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Fade to Black w/ scenery change
hercooles130uscg
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A while back in Alpha I posted a test of a blackout method to change scenery. This used the Depth fades put in a square around the player.
With the addition of the fade to black and fade to white, I have revised the method, and have made a demo video showing its use.
The resolution is low, that is on purpose. This is actually a demo test of the second quest in my Campaign; The Obsidian Enclave (see signature)
The quest is a ways off from being published, so I wanted to share this with you guys in case you wanted to do something similar. It was done through the extensive use of appear and disappear prompts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InfiacDig_U&feature=youtu.be
I just wish you could fade back to normal, instead of an instant snap from black to full visibility.
Instructions:
The process is simple in theory, but can be a pain to implement. Essentially what you are doing is using dialogue prompts to to change scenery while the fade to black is in effect.
1 First create the original room.
2 Second create the room you want to change to. The best way to do this is to use invisible walls to block out (define) where the first room is. For example, find the outer most object in the room and using two invisible walls, make an angled corner, with the object meeting both walls at the corner. This does two things. First it allows you to know where in relation to put the new rooms objects, and second, it will allow you to select all of the first rooms contents, drag them out of the way, and then know exactly where to drag them back again. You just put that original object right back in the corner of the two invisible walls. (the walls are not doing anything in the map, they are just acting as grid lines really, since they are red and stand out easily.)
The best thing to do is name each object, with the same exact proword. I used dungeon as my word, so it was dungeon_wall1, dungeon_bed, dungeon_lamp1, etc. This made it so I know easily what object belongs to what room, and makes it easier to find on the component list.
3 After deciding what object (or dialogue prompt) will initiate the fade to black, you have to write some dialogue to make it all happen. To make the transition seamless it is best to stagger when things appear and disappear. Do not make things start to disappear at the same time the fade to black kicks in, or the player will see things begin to pop out of existence before the room is completely black. It is best to have the initial interaction with the item or dialogue initialize the fade, then depending on what fade you use (fast or slow) and how much dialogue the player has to read, make the items begin to disappear two or three prompts in. Make items appear at the same time. Then to make sure players do not leave the fade and see items still popping up (it is not instant, some items might be delayed a half second or so) have one more prompt before hiding the fade or make sure there is enough time (in the form of dialogue) that the average reader will be reading long enough for all the items to appear before moving to the next prompt.
4 Now the tedious part. change all of the ORIGINAL rooms decorations to "disappear when: dialogue prompt reached" and then make all the NEW decorations "Appear when: dialogue prompt reached"
An quick rundown of how mine works.
Player interact with book and begins to read. Dialogue opens
Prompt 1: This is where I also begin to tell why the player blacks out. Initialize slow fade to black
Prompt 2: more dialogue, like you begin dreaming, or are dragged, or you hear sounds in the dark, whatever
prompt 3: old items disappear and new ones appear. More dialogue just to make it interesting and make sure the items have time to appear.
Prompt 4: Disappear the fade
Some key things to remember.
I have heard that if you have the floor to high, and it causes the player to move, it will send the player back to the spawn. My map uses the same floor as the stone tile fit.
Make sure none of the NEW items will appear near the player. Depending on where the player is standing during interacting with the item that causes everything to happen, you risk an item trying to load into the player, this sending them back to the spawn.
What you can do it use invisible walls to sorta guide the player to a particular spot, or block the scenery in a way that the player will not be standing on any old scenery or in the path of new scenery. For my quest, I used an invisible wall to block the player from being able to jump on any furniture that is close enough to the interact object.
Hope this gives you some ideas.
With the addition of the fade to black and fade to white, I have revised the method, and have made a demo video showing its use.
The resolution is low, that is on purpose. This is actually a demo test of the second quest in my Campaign; The Obsidian Enclave (see signature)
The quest is a ways off from being published, so I wanted to share this with you guys in case you wanted to do something similar. It was done through the extensive use of appear and disappear prompts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InfiacDig_U&feature=youtu.be
I just wish you could fade back to normal, instead of an instant snap from black to full visibility.
Instructions:
The process is simple in theory, but can be a pain to implement. Essentially what you are doing is using dialogue prompts to to change scenery while the fade to black is in effect.
1 First create the original room.
2 Second create the room you want to change to. The best way to do this is to use invisible walls to block out (define) where the first room is. For example, find the outer most object in the room and using two invisible walls, make an angled corner, with the object meeting both walls at the corner. This does two things. First it allows you to know where in relation to put the new rooms objects, and second, it will allow you to select all of the first rooms contents, drag them out of the way, and then know exactly where to drag them back again. You just put that original object right back in the corner of the two invisible walls. (the walls are not doing anything in the map, they are just acting as grid lines really, since they are red and stand out easily.)
The best thing to do is name each object, with the same exact proword. I used dungeon as my word, so it was dungeon_wall1, dungeon_bed, dungeon_lamp1, etc. This made it so I know easily what object belongs to what room, and makes it easier to find on the component list.
3 After deciding what object (or dialogue prompt) will initiate the fade to black, you have to write some dialogue to make it all happen. To make the transition seamless it is best to stagger when things appear and disappear. Do not make things start to disappear at the same time the fade to black kicks in, or the player will see things begin to pop out of existence before the room is completely black. It is best to have the initial interaction with the item or dialogue initialize the fade, then depending on what fade you use (fast or slow) and how much dialogue the player has to read, make the items begin to disappear two or three prompts in. Make items appear at the same time. Then to make sure players do not leave the fade and see items still popping up (it is not instant, some items might be delayed a half second or so) have one more prompt before hiding the fade or make sure there is enough time (in the form of dialogue) that the average reader will be reading long enough for all the items to appear before moving to the next prompt.
4 Now the tedious part. change all of the ORIGINAL rooms decorations to "disappear when: dialogue prompt reached" and then make all the NEW decorations "Appear when: dialogue prompt reached"
An quick rundown of how mine works.
Player interact with book and begins to read. Dialogue opens
Prompt 1: This is where I also begin to tell why the player blacks out. Initialize slow fade to black
Prompt 2: more dialogue, like you begin dreaming, or are dragged, or you hear sounds in the dark, whatever
prompt 3: old items disappear and new ones appear. More dialogue just to make it interesting and make sure the items have time to appear.
Prompt 4: Disappear the fade
Some key things to remember.
I have heard that if you have the floor to high, and it causes the player to move, it will send the player back to the spawn. My map uses the same floor as the stone tile fit.
Make sure none of the NEW items will appear near the player. Depending on where the player is standing during interacting with the item that causes everything to happen, you risk an item trying to load into the player, this sending them back to the spawn.
What you can do it use invisible walls to sorta guide the player to a particular spot, or block the scenery in a way that the player will not be standing on any old scenery or in the path of new scenery. For my quest, I used an invisible wall to block the player from being able to jump on any furniture that is close enough to the interact object.
Hope this gives you some ideas.
Post edited by hercooles130uscg on
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Comments
Just decorate two complete "rooms" you want to transition too. Everything you see in the dungeon is placed in the same space as the room before it. walls, floor, ceiling, decorations, etc.
In the first room, have every set to visible always, disappear when: X dialogue prompt.
In the second room have it set to appear when:x prompt disappear never.
Create a fade to black object, depending on if you use slow or fast depends on how long you expect the reader to be at the prompt.
the Fade to black effect should be on the prompt prior to anything disappearing, otherwise in the time it takes for the black to full occur the player will see things starting to disappear.
On the prompt before you want the fade to black to disappear, have all the new room items appear.
It takes more effort just clicking each item and setting its properties, as well as decorating rooms from scratch. The first room was actually a modified room that was already there, so it was easy, the dungeon had to be built from scratch. For this I put in invisible walls at a outer point of the original rooms objects, as a guide layout. Since the invisible walls show up as red lines, it is useful for making a boundary grid that you can realign stuff up to easier later. So after making the walls, I grabbed everything from the original room and dragged it as one piece somewhere else. I then built the dungeon. when I was satisfied, I dragged the entire contents from the first room back where they should go, again I grabbed all of the objects as one and lined up where they should go based on the guide lines I created (invisible walls). Set all the properties as they should be and walla. About 2 hours worth of work well spent.
That'll do pig. That'll do.
Ya I named each piece of the second room with a prefix so that I can find it in the component tab easily, but since you have to open up each object and change it's appear/disappear state anyways, it did not add to much more time.
Grouping: select a bunch of objects, click 'group,' and it's then rolled up into one group (sort of like how encounters work). So you can move, rotate, translate the group as one.
Editor visibility: click and the stuff disappears from 2d window, so you can select and manipulate stuff without accidentally moving another level or set of objects.
These are both common to most decent modeling apps.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
NW-DMIME87F5
Awaiting a serious response from the developers on the abuse of the review system by other authors.
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Brethren of the Five, Campaign. - Story focused
The Dwarven Tale - Hack 'N Slash
Ya i truth, designing anything interesting will be broken with multiple people. It is hard enough trying to figure out where one person might, but multiple is harder.
I do not like to really create for multiple players yet, as the features we are given are not geared towards that. To design for multiple people we need better dialogue options that show on everyone's screen, actual boss fights, and maybe even a way to force a group size in a foundry quest so you can know who many exactly you are designing for.
In general through even if you do want to make a group quest, it will extremely shallow, hack and slash affair, as any mechanics you have will always trigger on the first person to talk/activate an item/npc and ruin it for the rest.
I'm having fade to black transition problems.. =/
I want a fade-to-black, and then a map transition.. problem is, when everything is faded, you cant see the object that IS the map transition.
cant make the fadetoblack the transition, because then it always auto appears when i enter the foundry? is this just a foundry bug?
is there a giant invisible object that i can make interactable after everything is faded so the players oNLY option is "press F to interact" or how to i force a "press f for next map"?
=X
NW-DC9R4J5EH - 'The Black Pearl' - Spelljammer! Phlo Riders and Space Orcs
Thanks for all the fish.
Map transition is always on interact. The object to interact with can't be made with visibility conditions, because it's a quest objective, so it's always there. However, it won't be active until you reach that objective in the quest. That's why the fade as the transition isn't working for you; while it's not active as a transition until you reach that objective, it loads the detail immediately because it is an objective.
Probably the easiest way to do what you are wanting is to have something trigger the fadetoblack, and make that same thing an objective. Reach waypoint would probably work best for you, because there's no interact required. Whatever it is you choose, as soon as they do it, fadetoblack.
They need to be close enough to whatever your map transition is that the "Press F to" is available once that objective kicks in, and your map has to be set up in such a way that they can't wander away from it in the dark and get lost. Where you put it would depend on your map layout, but the easiest would probably be to have the transition item be a large invisible wall, turned sideways, and placed just above the floor level so they won't notice (or, if the floor is uneven, above the character... just make sure it's in range of halflings). They'd actually be walking around on the inactive map transition, so no matter where they are, once the objective to map transfer is reached, they get the prompt.
So, what you'd get is they would get to a certain point, they'd get a fadetoblack, and they'd get a prompt to press F to map transition.
If you want them to sit in the dark for a brief time before having the option of map transition, you could add a component complete timer using an encounter, with the encounter loading at the same time the depthfade does, but the encounter completing being the objective right before the map transition.
I haven't tried this myself (although I did something somewhat similar using timed depthfade and interact in my latest, "T1: The Village of Hommlet" (NW-DBDB7A38M), so this is all theoretical, but I would think it should work.
-- @Gruffydd