Animated gobo's tutorial

[Khyrpa]

I've discovered a way with you can animate gobo's of spot lights (thanks to Danarogon's nyan cat in Dark Room). It's a nice effect that you can use to create lots of different things.

The idea is to use rapidly changing pictures as spot lights gobo to create frames of lighting. Frictional used this to simulate light reflected from water.

I will not teach you how to use gimp/photoshop or other image editing software, but you can use various softwares to create what you like. It all comes down to what program can export to the file extensions you want (png/dds, you could perhaps even use jpg).





How I did that was use gimp to make a text (200x100 size because the pixels don't really show when the image is applied to spot light, frictional used 256x256 for their gobo's), then used another layer to cover certain areas of the text frame by frame so it looks like it is writing as you watch. (Notice how I screwed up by not mirroring the text).

Spoiler below!

Because I wanted red color for the light I made it red and exported as .png (I am absolutely not sure about the image extensions and which one to use when, but I am sure png works ok. If someone knows more about them, please teach me). Frictional used .dds files for their gobos, perhaps settings that had only grayscale.

You have to name the images appropriately. Here's a picture of my folder. NOTE: to properly use folders ouside the standard ones, you have to edit your resources text file. Good tutorial about that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZTabBgYD...x=&t=3m24s

Spoiler below!

When you have the pictures made, you can just put a spotlight inside your map, select the gobo with _001, set the Anim mode to oscillate or loop and set the framerate. That should be it!

Spoiler below!

I also want to advertise a short tutorial I made about billboards because it might be hard to stumble upon accidentally. Following the first part of it should make the changing of billboards colors a lot less frustrating. I wonder why frictional didn't connect their billboards (performance?).
http://wiki.frictionalgames.com/hpl2/tut...tutorial_6

Also if someone has ideas about neat tricks in the level editor that ease developers work load or enchance aesthetics, tell about them in this thread and/or add them to wiki.