[Ohrrpgce] [ohrrpgce/ohrrpgce] Step-on NPCs not drawn below heroes (#44)

[Ralph Versteegen]

When hero/npc layering is set to "Together," step-on npcs will appear above NPCs/heroes that overlap them from above.

We should add per-NPC-ID setting something like "Layering: normal/below all/above all".  This will add a large positive/negative constant to the walkabout slice sort key.  (Walkabouts with same 'layering' would be sorted by Y, as usual).

(No point retroactively applying this to Step-on NPCs in existing games, but the NPC editor could automatically change to "Layering: below" when you set an NPC as step-on.  Related: I wanted to split up the multiple effects of Step-on NPCs into different settings anyway.)

The "above" option is good for airborne and overhead objects (birds, ballons, branches, confetti, etc).

A normal/below/above option would already be good enough for nearly all cases but why not add a few more than 3 levels, since it's no additional work but is useful/needed in some cases (e.g. birds flying over other overhead stuff). E.g. five levels called "Bottom/Below normal/Normal/Above normal/Top".  Or it could be a numeric setting (e.g. -100 to 100).

But I still like the idea of adding a slice draw order Z value and would hate to create confusion with that (a numeric setting would).

Aside, I have the idea of adding multiple walkabout layers where two NPCs/heroes will only collide if they are on the same layer or otherwise pass through each other.

Each layer would have its own 'layer' slice, which may have a different position in the stack of tilemap layers, and its own foot-offset.  And possibly each walkabout layer could have its own wallmap.  Multiple walkabout layers will be very useful for creating bridges and multi-elevation terrain like rooftops.  Bridges would require either multilayer wallmaps, or some other hack (preferrable builtin rather than scripted), while elevation is a simpler problem.  However, multi-layer wallmaps are a lot of extra complexity to add, more complexity to understand for users, and might be a pain to edit.  (It won't be nearly as bad/complex as multilayer tilemaps though, which have tilesets to consider.)  I would say that multiple wallmaps are the most correct thing to do if we have multiple walkabout layers, but I've come to the conclusion that simple tools are often better than powerful ones.  Maybe some kind of zone-based kludge for enabling certain walls for certain layers? Honestly that seems harder to understand and edit and much more limited than multiple layers.


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