I've been pondering a problem that I ran into while building Keg Party. AS you may know, Keg D2's lights in the trench travel up through the tunnel. This is done with a utility in the builder.
D3 give no such help. A couple of folks tried a few things but nothing seemed to work. I understand that there is no way to turn lights on and off with scripting. So I had another thought.
Can Textures be changed on a given face via scripting? More directly, I was thinking that by changing from a no-light texture to a light bearing texture in order such as to mimic the D2 pattern.
start dark, change to lit then change to dark again. Like the LED reader boards.
Yes, it can. The monitors in the data bank of D3 level 1 would change once the player hit the button to various different textures.
Reactor Gamma also did it in a couple places to swap out the glowing yellow beam of light with the invisible train barrier texture when the player disabled a generator.
From the "Reactor Gamma Script Companion":
Script 005: West Gen Destroyed
Script 008: East Gen Destroyed
Script 005 executes when Westpumpcount = 2 and, likewise, Script 008 executes when Eastpumpcount = 2. In both cases, Pumpsdestroyed gets incremented (actually, this is a misnomer - Gensdestroyed would be a more descriptive name). The GuideBot talks again and the goal of shutting down either the Western or Eastern generator gets completed. So, what does all of this stuff about Set texture on room mean? This is a very subtle effect. When you fly into any one of the generator rooms, you may notice a pulsing yellow stream glassed off in the middle of the room. These commands essentially "turn off" this stream by changing their textures to InvisibleTrainBarrier.
Another totally weird method could be described as follows. In level 1 near the data bank, there are several rotating lights that spin a red beam around when the player uses a certain database. Until that time, they aren't animating and are inert. Now, the last I knew, no one had figured out how Outrage managed to lock up the animation and lighting because the script for level 1 isn't public. However, Novak prison might do a similar thing after the gas floods the lower corridors (blinking emergency lights) and that might be worth looking into.
I think Nick (Hawkeye3) was on to something when he was doing Wolf's Genova Caverns level in Descent 3 because he did an Unreal-style "lights turning off" effect there using this method. But that level and related scripting was lost to hard drive failure.
I have a version of this I was working on for someone way back before KegD3 was released. It uses an invisible powerup object to cast dynamic light from each flasher in turn so that they act like true lights. I thought it worked pretty well - did you ever see it?
If you combined the dynamic lights with the changing textures idea it would look much better. BTW, I used that technique on the missile pylons in D'OHme to simulate having indicator lights that turn on when they are firing. It worked great there - you can tell which pylons are on from all the way across the room.
I'll be happy to send you my flashing version of Keg if you want it.
Update: Forgot to mention that it's all done in dallas so nothing too difficult is involved.
Yes, Please send it. I'd love to take a look at it. I was thinkin of reworking Keg.
Speeding doors up, maybe some res'd up versions of the old D2 textures. I know I need to do something about the lights. Kinda tough though. I'll have to modify the trench itself to accomodate the square faces needed.
