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First of all, I would like to say due to the sheer greatness of this product and the masses of info and tutorials that allow people to learn how to use DarkBasic. Not only have I learned most of the basics, but I have been convinced into buying it! For everybody who has helped anybody at a time on DarkBasic I thankyou for your consideration!!

I am looking to first just get an animated person to walk around a 3d matrix. I have heard that making an object a plain and then texturing it is faster than doing sprites on this engine which is fine, I just have a few questions....

* Is there anyway to get the picture that shows up on the plane object to look animated? i.e. to make the picture in the square in the middle of the screen look like it is walking?*

* Is there anyway to get the picture in the now flat object to change when the camera rotates to make it look like you are getting a different veiw of your character? i.e. if you press the right keypad button to move the camera around the matrix.. but the object still in tact... but also the picture changing at a certain camera point to look as if you are seeing the character at 3/4's angle.. side angle... etc*

I am using DarkBasic Classic and I already know it is possible to make parts of the object transparent hence me coming up with the idea to use it as a sprite type instead of just loading a bmp onto the screen. If the answers are simple forgive me I just had this experience for 3 weeks on my spare time. Example codes are not needed but would be highly apreciated

** on a side note I would later like to be able to make a character creator to make the character that walks around look different... like have differen variables like different eyeshapes and hair. is it possible to have layers in the texture?**

Why not use a 3d model for the person?
You could use a series of animated 2d images, but you'd have to draw the character from every angle/rotation you plan on seeing it at. For using the 3d model, there are examples that show how to do that.

I'd hold off on the character creator for awhile yet.

Oh yes! I forgot to put that explanation in my post. Well when it comes to drawing... I am 3000 times better at that than I am at animating a 3-d model ... in my opinion 3d models look bad unless the person who creates them really and truly knows what they are doing with it. I also want my worlds to have a sorta cartoony thing going on in it anyways. And I also really enjoy drawing.
thankyou!

For what you are trying to acheive in DBC I would suggest:

3D characters, low-poly, low colour - kind of "lego" like if that makes sense.

2 get a better cartoon effect, duplicate the model, and scale it by ~1.1 (turn it inside out and slightly bigger). This will give you a black outline.

DB doesn't really lend itself to complex animated sprites, and you wouldn't get the desired effect by rotating the sprite, you would lose your perspective if you were also using a rotated animation.

Thankyou for your input! I'm so happy people have responded in a short amount of time here! Anyhow, the other reason I didn't want to use 3d models is b/c it looks somewhat blocky unless you have the talent of the people at squaresoft. I do not have anywhere near that skill to create 3d models, but I believe my drawing will be sufficient. In my experience with 3d models such as laura croft and spyro even.. the faces always come out looking rather... well is not what I wish.. I know the rotation for what I hope and wish to accomplish will look a bit questionable but that is fine for I do not wish for the 3d appearance. An example of the way this rotation process will look can be found on Ragnarok Online is something most people are familiar with.. another example of something I tried before but didn't like was Explorations the rpg engine. the way they have their sprites. Since using the plain object would be faster i just wanted to know if it was possible to create something like that.

I think he wants to do a style like Diablo. 2D but kinda looks 3D.

Sorry for this double post, but I figured out how I could get that 8 different veiw thing. But the new question is... can the camera's position on the object trigger the hide/unhide code? If it can I can just have that object be shown flatly facing the screen for a certain camera veiw angle range. If somebody could tell me that it is possible to make the camera's angle trigger a hide/unhide event it would be highly appreciated!
*also could somebody tell me the difficulty that doing this would be... I hope I am not going over anybodies head *