Castle Paradox

Greenwado · Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2010 7:39 am Post subject: Flashlight

How could I make a Flashlight for my walkabout player character using plot scripting? In your answer could you write an example script or a couple of lines to help me figure this out. I want to make a action Thriller game sort of like Alan Wake.
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Happy RPG Makin

Spoon Weaver · Joined: 18 Nov 2008 Posts: 421 Location: @home

First, making a game similar to Alan Wake will require extensive scripting knowledge. You might want to start small.
Second, I've made a game with a flashlight in the past.
Here's the link:
http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=938
Third, if you like the flashlight script in House Escape (the above game) I'd be willing to share a little of the code. If you're looking for something different I may still be willing to put you on the right track.

J_Taylor · Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 3:41 am Post subject:

How about a script for just illuminating certain areas; e.g. You're in a dark cave (black) and the only light comes from flickering torches which you can grab and move?
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Elemental: .75%
Heart of Darkness: 0% (crash)
The Mansion: .05%
Shattered Alliance: .05%

See a pattern forming? I do, dammit.

J_Taylor · Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 3:48 am Post subject:

How about a script for just illuminating certain areas; e.g. You're in a dark cave (black) and the only light comes from flickering torches which you can grab and move?
_________________
Elemental: .75%
Heart of Darkness: 0% (crash)
The Mansion: .05%
Shattered Alliance: .05%

See a pattern forming? I do, dammit.

Pepsi Ranger · Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 6:50 am Post subject:

TMC · Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 5:10 pm Post subject:

There have been quite a few games which have implemented a flashlight by painting black tiles over the map, even before map layers were added (Project `C'). But now you can use slices instead to black out the screen except for a circle of light around the hero, which is both much easier and looks better because it's not jerky as you move around. House Escape is the only game I know of to have used slices to do that so far, so I'll give a script (also put up at 'Scripts:Flashlight circle of light').

On the other hand, you can't do that "local lighting" effect shown in that article. You could limit the circles to walls, but that's much more work.

So if you want to use slices:
* paint a 320x200 overlay
* split it into 80x80 pieces (the size of large enemy graphics)
* save them each as 16 colour BMPs
* import them as large enemy graphics (if any are duplicates, you need just one copy of each)
* adapt this script:

(EDIT: I forgot about slice collections! If you're using a 'nightly build', you can see the wiki article instead of using this script)