Misc Ideas for Track Making: Lightboxes, Fogboxes, Sparkgen Speed

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Gotolei
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From: The New Are

Misc Ideas for Track Making: Lightboxes, Fogboxes, Sparkgen Speed

Unread post by Gotolei » Mon Aug 27, 2018 4:17 pm

I've been brainstorming track ideas over past week or so, came up with a few things that could be improved upon but may or may not be feasible to do. Bunching them all up in the same thread because apparently it's been done that way before, but if they need to be split up then that can be done too.
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Currently, if you want to uniformly light up a room, the main way you can go about things is trying to place wide spotlights or omnis in a grid around an area and hope nobody notices the slight fading (though of course, as the track maker, you'll never not notice it and it'll bug you till the end of your days). Want a normal (directional) light covering an area? May the force be with you.
So the first idea is lightboxes - basically the opposite of shadowboxes, in that they create consistent, regular light within their bounds. Perhaps it could be a new type of light entirely, or it could be a re-working of shadowboxes with what are currently shadowboxes being interpreted as [R -255 / G -255 / B -255 / Omni] or whatever they're equivalent to. They'd have the same omni/normal setting as existing lights, and as far as makeitgood is concerned normals could be manipulated by a method similar to that of a force field's direction.

Along a similar vein, tracks can go through all sorts of different environments. Perhaps a track starts out above ground and goes through a cave, or spooky tunnels, or maybe the same track could go through sections as differing as a moon base and an arboretum. One would probably want the different rooms to have their own ambiance and feeling, and one way to go about that could be fogboxes - another bounding box, probably an object, within which custom fog parameters could be set to override what's in track.inf.

The last thing that comes to mind for now: frequency of spark throwers. Currently they range from 1-200, with a hard-coded wrap-around in makeitgood. 200 feels like more than fast enough for any use, but the lowest speed of 1 still shoots particles four or five times a second. If one wants to have a few slow-moving particles floating around in an area, they'd have to be very sparse with their throwers to get the effect they want without pushing the 1k particle limit.
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