RPG Playground already gives us a lot of options regardings actors. But if you’re really making a game you’ll pretty fast come to its limits.
No Enabling/Disabling of Actors at Design Time
Imagine a village. The people of the village are usually to find at predefined locations. Now imagine a cut-scene. Some of that people would like to gather as a group for talking. In order to realize this, you currently have only two options:
1. You let the people walk one by one to the new location, which will delay the game and look pretty awkward.
2. You insert new actors at the location where you want them to gather, name them for example “Man2”, “Woman2” and so on and disable them until the cut-scene starts.
However, if we disable actors, the player might see them for a short period of time, until the screenplay command has been executed. To prevent this, such actors shouldn’t be visible in the first place. For that, we will need a way to disable them already at design time per property.
No Teleportation of Actors
In some situations, even way two can be rather inconvenient. Sometimes, it would be better to teleport the actors instead of copying them. Unfortunately, up to now the teleport command only applies to the hero.
No Access to Actors of Other Levels
For some situations it is necessary to disable characters or bring them in position before the hero re-enters a level. If we doing so while the level already has been loaded again, the player might see what the screenplay is doing. If we would have access to the actors of another level, screenplay could be executed before the player enters a level.
Screen Disabling For Initialization
Another approch to prevent the player from seeing the initialization of a level could be a way to disable the screen. With this, we could disable the screen first before the level has been loaded, than initialize it per screenplay and afterwards show the screen.