Managing Companion Characters

It's clearly not something that Visionaire is geared towards. For one, Characters clip through each other, but that's just a minor nuisance. The chase character command is troublesome to deal with, as you have to disable it and re-enable it whenever you want to move your companion character to a specific spot.

Not to much of a bother, but when you re-enable the chase command when the current character is within the chase range, the companion character will shift suddenly and awkwardly.

I've tried various workarounds to prevent this from happening. The best idea I've had so far is to create action areas that trigger the chase command when the current character leaves them. It's tedious work and a somewhat inelegant solution, though.

So, how do you guys handle companion characters? Should I be using the chase command at all? Maybe there's a better way to handle it I'm unaware of.

I think, nearly 95% of sidequest characters are standing around, fixed to speak with. I don't know a game with two ore more characters moving together. The mostly used tool is "following the main character" and it works - more or less, but only at one scene. To avoid collisions I want to use more than one way systems (one pathway for each character), but it doesn't work yet.

I hope I understood your posting. Not really clear what you want...

Machtnix

Characters in VS are flat, thus there's nothing to stop the characters from walking through things in the scene or from characters passing through each other.

If you want to prevent 2 characters colliding then you would need to create a looping function that checks a radius value from each of the characters on the scene to figure out if any 2 characters or more radius are overlapping.

I wrote a script (which is available on the wiki) a while back which is used to detect if the mouse cursor is inside of specified radius from x,y position. The code needs modifying to check radius of 2 character radius instead of the mouse cursor.

Look to the Sam and Max games if you haven't seen games with companion characters.

I'm not looking for one particular answer here. I'm just looking to hear other's experiences with trying to do companion characters and how they handle the various quirks and issues. More specifically, the lack of character collision and the problems that can arise from using the chase character command.

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Characters in VS are flat, thus there's nothing to stop the characters from walking through things in the scene or from characters passing through each other.

If you want to prevent 2 characters colliding then you would need to create a looping function that checks a radius value from each of the characters on the scene to figure out if any 2 characters or more radius are overlapping.

I wrote a script (which is available on the wiki) a while back which is used to detect if the mouse cursor is inside of specified radius from x,y position. The code needs modifying to check radius of 2 character radius instead of the mouse cursor.

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Thanks AFRLme, I'll be sure to check that out.

I think in Sam & Max that Max mostly did his own thing around each scene or was given a random thing to do from a list after x time had passed, then only started following when Sam called him over.

Being able to chase across multiple scenes would be a nice feature.

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Being able to chase across multiple scenes would be a nice feature.

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Already sorted that out in another thread before. One of the members wanted a little duckling to follow their character around each scene & when character stops & duck reached radius & character stopped then I think it deactivated the chase automatically so that if idle long enough it would play a random animation. A loop was used to check when it should chase & stop.