Sigh, yup. I kinda feared this would be the response.

No worries, I'll work something out.

Really, what I wanted was to have some entities obey one obstruction map, and other entities to live by a totally different map.

What I'm trying to do is have two "maps" on the go at once, and let the player move around in the "alternate" map while entities go about their business in the "original" map. Like the Zelda Dark World, except you can see both worlds at once.

At the moment I'm pausing entities and actually doing something similar to your suggestion, only with zones rather than map layers. In retrospect, map layers make a HELL of a lot more sense - because of overlapping tiles, I need to copy two zones to the obstruction layer - one of unique obstruction tiles, and one of tiles which exist in both obstruction maps, which is terribly confusing to look at in maped and causes very troublesome bugs if a tile is misattributed.

I don't know that maped needs to be changed, though. Just a way to tell entities in VC what map layer they should use for obstructions might be sufficient.

This is how i would handle this issue ---


So what you want is the map to contain (for example)
1 obstruction zone that only the player is constrained to ..
2 a second obstruction zone for enemies that are type A
3 a third obs zone for enemies that are type B

(obviously adding more obstruction zones for type C D E etc enemies is just as easy following this method ...

First off you need to have a VSP that contains a set of tiles that are simply symbolic and will always use the same TileIDs.
In our example we'll use tiles 1 to 16 ---- in case you choose to add a few more Obs

#define OBS_Player 1
#define OBS_TypeA 2
#define OBS_TypeB 3

#define OBS_Layer 5

// these next 2 stand for Maximum Map Width and Height
#define MMW 100
#define MMH 100

int ObstructionsPlayer[MMW]MMH];
int ObstructionsA[MMW][MMH];
int ObstructionsB[MMW][MMH];

Now design your map using maped 3 as you usually would
but you must remember that Layer 5 is only going to contain symbolic tiles ...... save your map and have them run the script initialize_map ...

Meanwhile in initialize_map

void initialize_map()
{
int x,y;
int temp_tile;
for(x=0;x<map.width;x++)
{
for(y=0;y<map.height;y++)
{
ObstructionsPlayer[x][y]=0;
ObstructionsA[x][y]=0;
ObstructionsB[x][y]=0;
/// Add other Obstruction Arrays as needed.
}
}
for(x=0;x<map.width;x++)
{
for(y=0;y<map.height;y++)
{
temp_tile=GetTile(x,y,OBS_Layer);
if(temp_tile==OBS_Player)
ObstructionsPlayer[x][y]=1;
temp_tile=GetTile(x,y,OBS_Layer);
if(temp_tile==OBS_TypeA)
ObstructionsA[x][y]=1;
if(temp_tile==OBS_TypeB)
ObstructionsB[x][y]=1;
}
}
}


ill post more on this later tonight