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A beacon!
StrikesBrain
Member Posts: 222
I just had a couple thoughts on arts, all along one train of thought, LIGHT!
Glow - This art is the most basic of light based arts. It just causes the evoker to glow, illuminating the immediate surroundings. It would also make the evoker stand out in a dark room like a sore thumb.
Dreamer Glow - I figured with an art like glow, somewhere down the line a bright egg would have figured this art would be funner if inflicted on others. It would require a line of sight with the victim, but when cast successsfully, it would force the target to glow, the evoker can set intensity and color. If the target is invisible they'll still emit the glow but be invisible. This would be an intersting way to bring out someone who's hiding in dark terrain, or make an invisible dreamer's life a little miserable, though they WOULD still be harder to hit. I've played a few FPS games where you have a situation of a glowing invisible thing, they are still hard to peg because there's no distinct shape for your eye to lock on, but at least you know where they are roughly. Or, you could just use it to make that bothersome bigwig from the opposing house glow a nice shade of hot pink.
Illuminate - This art would cause the evokers eyes to glow like a pair of flashlights. Not only does it make it harder to trace the light back to its source, it casts the light wherever the evoker is looking, allowing him or her to keep light where they need it while keeping their hands free.
Beacon - Beacon would bring up a dialog, the higher the level of the evoker, the more options avaliable, it would basically allow the caster to drop a floating glowing crystal which would glow with an intensity and color set by the evoker. One could use it to light up a dark path, mark out the way to an event, like a wedding or some such "Follow the yellow beacon road". They could be used just to spruce up a room with some extra color, or they might even be used to cast illumination in a dark room. It would be nice if they could be made so they could be attacked and destroyed by weaponry. Make for intersting target practice, "Shoot and destroy all the red beacons as fast as you can without harming a single green one". The possibilities are endless and they are more fun then a lavalamp!
Darken - The evoker casts darken and then selects a target, target then starts to do the opposite of what glow does, they begin to emit an aura of darkness which just paints everything in his vicinity black. Higher levels of this art allow for a greater radius, in close quarter rooms this could create a lot of chaos.
Because only someone as deranged as me would have a rubber chicken Named Alfredo Sanchez
Comments
~Khyperu~
Soon to be dreamer
"I'm not insane. I just have a vivid imagination!"
I'm not familiar with the Reclamation engine but I remember it being loosely based on the Unreal engine when it was getting started so I think lighting should be doable. It might pose some bandwidth problems but I think it would be a very cool idea if its doable (and it probably is).
Bandwidth shouldn't really be the problem. I mean you have the glowing item broadcast its light parameters when the object loads. When the situation on its glow changes, it would send an update to all clients so they can adjust accordingly. If the glowing object moves, well, that can all be calculated client side without sending information and using up bandwidth.
If glowing is a state, then it shouldn't really be more difficult to make an avatar glow, bandwidth wise, then it would be to make it's shirt change from red to blue.
Of course a lot of beacons laying around does not take up as much bandwidth as you think. Two words, Delta Compression. I'm not entire sure what lyra uses with their engine, but I suspect Delta compression is one of their nifty tricks. Delta compression, if the explanations I've been given on this thing can be trusted, is basically a compression that only causes a report on an entity's status if it's position or state changes. So, if something sits around and does nothing, it reports no changes and therefore takes up no bandwidth. You are in a crowded meeting hall with 30 dreamers, nobody is moving because they are listening intently, and you get very little lag there either, since most of the dreamers are not changing in state. You end up in a fight with 20 dreamers and a darkmare, all throwing chakram shots. Well in that case you have a TON of entities taht are constantly updating their velocity and position, and you end up with a lot of traffic and suddenly, lag begins to show. So basically, anything that isn't doing much in particular will not eat up much bandwidth, if all those beacons wandered about the room on a completely random pattern, THEN you'd have lag. You do get lag when entering a room with a ton of things in terms of loading the contents, once the contents are loaded, if they remain static that'll be the worse of it. If you ever entered a full house vault you may notice the delay between entering and the items showing. Of course if you treat those beacons like items, the same way wards are, then you can even have them cleaned up neatly. There are places where you can have near 16 wards on the screen at once, it's insane to behold. Yet UL can handle it. So, if UL can handle 16 wards, I'm sure reclamation can handle a few beacons.
Because only someone as deranged as me would have a rubber chicken Named Alfredo Sanchez