Scenario 1: White knuckles gripping your saber, you step into the next room. Three Stormtroopers lay behind you. One of them is lying in pieces. The room is bright. All corners are exposed. It’s clear. Entering the next room you see a computer terminal. The room is bright. The computer terminal doesn’t seem to be functioning. You know two more of the Imperials finest passed through here blasting at you, but you see no evidence of their escape. Maybe the danger has passed… Scenario 2: Your white knuckles grip you saber as you walk into the next room. Three Stormtroopers lay behind you. One of them didn’t go out completely intact. Sunlight from the above window cascades into the room, exposing all corners to be free of would be assailants. Faintly you hear a crackling sound through the next doorway. Stepping out of the sunlit room into the shadows of the next room your eyes take a moment to adjust. A nearby computer terminal hums softly, oblivious to the destruction around it. Looks like the two Imperials who got away shot out the lights on their way through. Sparks rain from the light fixture that is still trying to function; pulsing like a strobe light into the dark corners. You’d better be careful… Which of these two scenarios gets you more involved with the story? This is not an English lesson. Scenario 2 is the one that seems most intriguing to me, whereas Scenario 1 seems to be the case with the vast majority of levels I download to play. Scenario 2 creates ambiance, gives the story credence and atmosphere. It sells the story more so than Scenario 1. How do you create this atmosphere in your Jedi Knight levels? A few simple items and a couple cogs can go a long way. For this example, I’ve created a small level, 2 rooms connected by a doorway. In one room I’ve added a skylight, and in the other, I’ve added a ceiling lamp. Using 2 things and 3 simple cogs found in Jedi Knight, I’ll make the room go from a basic Scenario 1 to an enticing Scenario 2. | |
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Since both these lights leave a couple of my surfaces looking completely black, I adjust the ‘Extra Light’ of the sector to something between .1 and .3 depending on how much light I want the room to have naturally. (Extra light adds a light value to the entire selected sector or surface that does not vary in intensity over the whole of the sector or surface). Okay, now that I have some light in my rooms with a nice shadow extending from the sunlit room into the next room, I want to create a feel that there is something going on in this place that seems to be over-run with bad guys. So, next step is adding some depth and solidity to my level. Thing number 1, a computer console, gives me a good start. Just placing the console isn’t really good enough. Sure, I’ve seen lots of em in levels, placed nicely in a semi-circle, just waiting for somebody to go punch on their buttons, but rarely do they seem to add life to a level. Adding some ambient sound to the console can go a long way to making it seem more ‘real’. For this, you’ll need a cog from JK; 00_playambient.cog is found in the res2.gob in your copy of JK, and will do the job nicely. This is a fairly simple cog, and should take little time and effort to place. After adding this cog to your level, you’ll need to fill in a few things. This particular cog supports playing a single ambient sound to up to 8 ‘things’ in your level. We’ll just be using it for one thing, a console 5, and thing number 1. Since we want the sound coming from the console, we’ll use the console’s thing number to attach the sound directly to the console itself. To see which thing number your console is, just click on it in thing mode or in the 3d preview and check it’s properties in the ‘item editor’. Under ‘SoundPos0(thing)’ we’ll put this number. Don’t worry about the rest of the numbers until you have more consoles placed. Next, for wav0 (sound) just double click in its field and go select yourself a good computer console sound. You can attach any sound you want, but a Gamorrean Guards death sound coming from a console might be a little odd. I usually go with the series titled 00techamb*.wav. Now, mindist (flex), maxdist (flex) and volume (flex) are pretty important. These will define how far away you hear the ambient sound and how loud that sound is. Go ahead and experiment with this. I typically leave mindist at 1 and volume at 1, but alter the maxdist I want to hear the sound up to around 15. Now we want to make it look like the building is being over-run with bad guys, so we’ll add a couple more cogs for this. 00_lightanim.cog creates a pulsing light from a thing light (light things are placed like any other object). 00_simplesparks.cog creates a rain of sparks and sound from a things position. Since we’ll be putting the sparks and flashing lights in the same place up near our broken light fixture, we’ll use the same thing to tie both cogs to. For the 00_lightanim cog, simply fill in the thing number, then set the values to the desired pulse and rate. Period (flex) is the amount of time between light pulses in seconds. If you want it to pulse slowly, set it higher, For this example, we want a strobing effect, so we set the light period value to 0.5 or half a second between light pulses. MaxLight sets the top end of the pulse and MinLight sets the bottom end of the pulse. Let’s set the Max value to 2 and the Min value to 0. Finally we’ll add the sparks and spark sounds. Placing 00_simplesparks.cog already has the spark template set, so there’s no need to adjust it. All you’ll need to do is tell the cog which thing number you want to use (the same as the light for this example) and the minimum and maximum delays for the sparking since this cog allows for random sparks. Since we set the light animation pulse to 0.5 we’ll set both values for the spark cog to 0.5 as well. This takes away the random portion of the cog in this example. Yippy, that’s all there is to it. We’ve now created a brightly-lit room that fades into a dimly lit room that has lots of ambiance. Fire up your copy of Jedi Knight and walk around. Using cogs like these, as well as a multitude of other great ‘effect’ cogs found in Jedi Knight can really boost the feel of your level and even sometimes succeed in turning dull architecture into nice atmosphere. Browse through the cogs in JK, most of them have descriptions and are easy to place. Check it out, ambiance turns a good level into a great one! Take care, and may the ambiance be with you!
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Jason Burton (AKA Dak) believes getting immersed in a game is so important that when he plays JK he dresses up as Jan and pretends to be on the Crow watching Kyle through surveillance cameras. . |