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Making the player character invisible?

by Ed Averill · in Torque Game Engine · 07/22/2008 (10:58 am) · 10 replies

Hi, I'm trying to decide if I can get TGE to do this before I dive in to hacking around with it (I'm mostly using TGB right now)...

What I want to do is make an exploration game (yeah I know, a Myst-alike sort of) but I don't want a visible player character, just a bounding box so I can check for collisions against triggers and various other objects. Is this possible, and if so is how to do it documented somewhere? An RTFM with a pointer to the appropriate section would be super!

All info greatly appreciated! :-)
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Torque Owner Ed Averill

About the author

Programmer, writer, game developer. Born in Florida, lived all over the U.S. Now in Austin, TX!

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    Associate Konrad Kiss
    Bitgap Games
    #1
    07/22/2008 (11:57 am)
    You could try startFade (scroll to the bottom) and fade out to 0 in 0 msecs. This is available for every ShapeBase object.

    Torque Owner Ed Averill
    #2
    07/22/2008 (11:59 am)
    Cool, thanks for the info! Can't wait to get home from work and try it! :-)

    Torque 3D Owner mb
    #3
    07/22/2008 (1:07 pm)
    In TGE you can use cloak to make the player invisible. tdn.garagegames.com/wiki/Torque_Console_Objects_9#Cloaking

    edit: Also setHidden will hide an object but it will not have collisions.

    Associate Konrad Kiss
    Bitgap Games
    #4
    07/22/2008 (3:03 pm)
    Yeah, good catch, I wasn't sure if cloaking would still let him use the collision box of the player.

    Torque 3D Owner Syllus
    #5
    07/22/2008 (7:22 pm)
    If I remember right cloaking does have collision... but setHidden does not.

    Torque 3D Owner Daniel Buckmaster
    #6
    07/23/2008 (12:10 am)
    Or, if you're making a first person game... set renderFirstPerson to false in your player datablock.

    Torque Owner Taylor Petrick
    #7
    07/23/2008 (12:40 am)
    I used a setSkinName to make the player invisible. You could set the skin to something transparent. In TGEA, I took it a little further and used a shader to get a Halo-ish effect:
    img165.imageshack.us/img165/5828/screenshot01900004ew7.jpg

    Associate Konrad Kiss
    Bitgap Games
    #8
    07/23/2008 (1:50 am)
    Taylor, that looks really sweet.

    Torque Owner Taylor Petrick
    #9
    07/23/2008 (2:10 am)
    Thanks.

    Torque Owner Ed Averill
    #10
    07/23/2008 (9:37 am)
    Dang, you people are great! Thanks to all for posting all this goodness.

    There's so much to learn, and so little coffee.... ;-p