Lassie SuperSheep: peanut gallery may comment

Heads up all... this forum locks tomorrow. Toss in last minute ideas if you have them; specifically if you have any crazy ideas for matrix-based filters. I wrapped up the matrix system architecture this weekend, so it's now pretty easy to plug in new custom filters that render according to the the standardized grid math. There are four matrix filters so far. I'm open to others if anyone can think of any wild visual effect they've always wanted to control based on room position.

I'll throw some crazy, impractical ideas at you just for the hell of it: Volume matrix: Like if the character walks toward a waterfall the ambient sound would get louder as he gets closer (granted, sound would have to work for this anyway.) Background color/brightness/opacity matrix: Like how it works on the character, but instead of the character's color/brightness/opacity changing as he walks from point to point, it affects the background image (and maybe other sprites can be set to be affected by it). Example: the player is holding a candle or flashlight, and to increase the illusion, a room would be dark but the scenery would brighten as he walked around. Focus matrix: to increase the illusion of depth, points could be set where if the character walks beyond them, his sprite gets more and more blurry, as if really close up or really far away. I'm sure something like that wouldn't eat up any computing power at all and cause no slowdown whatsoever. Reflection matrix: set a vertical or horizontal line and the character sprite would be reflected across it (with sliders for the reflection's tint, opacity, etc.) Usefull for mirrors, reflections in water, etc. Multiple points for matrices (for scale, color, etc.): the current two-point system is fine, ie establishing a single "small" or "dark" point along with a single "large" or "light" point, but what if I want the character to appear small on the left side of the screen, large in the center of the screen, and then small again on the right side of the screen? I'd need three points for that.

Cubic room support.. It can be done in AS3 but normal 360 would be nice.. we have just the perfect game planned if we had that, i have done it in my usual half assed way recently lol with Lassie AS

Hmm... 360 would be cool.

Whoa? this place is closing? Anyway, I'm almost afraid to suggest stuff now, you guys seem so leet when it comes to this technical stuff.

I'm thinking Greg meant this thread, not the whole forum... ...right?

Heads up all... this forum locks tomorrow. Figured.... but just called and clarified with Greg. He meant this thread locks tomorrow, not forum.

hmm... dunno whether this has already been covered anywhere else butit would be cool to have a few different ways of panning along a room... like in a long room, at the moment the camera pans along with the player character, but could it be made to wait until the player reaches the edge of the room before panning across to reveal another part of the room? Im thinking like the voodoo lady's room in MI2

BTW, i really like some of those last suggestions from John, things like that could really help bring a scene alive. Heres a cool example of a focus effect being done in Flash... http://www.senocular.com/flash/source.php?id=0.178 Yeah, yeah, yeah guys... I've already implemented the Focus Matrix (and that's what it's called too, since Flash already claimed the namespace "blur").

Cubic room support.. It can be done in AS3 but normal 360 would be nice.. we have just the perfect game planned if we had that, i have done it in my usual half assed way recently lol with Lassie AS Arg... yeah, that would be cool. However, I've moved development away from the room engine onto more of the general game stuff. I'm content to leave the room stable and "as is" for the time being, so this is something that certainly would not appear in first releases.

1: An ability to over-ride they Keyboard input bringing up the menu. It would open allot of ground to have minigames that you could, say, control with the arrow keys. 2: A text parser would be pwnsome. 3: Maybe multiple templates for things like the Menu, Inventory, and Action Box. 1) Keyboard management will be totally different. And yes, you'll have some level of control of the system using scripts (TIMes). 2) Text parser for dialogue texts? the frame work is all build for it, though I've only written in a couple render functions for it. That will be another survey for another time... what dialogue parsing do people want? Please don't answer right now as I'm not going to develop that system anytime soon. It is just a utility system. 3) I'm building one set of templates and releasing source for "snap in" components. You're welcome to develop any system that you like for things like inventory, action selection, and conversation playback. You'll just need to adhere to the defined component interface and make it responsive to engine events.

Volume matrix: Like if the character walks toward a waterfall the ambient sound would get louder as he gets closer (granted, sound would have to work for this anyway.) F'ing awesome. I love it. Mind you, I'm light years for building out sound capabilities at this point, but a year down the road when that's under consideration, I'll be sure to keep this in mind. Background color/brightness/opacity matrix: Like how it works on the character, but instead of the character's color/brightness/opacity changing as he walks from point to point, it affects the background image Hmmm... making the background responsive would be fairly easy, but I'm not sure how good the effect would be. You can't apply color transforms to specific areas of an image, it's an even change across the whole image. So, the entire background would lighten and dim. Focus matrix: to increase the illusion of depth, points could be set where if the character walks beyond them, his sprite gets more and more blurry As mentioned, this is already done. And while I haven't implemented it yet, I'm also consider attaching the Flash glow filter to a matrix. Reflection matrix: set a vertical or horizontal line and the character sprite would be reflected across it. I've been thinking about this one for a long time, and have avoided implementing it because of the technical requirements relative to the dynamic nature of this engine. Reflection tricks aren't hard to pull off in Flash, but they involve a lot of manual masking and animation timing to make them work. Making a dynamic implementation of this would be messy and still give a fairly sloppy effect. Multiple points for matrices (for scale, color, etc.): the current two-point system is fine, ie establishing a single "small" or "dark" point along with a single "large" or "light" point This is going to be handled in several ways other than with multiple skew points. A) There is now a radial matrix axis, so you can have the character large in the center of the matrix circle and have is shrink at any edge. B) Also, matrices are applied to the room on a layer by layer basis (so you can have various matrices working independently on each puppet layer), which will make it possible to swap a layer matrix out for another without affecting the rest of the room.

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