Luminious Sprites

[Raeven]

Not really 'troubleshooting', but I couldn't think of a better section to post this.

I was too late to participate in the evaluation of Volcanic but did the 5 tasks to learn more about your program.
For Task 5, making a new object with at least one interaction, I chose to string fairy lights onto a topiary and allow the Sim to choose the lighting mode as the interaction. Of the four two cause the object to act as a (low level) light source, the other two do not. Of those later two one is "off" but the other required the fairy light sprite to be "Luminous". There appears to be to no way to to flag them as Luminous.

To be perfectly honest most people don't think Luminous Sprites are as brilliant and fun as I do (weirdos), but common existing items such as televisions do also use luminous sprites so I figured it was worth a mention as missing from the DRGP editor

 

[Rhys]

Objects become "luminous" when their "generates light" flag is set. I don't think there's any information on this on the wiki, pretty hilariously, and Volcanic does not yet have smart names for flags.

An expression primitive "Flag Field 2 Set Flag 11" should set this flag. (flags are 1 indexed, starting from the top you see here)
For more flag definitions, you'll currently need to check the classes at the bottom of FSO.Simantics/Entities/VMEntity.cs.

 

[Raeven]

Yep, that's the whole object and it effects the surrounding area, but SPR2 can also be flagged to Luminous (through the DRGP, as I understand it,, not in the SPR2 itself) without the object becoming a light source - this allows the computer and television screens and the large fish tanks to glow without their respective cases case lighting up. (Neither does so in FreeSO, so the screenshot below is actually TS1 objects. )

No light-circle cast on walls or floor, no contribution to the lighting score, and the non-luminous sprites remain dark in the darkened room.
The tiki god IS actually a wall lamp, but the light is Off in this image. The glowing eyes are a separate SPR2 that I added in on top of the normal maxis tiki god lamp in the DRGP (using IffPencil). I made that luminous, leaving left the rest alone so it behaves the same way it always did except the eyes continue glowing in darkened rooms.

Same again with the counter. The cloned one functions just like the SS original (shown on the right for contrast), but I added a SPR2, added that to the DRGP as the top 'layer', and made it luminous (this is a check box in IffPencil, right next to the 'Flip' checkbox).

EDIT TO ADD:
See the sprite named Atmc_Piece4_on (Spr2 #406) in DRGP 400 Robot-atmc of oj-robots.iff for a TSO example of a sprite that is meant to be illuminated/luminous. All of the Atmc_Piece8* and the collision sprites are "luminous" as well

 

[Rhys]

I didn't know this flag existed. The SimTech page had it listed as "it could be a trigger for the animation or it could cause (a portion of) the animation by rotating the palette.", so it was in there called "AllowCache". I can quickly change the renderer to respect it but I don't think I can make reasonable changes to volcanic while I'm on an entirely different branch.


To be honest the way they've set it up for this tv is a bit stupid. There's probably further complications judging from the fact that the aquarium still completely lights up because it is set to "emit light", whereas this tv is not. I think there are some more confusing flags, eg. "light if contained object is lit" for end tables. Will need to do some testing, but it's low priority.

It's worth noting that lighting may eventually change to per-pixel illuminate floors, walls and objects depending on surrounding light sources. In a case like this, the end table change would not need to be made.