A large black active object with a hole in the middle, the size of the frame, position the hotspot to the top left corner, then: ALWAYS: set position of object to x left frame, y top frame? Then maybe create another circular active, give it some transparency and position it where the hole would be? Is that what you mean?
Seems quite easy, just do what circy suggests but take out a triangle and give it two (or more) directions and get it to follow the characters direction (rather than the top left. You may have to make it a lot larger than the screen size if it follows the character.
no, really no! it has to be square, with a side length of max(screenWidth, screenHeight). But if you give it one animation for each direction it would never need to be BIGGER than the screen! that is absurd. Why hide something that is OUTSIDE the visible screen?
btw, I mean if the hotspot is centered and you always place the big black thing at (0,0) from character
or you could set it to follow the playfield and just make sure you always center display on the guy. Change it's direction as the character changes its. Then it could be the exact size, otherwise it does need to be a bit biger so that the edges don't peek out during the game during movement.
there is one problem though. Moving close to the edge of the frame will make it not scroll you know... (as there is nothing more to show) so it has to follow the character and has to be twice the screen size... if you know what I mean.
actually three times the screen size if you want it to work close to both left and right edge of the frame
I think the ideal method would be to utilize an overlay redux object, and draw an invisible "custom" triangle utilizing fastloops. During the loop, while it's plotting every point, it would also Grab the pixel color at that location and then add a predetermined value to it maybe RGB(25,25,25) or something. You could even use different values to simulate getting a better flashlight. The Custom Ultra Eye of the Sun flashlight could add RGB(75,75,75) to each pixel...3 times the lighting effect. On the same note, you could change the drawing algorithm to plot a bigger triangle when using a "more powerful" flashlight.
This would take up much less memory and CPU power than using a huge active object, and it would offer the benefits of easy customization. If you really wanted to make it badass, you could make a separate overlay that lies "underneath" the frame graphics...make this overlay clear or white or something and then draw all of the "walls" or "obstacles" in black(anything that the light won't shine through). During the fastloop triangle drawing routine, first check the invisible wall overlay. If the current point that the algorithm is plotting is black on the invisible overlay, don't change the color on the active frame.
The downside to this approach is that requires quite a bit of trig and the overlay redux object or some other object that can get and set the color of individual pixels, which means that doing this in TGF is out of the question.
Current Project: Undertaking the design of my mammoth RPG. Utilizing all of the knowledge gained while coding the now defunct "Shadow Reign".
SculptureOfSoul, your method sounds interesting, but I don't quite understand it. I haven't used Overlay Redux before, but it sounds like i could benifit from this.
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