I Need Some Help With Water

[craZboy557]

Trying to make a map, but I'm having trouble getting some water on it to work. Purely an asthetic touch, so if noone can help it's not that big a deal, but I can't get the tides to work.
Here's one of the liquids I'm using:
http://oi41.tinypic.com/2wr10rd.jpg

Here's the other:
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2u40gme.jpg

And here's the liquid light I'm using on them:
http://oi43.tinypic.com/x4rndc.jpg

So yeah, if anyone can tell me what I did wrong it'd be greatly appreciated.


PS: Sorry, I'd have them as pictures but they were too large to fit. <sarcasm>Completely unrelated,</sarcasm> does anyone know how to do those little scroll boxy thingies?

[$lave]

The settings of the light you're using aren't.. right. At the moment the light (tide) is always (constant) at 100% Intensity. That means your liquid will always be at 100% of the max height.

What you want is a light with a "Smooth" (as opposed to constant) function, and the secondary active should be somewhere between 0 and 50% intensity, probably.

edit: the easiest way to make a light for a liquid tide is just to change the preset from "normal" to liquid or whatever.

[craZboy557]

Ahh, thanks. DIdn't really understand what the percentages did. Welp, I'll go fix that up then. Thanks!

Also, didn't realise I has it set to constant. Definitely intended for it to be smooth. Thanks for that catch as well.

Edit: Don't worry, it's working, but I just realized I didn't have a liquid preset. Which is closer, periods of 300 and intensities of 100% and 0%, or periods of 15 and intensities of 100% and 50%? It makes very little difference whether anyone can answer this or not, it's not exactly very important.

[jonny]

Off topic, but did you use the Copy/Paste plugin with this map? I'm asking because I see from the liquid lights pic that you have a lot of lights (from the size of the scroll bar on the right, I'm guessing around 42, which in this case is almost certainly not the universal solution). If you did use Copy/Paste and you do have a bunch of unused lights, be aware that by default Copy/Paste copies all lights from the source map to the destination map. You can tell it to to only copy lights above number 20, or none at all (see the README). On the other hand, if you really are using that many lights and/or didn't use Copy/Paste, just ignore my sticking my nose in here.

[goran]

A liquid has a min and max height, and a control light which decides at what height the liquid is at between those min and max height values.

Example given: Min height 1 wu, max height 3 wu. The light will decide where the liquid is between 1-3 WU.

The light control the height with its primary and secondary active triggers. These triggers activate after each other and loop. The period decides how long each trigger is active. Period uses ticks, where 30 ticks = 1 second.

Example given: Primary trigger has period of 60 ticks, secondary trigger has a period of 90 ticks.
Primary is on for 2 seconds, secondary is on for 3 seconds, loop
Primary is on for 2 seconds, secondary is on for 3 seconds, loop
Primary is on for 2 seconds, secondary is on for 3 seconds, loop
...and so on

The intensity value of the primary and secondary trigger decide the height of the liquid by percentage. 100% intensity = max height. 0% intensity = min height. If going by previous examples, then 100% intensnity = 3 wu, and 0% intensnity = 1 wu.

The function decides how the light transition from the primary to the secondary trigger and vice versa. If the function is constant, then the intensity will switch instantly from one trigger to the other. For liquids the best functions are linear or smooth. If the primary trigger is intensity 100%, and the secondary trigger is 0%, period 90, function smooth. When the secondary trigger actives, it will start at 100% intensity, and then over 3 seconds gradually lower the intensity to 0%.

[craZboy557]

@Goran
Thanks, I wasn't really sure how the percentages worked. Glad to finally know that.

@jonny
...maybe. Don't worry, I copied it again but this time didn't transfer the waters and lights. Back to normal. There isn't any normal way to delete light or water settings, right?

[jonny]

There isn't any normal way to delete light or water settings, right?

In Weland? Not as far as I know. I thought about writing a plugin to delete unused lights, but I need to make sure that it wouldn't break Weland or cause some other problems.

[craZboy557]

Huh, best of luck. I'd bet all of us here would like to have something like that.

[Crater Creator]

There isn't any normal way to delete light or water settings, right?

In Weland? Not as far as I know. I thought about writing a plugin to delete unused lights, but I need to make sure that it wouldn't break Weland or cause some other problems.

I realized today that, through liberal use of your Copy/Paste plugin, I have a map with over 300 lights. Until I caught the setting, they were doubling with each iteration. I'm worried I'll bump up against a limit sooner or later; thankfully I shouldn't need to copy the lights again.

So yeah, a plugin to delete unused lights would be nice, like the Cleanup plugin for Chisel. Unless there is a way to delete lights & liquids in Weland already... anybody?

[Hopper]

Deleting a light would be a pretty annoying and complex process to implement, given the map format. Since lights are a contiguous 1..N array, you have to renumber one or more lights with higher indexes than the one you're deleting, to close the gap. Since the index numbers are how lights are referenced, you then have to scour the map's textures, platforms, control panels, etc. for references to that renumbered light and update them all. Most of those references are set up in VML/Vasara instead of Weland, so the developer might need to add more code to edit parts of the map data Weland usually copies without touching.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just explaining why it probably doesn't exist yet.