<fading away...>
Interesting thing happened to me on the way to the sunest...
First, the screenies ;-)
Two very interesting points here:
1) I created the day2night anim at 240 frames (8 seconds) because I didn't want a weird insta-sunset. The sunset lasted 2 minutes (1 game hour). It was very subtle and definitely on the right track for that mood shift that comes at twilight. So next, I changed the module's time rate to 1 min/hour. Sunset lasted 1 minute. I.e. Day2night (and presumably night2day) anims are scaled to the timerate of the mod. Sweet.
2) The windowlight is an alpha mapped texture on an alpha animated model. The alpha channels are *additive*. I.e., I animated the alpha on the *model* to fade from 1.0 (opaque) to .5 (half transparent) during the sunset. The alpha *texture map* fades from strong at the end to weak at the base. Now the engine (at least on my two gfx cards) considers any alpha lower than .4 to be utterly transparent. It's a threshold thing. fading... fading... fading... where'd it go!?. As the model fades, the combination of alpha texture and alpha model crosses the threshold in a *texture mapped* fashion. Look at the last two screenies... the windowlight vanished from the tip back toward the base as if it was being erased. Very interesting effect of *partial invisibility*. (edit: Not what I want for the windowlight, but intriguing...)
Onward:
There are two rather conflicting methods of implementing windowlights - the day2night anims or the animloops. (another would be windowlight placeables, but that is a different discussion :-P )
Day2night anims:
Pros: anim scales to game time, effect is very subtle and it is a fire & forget solution.
Cons: No builder control over timing of anims except changing the mods timescale. Cannot disable.
Animloops:
Pros: Builder can enable/disable day, night or none state with a third option available.
Cons: No gradual animation. It is either day (or night) or it is not. Changes must be scripted.
The ideal solution would be to have two variants of every windowed tile - one with day2night and one with animloops.
Something to think about. I am only working on the day2night anims for this release of Q, but if there is enough interest, maybe variants can be made in the future.
<...but not burning out>
Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 11 juillet 2012 - 03:43 .
