I think we shouldn't go out of our way to hide characters in rooms other than the player. In a few games I played that did this, I found the constantly appearing and disappearing objects annoying. It serves little purpose in a general RPG. If someone really wants to do so (for a stealth sequence or something), they could do that using scripts.
I'd be reluctant to make speech bubbles a part of normal rendering process. It could possibly lead to weird results, like partially obscured bubbles going through walls. Maybe not, I don't know much about the renderer's internals. Still, bubbles are a gui element and not a map object. As for character visibility - maybe it could be determined as feedback from the renderer? For every placeable it renders, it could set a "visible" property every cycle. Of course it's probably a bad idea that breaks encapsulation and good coding rules. Alternatively the script that schedules npc conversation could use a similar algorithm as the renderer to determine whether to display the bubbles. Another way would be to just check the character positions. It would prevent hearing conversation from across the map and allow overhearing in a natural way. I'm not sure about overhearing things across floors - a bubble coming out of the floor or ceiling could be confusing for the player. Perhaps it could be amended by a simple check whether there's a solid object between characters in z dimension. I'd like to ask - will the speech bubble (and similar gui elements written in python) become a part of core engine (which has no python scripts as of now) or some sort of run time package? _______________________________________________ Adonthell-devel mailing list Adonthell-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/adonthell-devel
