Rotating entities

coil

<div class="IPBDescription">What's possible?</div>Is it possible to make a mobile spotlight?  I was looking at the tutorial for the rotating "alarm" light on valve-erc, and wondered if one could create, say, a light swinging like a pendulum from its fixture?  A half broken flourescent light or a bare bulb dangling from a cord.

point #1: is it possible to make a brush rotate only a given angle - like, say, a door opening only 90 degrees - but constantly back and forth?

point #2: is it possible to make a light source do the same thing?  I have a feeling this may not be doable.. however, it might be possible to fudge the effect with a stationary light source and a moving brush, similar to the rotating alarm light from the tutorial.

Anyway, just wanted to get your brains working on it.. might be a nice touch to add to your map.  (:

Black_Wolf

naaah, you cant do a swinging light source. too much RAD information would have to be precalculated, where the shadowns/lighting is in even single position the light can be in. this would only be possible with a dynamic lighting feature.

realityisdead

<u>Fully</u> dynamic lighting and shadows is what I want more than anything else right now in a game engine. By far much cooler than 70000 polys on the screen at once... Though I'd do anything for that too. <!--emo&;)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=';)'><!--endemo-->

But yeah... not possible in HL. Yet.

(Note: I must add that it <i>is</i> possible to simulate moving light/shadows with clever use of multimanagers and such. Check out Merk's fan shadows, for an example. The only big problem with doing this (other than the excessive amounts of work involved)... is the fact that you are more or less likely to run into "too many entities in visible packet" or "Too many lights on one face" errors.)



<!--EDIT|ken20banks|April 24 2002,17:05-->

DanDaMan

but you can fudge it a bit by using a func illusionary volumetric light to represent your light and just a regular point light somewhere near the source.  It would only look good if the swing was very small though.  Like 15 degrees.

Yamazaki

One light cone made of a func_pendulum set to additive.

One non-solid func_train on the ground with a texture of a bright circle on black, set to additive also, moving in sync with the pendulum (Will need about one or two dozen pathcorners to sync it right).

The light circle makes it look like there's actual light being cast, but the illusion is broken if someone stands under the light. Their model will not be illuminated, they'll be just as dark as before.

This effect would probably look best if you couldn't actually reach the light circle, like have it on the other side of a window.