Wow, thanks for taking the time to put that together! For some reason I'm struggling to get this to work when I edit the tree's layer mask though... I want the tree base to be solid so that the player cannot walk through the trunk, but is still able to walk behind it. So I've made the tree a solid object and erased everything from the layer mask except for the base. The collision detection works, but the player doesn't disappear when he walks behind it and the circle doesn't show up.
Well, that's not really surprising since the events in my example use an overlap condition in order to work. And when you edit the collision mark, it doesn't overlap anymore properly.
If I remove the 'solid' attribute from the tree then the player disappears behind the parts of the tree with the layer mask, appears correctly in front on the tree, but still shows up on a higher layer when he should be behind it whenever he's not in contact with part of the layer mask. And, of course, he can walk straight through the trunk...
I guess I'm doing something very wrong here? Should layer masks for trees not be deleted at all to achieve this affect? And if so, how can I make the trunk a solid object? Using an invisible block at the base could help I imagine, but would lose the exact pixel collision.
Hope that's not too confusing :S
A little confusing right there, hehe. I'd say you should put another sprite in a container with the tree. That object would be invisible and be solid. You shape it accordingly and set it to the tree's position with an event. That should take care of that.
But another problem I would see with this method is Z odering. Like smaller stuff, that would be behind the tree (like a flower for example), but maybe in front of the player at his feet and visible too, when the player is covered by the tree. I guess that may have sounded a little confusing now as well. Anyway, at this point I'm not quite sure how I would achieve this myself, while still using the basic method I showed. Maybe I'll give it another try these days.