Game Development Community

Hit Boxes visable when AI monster dies

by Katrina Rose · in Torque Game Engine · 02/16/2005 (10:17 am) · 3 replies

Hey all,

We have a situation where the hit boxes we've applied to our AI monster become visible when the monster fades out after its death animation has played. While the monster is 'alive' the hit boxes display correctly...that is to say the are transparent.

Has anyone encountered this issue? If so, how did you get around it?

The monster mesh and hit boxes were built in 3dMax6. The transparency on the hit boxes were created by assigning a transparent .png to the hit boxes.

Is it possible to have the monster simply disappear after the death animation plays instead of doing a slow fade?

cheers,
k

#1
02/16/2005 (12:08 pm)
The fade effect is done by tickling the alpha of the sceneobject, which in your case seems to be overriding the transparent material, also done with an alpha. Yes, you can easily remove the fade effect, but why are you using a transparent material to begin with? Why not use no material, or a null, depending on how you added hitbox code.
#2
02/18/2005 (12:50 pm)
Thanks for the suggestions Erik! :)

Some followup stuff:

How can I tickle the alpha of the sceneobject?
How can I remove the fade effect?

I'm a graphics grunt trying to pitch in and help out my swamped programmers so anything specific you can dump on me would be MUCHO appreciated.

I need to use a transparent material on my hitboxes because (as far as my experiments have allowed me to determine) Max6 will not export a .dts object without some form of bitmap assigned to the diffuse color channel in the material editor.

cheers,
k
#3
02/18/2005 (2:12 pm)
Whew...finally figured this silly thing out.

I searched through the player.cs file where the post-death fade code is and played around with the values until the fade became instanteous.

Monster receives a fatal blow. Monster cycles through its death animation. Poof! Monster disappears with nary a HitBox to be seen.

cheers,
k