Toggling the Player Lantern

[grayman]

I can't find a way to toggle the player lantern via script.

 

I could write a script event to add this ability, but if there's a workaround anyone knows about, I'm willing to do that.

 

Anyone know how to toggle the lantern on and off?

 

Thanks.

[Moonbo]

You could identify the initial inventory item, flip to the lantern, activate it, and then flip back to the initial inventory item via script.

Edited May 8, 2014 by Moonbo

[Obsttorte]

Currently the lantern works like this:

• If the player uses it, it checks whether the light is already there
  
• in this case it removes it, in the other case it spawns a light and attaches it to the player
  

You could change the scriptobject (to be found in tdm_playertools.script in the tdm_base01.pk4) so that it spawns and attaches the light in the init() method, and later one only turns it on and off. The light gets attached to a position called "lantern_light". This way you could access the entity via

 

entity lantern = $player1.getAttachment("lantern_light");

 

and than turn it of using On() and Off().

[grayman]

I used Obs' suggestion:

 

1 - Grabbed a copy of the lantern's script object code and pasted it into my mission's script file.

 

2 - Changed the name of the script object, otherwise there's a namespace collision at game start time.

 

3 - Gave the new script object to the lantern in the mission.

 

4 - Rewrote the script object so it spawned a light during init, then turned it on and off when used in the inventory.

 

5 - When it's time to have the script (not the script object) manipulate the lantern light, I grabbed it using the attach position and did what was needed.

 

6 - With this design (spawning a light during init), I had to be careful when a camera has control. The camera automatically turns on the player light when the camera passes control back to the player, whether the lantern is on or off. This wasn't a problem with the original script object, because when the lantern was off, there was no light. The player is hidden during a cinematic by using the Hide() method, and when the cinematic is finished, the Show() method is run. Show() on the player runs Show() on all attachments, so it gets run on the lantern light, and that turns it on.

 

 

Thanks, Obs.

 

And thanks to Moonbo for your suggestion. Unfortunately, w/o the script object change to make the light available, there's no way to toggle the lantern on and off.

[Obsttorte]

I can'T remember, but is it possible to overwrite functions in doom3 scripting? If so you could overwrite the show() method.

[grayman]

I don't know if there's a way, but I don't need to override show() because I have a solution that doesn't require overriding it.