Light up platforms in a dark room

[soopytwist]

A similar question has been asked on these forums before but I think my application differs and I can't apply solutions I've seen to what I'm trying to achieve.



The image above is a room in my platform game. When the player has collected a flashlight they press "F" and an invisible round active about 128x128 is created at the centre of the player. This "bubble" needs to light-up the floor, walls and ceilings of the room so the player can see where they're going but plunged back into total darkness when pressing F again (the bubble is destroyed).

I've tried various ways to implement this and the only solution I could come up with is the one above but it's a long and tedious process of creating all the conditions and events for when the bubble is overlapping the actives that make up the walls.

In the above image I've created about 30 individual actives just for the left sides of the 32x32 blocks. Then there are another 20+ each for the right sides, the tops and the bottoms. That's a lot of actives and took ages to create them all.

Is there a better and easier way to accomplish this? I've now got an enormous amount of conditions and events to create for the bubble overlapping each active (make reappear) and negating when the bubble is not overlapping each active (making invisible).

There has to be a better way...?

[Hidronax]

You want the rest of the room to be in TOTAL darkness? You might create a big black rectangle with a round hole in the middle. The hole should always have its center on the player. When the flashlight is off the rectangle might play an animation in which it is completly black, or something else might cover the round hole. The dimensions of the rectangle should be twice the dimension of the window.

This is just a quick random idea, maybe a better solution can be obtained improving this one.

[Sparckman]

Here is a similar example, in this example you can turn on and off the light.
Press shift to turn off the lights.

http://community.clickteam.com/threads/92983-On-and-off-Flash-light-effect-Example

[soopytwist]

You want the rest of the room to be in TOTAL darkness? You might create a big black rectangle with a round hole in the middle. The hole should always have its center on the player. When the flashlight is off the rectangle might play an animation in which it is completly black, or something else might cover the round hole. The dimensions of the rectangle should be twice the dimension of the window.

This is just a quick random idea, maybe a better solution can be obtained improving this one.

I tried your method as it seemed to fit more with the low-fi 8 bit look I'm sticking with. The downside is that the large black rectangle cannot order in front of actives (I wanted the flashlight to make enemies appear as well as backdrops). Plus it was a pain to have the rectangle position at the player only when entering this room and then remove it again when leaving.

In the end I went with the method I initially started with. Actives on all the backdrop surfaces that are only made visible when a flashlight "cone" active collides with them. It works well, although it does make platforms visible that shouldn't be from particular angles. It also took a freaking long time to make.