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 Zones, Skyzone, Lightning
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Think that your current skyzone is flat and lifeless?
What about adding lightnings and thunders?
This is how to do it the simple way.
To be able to follow and understand this tutorial it is important that
you understand zones, movers and triggers.
First you need a basic level with a functional skyzone.
In this level I have created a "castle" entrance with a high up in the mountains
look and a river with some haze.
The skyzone have two layers of clouds and a few lights with different light
colors to give a more 'colorful' look.
Also four sheets with distant mountain look to both give the high up in the mountain
feel and also to prevent players from seeing the walls.
How you really do this is not important but in this example it looks good but
is still very basic.
To actually create the lightning we need a mover as it should not be visible
unless it is 'lightning'.
This screenshot show all that is needed.
What you see is a light, mover, dispatcher, stochastic trigger and special event.
Lets mix all this togheter.
First the mover.
The mover is really a volumetric sheet (or two sheets crossing each
other) with a texture that do not look like a real
lightning but have to do for this example.
(All sides of the mover is unlit to prevent lighting problems).
The mover is in its first keyframe (keyframe 0) outside the actual skyzone but
inside in its second keyframe (keyframe 1).
The second position is right under the light you see from the screenshot.
Reason for this is that when the lighting starts we want the sky to light
up a bit.
That is why the light is a triggered light.
The dispatcher is used to first activate the mover, which have zero seconds
move time, and then trigger the light.
The mover have 'stay open timed' so it will disappear after the specific time
which is the same delay the dispatcher have before it triggers the light again
to turn it off.
To activate the dispatcher at random intervals we need a stochastic trigger
set with a few values to create random outcomes.
This is not all.
With lightnings we need sound.
This is what the special event do.
It will play a thunder sound effect for all players when it is triggered.
The special event is triggered by the dispatcher right after the lightning to give
the slight delay to make it sound more realistic as light travel faster than sound.
This is how it works:
The stochastic trigger will trigger the dispatcher at random times.
The dispatcher will trigger the lightning mover and the overhead sky light.
The mover will return by itself while the dispatcher triggers the light again
to turn it off and also triggers the special event which plays a thunder sound
effect for all players.
In the downloadable version of this map I have made the lightning happen far
too often.
It is just for show and not for realism.
And the design is pretty flawed and need some adjustments but could work
out nice.
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