Background Artists, Sprites and Game Physics

[BlueMonkey5]

Okay, here's a question pertaining to BG artists and what they need to do to assist programmers in allowing character sprites to move about the board properly. It has occurred to me that programmers need to make the character sprites behave correctly while walking on the ground and not have them walk through the ground or walk through walls, for example.

So, I am wondering if it is the Background Artists responsibility to give the programmer any extra information such as any kind of "markers" or x,y co-ordinates which will indicate where the ground is, where the ground ends and a wall begins or any of the sort, so a character doesn't end up walking through walls or floating in the sky. Does the programmer need any assistance from the artists while developing the game physics to ensure that this does not happen?

This question is for a 2 dimensional side-scroller, but would it be the same for a 3d game?

[BlueMonkey5]

Nevermind... I was just reading about 'collision detecting'... but it was for SDL. Complicated stuff.

[Moosader]

You know, I learned about this stuff from playing with RPG Maker when I was a kid. This is something you have to learn from experience.
Why? Because there are so many different ways to handle this that it has to be something fairly intuitive to you.

For platformers, they're generally tile-based. This means that each tile is made up of squares, such as:



The artist has to understand that the tiles must... tile and fit together properly.
Then you have to either code a map editor, or find one, and if you find one, you have to figure out how to implement that map editor's save format into your game.
Collision can be marked in the map editor, usually the artist doesn't do anything like that, unless it's unclear that one doesn't walk through a wall.

Collision itself can be anything from bounding boxes to vectors to pixel-perfect.

[BlueMonkey5]

OK, thank you