The Mana World Forums

this needs more sets for the back because of the way the character walks but still i found this a pretty neat idea to start.

lol, this reminds me a bit of some of the old snes games i used to play. pitch black places where you need a lamp (zelda i think). i used to remove the black layer in zsnes with one of the function keys :p

lol thats cheating

I think this same effect could be much better done with a particle effect, rather than using a whole new spritesheet. So, try making a particle effect for this purpose.

i have no experience with particle effects

particle engine is IMO indeed much better for this
meway: then learn it.

I will learn it as soon as possible

ditto

I have been thinking of ways we could have dynamic lighting in the game.

Also been thinking about dynamic shadows.

We could do it like that:

-Implement a custom graphic blit mode which multiplies the opacity of the source with the opacity of the destination.
-Add a black layer to the maps which have darkness (amount of transparency equal to the amount of light on the map).
-Create light sources as alpha images. Full opacity = default darkness, full transparency = no darkness.
-blit these images on the black layer thus adding transparency to it.

But I can already tell that it will most likely cost a lot of frames per second when enabled.

heeheee

I was going to suggest that the miner's hat have the flashlight removed.

While it helps the miner's hat be easily distinguished as such, it brings up the question of the Mana World's technological development. Perhaps I'm taking this too seriously. But the removal of the lamp was going to be my suggestion.

Adding the light of the lamp for effect would certainly be a major issue:

• Why are warriors (not wearing lamped helmets) able to see as well those wearing the miner's hat?
• Would the visible area be greatly reduced in order to accommodate the light effect?

Perhaps effort in other much-needed areas would be better?

I would tend to agree with Doulos on that, as these miners would be using torches etc to stay in line with the time period.

However magic does propose there could be other forms of magical lighting, possibly on items. Like a staff that lights or a magic helmet that lights. Could be interesting for a pitch dark black cave somewhere that can only be navigated with something like this.

Besides seems imo that there are already alot of items that don't fit and are just fluff.

Can a mod move this to genral development?

Use the cave snake antenna as a light source. The antenna would create a circular light around the wearer. Outside of the circle would be darkness.

A light engine should not be used as a feature which obstructs the player. When a player is annoyed by it he will just switch it off. Making it impossible to switch the light engine off is out of discussion because, as I said, the engine would be a big performance killer for low-end systems. And even when we wouldn't make it possible to disable it people would just patch their clients.