I could accomplish it easily and simply. Thanks!

Here's a quick example I put together. Sorry for the images, just used what I had lying around. When implementing this in your own game, the collision mask tile set should probably be more detailed, so you can match the collisions better. The main trick of this is to set the zdepth by using the y coordinate (in actors that move make sure to use draw for this). The other thing is that the player is parented to the player collision actor, which has its zdepth set as well as the xy movement is done through this actor.