Hey guys,
I’m just doing some ‘research’ out of curiosity. I was just playing around with Tonypa’s tile engine tutorials the other day, applying them in AS3 when I started looking around at some of the platformers out there.
I have a fair understanding of all the simple platform functioning like the basic ‘if your y-position is beyond the floor, reset your position to the floor’ kind of stuff and straight up ‘you can’t walk on this tile kind of stuff’.
I’ve also noticed there’s a few platformers out there that use a decidedly non tile based way of checking character-platform collisions. Most notably the amazing mr fancy pants game. (http://armorgames.com/play/553/the-fancy-pants-adventure-world-2)
I was wondering if anyone knows how games like this work out their platform collisions. I know that games like for example the recent super mario galaxy let’s Mario run around all kinds of funky shapes by aligning Mario perpendicular against the face of a 3d object he’s standing on by using vector normals.
My best guess is that fancy pants is based on a similar system using vector normals. Still that’s just a guess and I’d love to know more if there’s anyone here with a better understanding it. Fancy pants is such an amazingly smooth polished ride that even if it is based on vector normals it’s only the beginning of a lot of very neat programming. (and so smoothly running in flash too!)
