Quake Flicker

[Kawa]

You know how all these games based on the original Quake have the same lighting presets? How from Quake up to Half-Life Alyx the same "fluorescent flickering" pattern?



As it happens, that one's a perfectly binary pattern that, instead of a string of letters, can be stored as integers. So I figured I might implement it in SCI.

https://helmet.kafuka.org/sci/QuakeFlicker.sc

Available as a Code that, once init'd, returns the next state in doit at your own pace, or as a Cycler that you can attach to a View, in which case it'll flicker between cel 0 and 1.

[Collector]

Nice!

[doomlazer]

Spooky!

edit: Replaced the gif. There was a bug in the previous version.

How are you supposed to get the return value from the instance? I used (qf doit?), but doesn't that call the QuakeFlicker doit twice? Nevermind, it's not getting called automatically.

[Kawa]

The intent with QuakeFlicker is indeed to just use the return value from doit, as you supposed. That's how I first tested it, in fact, debug-printing the returned values and matching them to the bit stream in the comments. 32 of 'em, so I could tell it was repeating correctly. It just returns bits at whatever speed you call it at.

[Collector]

Might be nice to have the flicker with a dimmed down level or varying intensity instead of just on and off. It would fit that Laura Bow clip better, like light from a flickering flame than on, totally off then back on. Of course that might be easier with playing with something like VGA palette cycling than the EGA of SCI0.

[doomlazer]

Ugh, I didn't even notice the flicker wasn't displaying properly in my gif. Adding the cycle to slow it down introduced a bug. I think the pattern still might be inversed in my gif, but I can't look at the flashing anymore.

Might be nice to have the flicker with a dimmed down level or varying intensity instead of just on and off. It would fit that Laura Bow clip better, like light from a flickering flame than on, totally off then back on. Of course that might be easier with playing with something like VGA palette cycling than the EGA of SCI0.

It definitely feels anachronistic. You could probably get a pretty good flame effect in VGA. That scene is interesting in how they did the light on the rocks and timber.

[lskovlun]

Why not make it a subclass of Cycle?

[Kawa]

Why not make it a subclass of Cycle?

Eh :shrug: