Is there a way to make a character invisible?

[elypter]

Is there a way to make a character invisible by script? Or if it is not possible a palette that i could modify.

[Cuban-Pete]

To me it's a bit unclear.

Do you mean that in-game, when someone talks to you, like a gang boss, you want to hide certain letters/characters?

Why would you want this?

You could usegta2stytool and edit a letter/character to black.

Or do you mean, hide a whole font?

[Sektor]

He means the ped type of character. You can't do it by script (maybe if Vike adds it) apart from picking up a powerup. You could make every ped invisible by making all ped sprites transparent but there are a lot of sprites to edit.

[elypter]

Yes i meant peds. Isn't it possible to make only one specific remap invisible by modifying a palette? But the question is which palette. Or am i completly wrong?

[Cuban-Pete]

He means the ped type of character.

Yes i meant peds.

Haha, I must have spend too much time making TXT2GTA2....

[Razor]

Yes i meant peds. Isn't it possible to make only one specific remap invisible by modifying a palette? But the question is which palette. Or am i completly wrong?

Yes it is but "show player name" option ruins everythin'

[elypter]

you could still change your name to " " and it will be invisible although that is not best way. hopefully vike could one day force gta to show or to hide playernames.
But there is another problem:
i found the right palettes but when i replace them with complete black ones the ped doesnt get invisible but only completely black.

My idea: replace the swat sprites with black. Afaik they are only used for swat members. But with the sty tool a the current development stage this would be an enormous amount of work and i don't know if it is even possible to use it with players.

[Vike the Hube]

I'm sure there's a palette entry for "invisible". How else could it do the transparency of the areas around the character? Unfortunately I don't know a lot about sty editing so I can't help more than that I might be able to make a script command to make a character invisible, but I definitely think using the palette/sty would be easier and faster. I mean worst comes to worst we could make an extension to the sty tool to allow multi-pallette modification.

And yes, I plan to add a lobby checkbox to set "show player names" for all players. The way things are going, I'm thinking 11.41 will be the lobby checkbox version. Lots of people are getting into it so seems right.

[elypter]

afaik it works like this:
the first color in the palette is the transparency color. no matter what color it actually is it will be transparent in the game. When using multiple sprites that share one palette you can change the transparent area by painting the "color 0" on that sprite. But when you have multiple palettes that share one image you cannot change the image because this affects all remaps. Unfortunately it doesn't help to give the other colors the same color value as "color 0" has.
If somehow possible i also would prefer having the sty method working because this enables you to make a character/player invisible for other players but not for AI.
btw: nice to hear that checkboxes are next on agenda

[Cuban-Pete]

and when you drive over the ped accidentally you hear ghosts...

And yes, I plan to add a lobby checkbox to set "show player names" for all players. The way things are going, I'm thinking 11.41 will be the lobby checkbox version. Lots of people are getting into it so seems right.

Cool! Will that also include removing the arrow? Would be a bit hard to find each other without it, I guess... Perhaps you could let the arrow blink every 3 seconds or something...

[Vike the Hube]

Unfortunately it doesn't help to give the other colors the same color value as "color 0" has.

Yeah I was worried it would work like that. I also didn't realise that remaps were just palette flips but it makes a lot of sense. Let me think about it.

Cool! Will that also include removing the arrow? Would be a bit hard to find each other without it, I guess... Perhaps you could let the arrow blink every 3 seconds or something...

Hahaha I don't know about blinking but I hope to add a checkbox for no arrows too

[elypter]

I thought about making blinking arrows on my new map too until i noticed that it isn't scriptable.
i wanted to use invisible players as "turrets". eg: an "electrified" region could be simulated by a bot that starts and stops firing electrogun.
if possible, i also planned to use it with the map ghost town which should be a rocket map with invisible players. depending on how hard it will be to find each other i would add "electrified" regions or (visible) bots chasing the players.

here a little image of a very early development stage:

[Sektor]

Blinking arrows is possible. The LEVEL_END_POINT_ARROW_AT blinks but if that's too fast then you could POINT_ARROW_AT, delay for a bit, REMOVE_ARROW, delay a bit and then loop.