LogicBricks v10: ScreenFade + LoadingDelay
Added 2021-08-22 07:36:18 +0000 UTC
Among other things, two new bricks for LogicBricks. These will be needed for the Benchmark project to reduce motion sickness as much as possible. Due to the locked VR head tracking, motion sickness is a problem in that scene you usually would not have to this degree. So I need to use every trick in the book, at least those that won't affect benchmark results, to reduce it as much as possible. In this case fading to black before teleporting the player. However, we all know VaM's jerky loading, so nicely covered up scene transitions this will be useful for lots of other scenes. So it made sense to add this to LogicBricks.
Changelog for LogicBricks v10
- ScreenFade: New brick that can fade the entire scene to any color. Nice to cover up loading transitions, see video above, or other things like player teleports or simply helping with telling the story of your scene.
- LoadingDelay: New brick similar to the good old Delay, except that it internally resets its timer while there is any loading in progress. So you trigger it before you start loading stuff and get a trigger back X seconds after loading finished. The extra delay allows you to wait for hair/clothing/body physics to settle into place.
- EventAudioQueueEmpty: Added option to retry every frame while the queue is empty. This solves the problem that VaM may report everything is "fully loaded", and you can trigger audio already, except nothing happens because the audio is not yet there. So if you want to play music when your scene launches and immediately schedule a new track once the previous one is finished, this is your thing to trigger that.
- Timer, RandomTimer: Reset timer on re-enable.
- Delay, Blend, Loop (and RandomX variants): Reset bricks on being disabled. Fixed bricks not being able to trigger themselves.
- Separated the example scenes into its own VAR package. This way I can use Life and IdlePoser in the examples without having them as dependencies for the main package.
- Reworked example 24, instead of weird and unpractical stacked AnimationPatterns its now using IdlePoser. So, its an all-in-one example showing how you can combine StateMachine and ValueUpDown to control animation of IdlePoser, also using Empty atom anchors animated by LinearAnimation bricks and TriggerSync to keep the state changes synced.
- New example 25, see video. Demonstrates how to use the new LoadingDelay and ScreenFade bricks to make nicely smooth loading scene transitions. Of course backed by a StateMachine brick.
Download
- This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after 2021-09-06. You are allowed to reference this package in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different license. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.
- Beware of some browsers mistakenly renaming .var files to .zip when downloading from Patreon. More details on how to install VaM content and missing dependencies here.