Visibility

[Lunever]

If one of the following is already doable by regular dungeon mechanics (without a mess of interconnected relays), please let me know how.

- I'd like to be able to set for an object, i.e. a monster or a wallitem, a brightness inverter flag. That means if that flag was set, the object would appear completely black in bright light and completely bright in total darkness. That way something could made be distinguishable only in the dark, an infinity of light puzzles would start to open up, and the darkness spell would finally become a useful part of the game.

- You'd also need to set a minimum and maximum brightness in order to be able to make an object glow in the dark, but not become dark when in bright light, and make a glowing object not become all white in total darkness.

- Maybe the point of an object's maximum brightness could be defined freely, becoming more shady if light environment becomes either lighter or darker than that maximum point. That way you could create a wall text that would only be clearly visible in twighlight for example.

- I'd like to give an object a light-dependant tansparency, again with an optional inverter flag. That way you'd be able to make a ghost be nearly invisibly translucient in bright light. Only in the dark brave adventurers would be able to fully perceive the terrible spectre. Again being allowed to freely define a point of maximum or minimum transparency light level might allow for even more interesting puzzles.

Since this would need some engine tweaks, yet algorithmically not too complicated ones as far as I can judge, I'd be happy to have them.

What I have in mind for my dungeon, as an obstacle in the monk's path part of the dungeon is The Hall of Zen, an abandoned Dojo haunted by the separated undead goulish bodies and spectre-like spirits of the ninjas who once used to train there. The bodies would be corporeal, and have a giggler-like stealing ability along with the ability to cast a strong darkness spell. The bodies would have normal positive visibility. The spectres would be uncorporeal and cast lighnting bolts. They'd have inverse visibility along with light-dependant transluciency, and a permanent low-level light spell, in order to make them appear glow in the dark. Maybe even the meeting of a darkness-shrouded body and a glowing spirit could create a spooky greyish weak flickering of light in the distance.

[George Gilbert]

Interesting idea.

You can get pretty close with the existing mechanics (in particular, you can have monsters / wallitems / text that are only visible when it's dark), by using the SWAP function (or in the case of wall items, toggling it's visibility) triggered through a relay that is conditional on the light level.

Whilst that wouldn't give you a proper "glow", it would certainly allow for puzzles that are light dependent.

Of course, the above only gives you a simple binary shade; you can apply the same principle with a series of relays to give a smoother variation in visibility with brightness by having different graphics with different alpha channel opacity for various degrees of light.

[Lunever]

Yes, I thought about that already - yet, having the requested flags would handle such things smoother and easier to handle, for to emulate exactly the behaviour above you'd need countless swaps, one for every step of light with step-lighting ON and even more for all those steps with step-lighting OFF, and all of that separately for every object involved. With that I'm back to the above-mentioned mess of interconnected relays (although some people seem to love to play engine with dungeon mechanics, probably comes from a certain Lord Chaos using gigglers for random generators).

Having a wallitem be translucient in bright light could hint an attentive player to try casting a darkness spell (the idea of letters in blood appearing more visibly the darker it becomes in a spectre's abode just comes to my mind).

Of course having my old request of allowing the dungeon designer to set the step-lighting and light cap behaviour implemented would come in handy here too.

So, can you do it? If so, do you consider the idea worthy of being made real? I'm not a programmer, but I guess whether I say a monster's picture becomes shaded/whitened the darker/lighter it becomes ending up black in total darkness or totally white in over-brightness, or saying it becomes more shaded in brightness and fully visibly/whitish in dim light/complete darkness would not be too complicated, since it would merely swap a few conditions of the colour intensity algorithm.
Don't know whether the same goes for transparency - if transparency can already be set variably to a specific degree of transparency for an object by the dungeon designer, making that variable dependant on the light level should not be that hard either. And last but not least setting a maximum/minimum cap for an individual object's illumination to prevent a complete blackening/whitening would also be just a couple of variables be defined to be limited by a certain range of values.

[Tonari]

You can get pretty close with the existing mechanics (in particular, you can have monsters / wallitems / text that are only visible when it's dark), by using the SWAP function (or in the case of wall items, toggling it's visibility) triggered through a relay that is conditional on the light level.

Method is not understood though I think that this idea is interesting.
Method of examining present light level by relay is not understood.
How to make wallitem seen in the dark is not understood.
Does anyone understand it?