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Marscaleb wrote: That's impressive. The Hub example particularly has got me re-thinking about what I would want to do. But on top of that, portals, mirrors, the RTS menu... This is far beyond what I thought it might be able to do.

Marscaleb wrote: Would there be any problems with stacking jump commands? And would I be correct to assume I could just slip them in wherever I want in a state's script?

With this, I could create the randomized flickering effect I want, but the DDF file will be a bit longer. I'll just be downgrading my light patterns idea to a suggestion.

You can stack as many as you want, I have never ran into performance issues stacking thousands of states to JUMP executed in intervals (or even all at once), calling a mersenne randomizer, and tagging dynamic lights -- all of that at the same time, plus a ton more (Hypertension).


It is a good suggestion, but the same thing with little effort can be done in DDF, even more-so now that the dynamic lighting code has been getting an overhaul. In the future, you will be able to call as many dynamic light types (not limited to one overall shape) as desired. ^_^

Coraline wrote: It is a good suggestion, but the same thing with little effort can be done in DDF, even more-so now that the dynamic lighting code has been getting an overhaul.

Yeah, but unless my beginner's knowledge of DDF is wrong, I have to create each flicker effect individually for each light. To add a flicker on (for example) twenty objects, I have to write twenty flicker routines. But if there was a built in flicker effect, I could just call one command on twenty objects. Much more efficient.

While you are revising the dynamic lights, there are two features I am curious about. One, will they support occlusion? I know its a tricky thing to pull off, but it would be well-worth the effort. Two, will it support casting stencil patterns? I'm not sure what the actual term is, but like, you supply a texture and it uses that pattern to cast shadows. That would be neat.

Oh yeah, and one more suggestion. I would like to be able to have dynamic lights on things that are NOT set to "bright." I know it may sound odd, since any object that is emitting light should be bright, but there are a few situations where it makes sense. For example, when a Baron throws a fireball. His hand is glowing, and it would be reasonable to see the dynamic light from the fireball start to fade-in during that animation. Then as soon as the fireball is spawned, the light shuts off. It would appear as one smooth transition; a light fading in as the animation starts, and then gets thrown at the target.

The stencil technique you're talking about is actually possible with 3DGE right now. You can use a PNG image defined in IMAGESDDF (DDFIMAGE) and have it set to a specific type of light. For example:
[spr:SOMECOOLLIGHT.PNG]
IMAGE_DATA=BUILTIN:QUADRATIC;

Now, what this does is replace whatever image you define with that light setup. It can definitely work for shadows, but I tried using it with quadratic lights and ended up with a transparent ugly square. Maybe there's still more to it than I'm able to figure out.

For the fireball example, you can use the IDLE states of the fireball to call an action to fade out the fireball. Use tics to determine how long that actually takes.

STATES(IDLE)=BAL7:1:NORMAL:DLIGHT_FADE(0),
BAL7:8:NORMAL:NOTHING;

Since the DLIGHT.INTENSITY would be set to 100 or so, that idle state immediately calls that action when it's spawned to loop. In the Death states, you can call another DLIGHT_SET back to 100 and have it fade again.

marscaleb:

FYI the ladder example is broken...

Try the jump key and see if it works- worked in 3dge2.1 for me.