Fog of War/Illuminate Dark Area

Mmk soo lets say that i have a frame that is comepletely black (i.e dark).

How would I make it so that a "circle of light" appears around an object/mouse and everything within this circle of light is no longer hidden under the darkness (aka black)

I have done something similar . Basically I made a large black active object . Make it so it would take up the entire visable play area ( doesn't need to be the whole frame. Then make a transparent hole in the center . Then just have it always center around your mouse/active. This just allows you to see inside the "hole".

You could always center another object in the center with transparency too for some kind of effect .

Might be a better way bit worked for me.

Mmk thanks Redsquirrel. It works!

I may have another question, but i'll work on it before i ask.

Ok here is my new Question:

Let's say i have 5 different areas. Areas that have been unlocked, they can see without blackness. In the locked areas, Let's say one an locked area i want to bring their attention to something about the area. This area (which is shrouded in blackness) needs to have a "window to see through" which could be what you suggested above. However I do not want this darnkess to be in the unlocked area.

Follow along so far?

So essentially my question is this:
I want to use your way, however i only want to do it in certain sections of the map. How do i acheive this while still having light in some areas of the map? I may be everthing this too much but i can't quite wrap my head around it yet.

I woudlnt use the active object approach, that will need a big image for large resolutions and you can create much nicer effects using HWA effects.
I dont play with them much but there are examples floating which creates much nicer and smoother blends (I think its the AND effect)

There's actually an example iirc

http://www.clickteam.com/epicenter/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=194709#Post1947 09

I think that's overkill for what he wants, and its still too slow to use in an actual game.

HWA and the "Subtract" effect are the way to go (don't use additive/semi-transparency effects, or the big-black-active-with-a-hole method).

A couple of examples:

http://cid-b1e7ee094271bbda.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/LightsEg.mfa

http://cid-b1e7ee094271bbda.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/fow.mfa

MuddyMole. I would like to see the fow example as a scrolling example.

Thanks

Marv

I don't see any code for MuddyMoles, but it's the exact thing i want. How does the LightsEg. work? I see that the transparency effect is all in the image. However i painted the image purple and it sees the image as if its in a green filter. Is it all in the image? Also which part of the frame is needed to be in HWA?

Never mind MuddyMole...I got it.

Marv

There's a subtract effect applied to the whole top layer.

The background of the top layer is white. If you subtract 255,255,255 from any other color, you get 0,0,0 = black (ie. darkness).
If you use a darker background color on the top layer, it will be less opaque.
If you make it purple instead, you are subtracting something like 128,0,128. Anything white on the bottom layer, will now appear 127,255,127 (ie. light green).

In order to do this, do i "absolutely" have to use HWA?

Are there no work arounds that give the same desired effect in the regular mmf2?
I dont like using HWA in my current game because it likes to not respond 75% 99.999999999%of the time. (the mfa file)

must be a problem with your graphics card or drivers because HWA is reliable

Yeah, I've used it on a netbook, a 700MHz desktop (recently died), and a new 3.2GHz dual-core (which replaced it), and never had any trouble on any of them.

Found out that the active/background system box was causing it for some reason. It seems to run smooth now.

i could have sworn that there was an extension/combinations of extensions that had the ability to do this.

Am i mistaken

Could someone take a look at my .mfa and see if it happens it stops responding on their computer too?

Sure, if you upload it somewhere. Not promising I'll be able to fix it, but I'll take a look.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25332369/X.mfa

What am I looking at?
I don't see anything at all to do with FoW here.

If you're having trouble with something, it really helps a lot if you can isolate the problem as much as possible. Post a file containing only the broken frame, and strip out as many objects/events as you possibly can, without removing the problem itself.

I'm not about to sift through 16 frames to try and see what's wrong (and I wouldn't normally even have downloaded a 17Mb MMF2 file).

The problem has nothing to do with code. (There is no fog of war)
The problem has nothing to do with game play (i.e pressing f8 or running the frame/game)

The problem IS when the game is opened with HWA the frame that says "world map" becomes unresponsive. I can't put the fog of war on BECAUSE it freezes & becomes unresponsive when just VIEWING the file. I can't EDIT that frame at all.

That is the problem

What build are you running?

Latest Build; b.251

It works fine for me.
It doesn't seem to do much - just scrolls off to the right if I press enter - but I can view and edit the frame without any problem.

Then what should I do?

Reinstall MMF2, Reinstall Windows, Change PC.

Is there an option for mmf2 not to display the HWA effects in the frame editor? It seems to work if i load the game (which is in direct 3D 9), switch to Standard, go back to the frame that was having troubles, and switch back to direct 3D 9. Seems like it freezes when my computer tries to render/do the effect.