Moons vs Moon triggers

posted on February 12th, 2011, 12:05 am

I always wondered when you're making a map, what the difference is between using moon triggers and actual resource moons.  Today I finally figured it out...and felt stupid.

When the game starts, moon triggers reveal themselves to all players; you can see them on your minimap and know where they are.  If the moons are placed straight on the map, they don't do this.

What do you guys prefer?  I started looking at maps, realizing I'd never paid attention to it before.  For example:

Duel II 1.2 uses regular moons, so you can't see where they are immediately on the minimap.

Star Traffic 1.2 uses triggers, so all moons are revealed at the start.

So what should I do on my maps?  All triggers?  All normal?  Or maybe have some of them be "known" and some be "undiscovered?"  What do you guys think?

posted on February 12th, 2011, 12:33 am

There are technical reasons too, you should avoid using the moons itself

posted on February 12th, 2011, 12:56 am

...

I see.  Would you mind explaining the technical reasons a bit?  I'm trying to understand the Flops architecture better.  Will it cause longer loading, or possibly break in a new patch, or be incompatible with something?  There's something to be said for creatively using all the features available, even if they're not technically supported.  And if it crashes or becomes broken I'm willing to go back and do the work of correcting problems with my maps.

[Dominus_Noctis]

posted on February 12th, 2011, 1:01 am

Last edited by Dominus_Noctis on February 12th, 2011, 1:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

Can you explain the technical reasons that way I might document them for the map making guide?

EDIT: ninjad 

posted on February 12th, 2011, 1:16 am

the properties of objects placed are stored in the map files. changes in the ODFs will not affect them, and larger changes to the resource system are to be expected soon.
the moons do also consist of multiple object, rather then just a moon. at the moment, its only a point-light-source thats added, but that will change too

posted on February 12th, 2011, 4:42 am

okay I'll stick to moon triggers.  One thing though, it is possible to place point light sources in the map manually?  Because I've had some ideas for cool lighting and I'm just starting to learn how they work.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 4:56 am

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by point light sources, but it is possible to place additional lights an change their hue, brightness and direction 

posted on February 12th, 2011, 7:09 am

by point light sources I mean a light that only affects part of the map, for example if you wanted a sun in the middle of the map that shined outward you could put 4 directional lights, but you would want the correct light to shine on ships for each side of the sun.

posted on February 12th, 2011, 7:51 am

i thought the moon triggers were there just to allow random moon models lol

posted on February 12th, 2011, 9:00 am

these 'triggers' once actually had the task to add a light source to the moons until i added this functionality to gameobjects directly (i guess optec just forgot about that). anyway, today their main function is to display a random moon model each time a map is loaded. so for example if we one day decide to add a new moon model to fleet operations, old maps aren't stuck with the old models they have been created with.
or even thought further, they just serve as placeholders for 'gameresource1' and 'gameresource2' - if we are going to change something fundamental in the resource system one day, we can easily let spawn something totally different in their place than just a dilithium or tritanium moon - without breaking our old or custom created maps. that was another thought behind the triggers.
i have to admit though that i am not entirely sure if that works out as we thought it would. even changing too much on these triggers might break old maps.