I can't seem to find the old threads. I've tried all kinds of searches with different year ranges, but there's nothing. Here are my old bookmarks, but I can't figure out how to convert it (if you even can) to the new forum syntax. I think the first one was in User Requests and the second in Feature Requests, although I could be wrongs since these are ancient:

2D Zbuffer masking...: http://www.conitecserver.com/ubbthreads/...;fpart=1#365449

Zbuffer masking...2D gaming...: http://216.46.205.166/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=398441&Main=377071

If I were to use a normal level along with panels, I wouldn't have to worry about NPCs since in most adventure games (what I'm interested in), the NPCs don't move around. The only time I'd have to switch panels on and off for the walk behind objects is when the player is at a certain part of the screen. If the player is above a certain predetermined section, I'd switch whatever panel(s) needed switching and then I'd switch back when the player crossed that threshold again.

I would think a major problem using view entities would be dealing with stencil shadows. I'm assuming you've gotten dynamic lights to look correct on an entity? For example, in the screen below, there's a dynamic light highlighting my character and because of my cast flag settings, I get that nice self shadowing across the face. This is an all 3D level and not 2.5. Can you get an effect like that with your view entity experiments?



The Wintermute Engine already has both of the features I've requested in this thread (the main one and the shadows one I linked to), but its 3D instruction set is young and nowhere near as mature as 3DGS. Plus, I don't want to use Blender or Cinema4D (the only two packages with a 3DS export that contains the info WME needs for collision, cameras, lights, etc).