Seeing the player through geometry

[marscaleb]

I'm trying to wrap my head around the age-old problem of how to see the player through geometry that is blocking your view of the player.

I can think of three methods I've seen in other games, but I have no idea how to execute any of them.

The first is to turn blocking objects transparent. This is easily the cheapest and least-desirable method. While is may work for some games, overall it suffers from the problem of the whole mesh disappearing, which breaks apart geometry and looks poor. It really only works when the player is blocked by geometry of the right size. Either way, I just don't know how to make any mesh turn transparent without building a special material, which means only properly prepared meshes could turn transparent.

The second method I've seen in other games is to have a window through all the geometry, typically a round hole where all blocking geometry disappears. This looks much nicer than the first method because it effects geometry evenly, rather than seeing a whole mesh disappear.

The third method I've seen in other games is to draw an outline of the player over the geometry, or a shadow or other form of the player. The biggest problem I see with this is that it has to cover the player only where the geometry is covering the player, otherwise the outline or shadow is always cast around the player.

Anyway, I wanted to open this up for thoughts from other people. How would you suggest I make the player visible when geometry is blocking your view? What can you think of that we could actually pull off in UDK?

[Graylord]

How about simply setting it to the foreground depth priority group?

[Jetfire]

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Devel...dedActors.html

[marscaleb]

Wow, there's a lot of stuff here that I just didn't know existed.