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Life 11: More customization via LogicBricks
🕑 Added 2020-11-20 16:30:39 +0000 UTCAs mentioned earlier, I spend this month on making my Life plugin compatible with LogicBricks. This is a huge step forward! For example you are no longer limited to control AnimationPatterns, you could also have Life control a Timeline animation, if you like that more. The old DriverThrustSFX sub-plugin has been replaced with DriverThrustTrigger, with gives you more control. Instead of a fixed set of sound effects (bed squeak, flesh slap, etc.) you can now trigger a LogicBrick and do whatever. That could be a RandomSound brick playing your own sounds, or something completely different, like a plugin controlling external devices, say my Connect plugin.
Preparations for all this obviously were already part of the recent LogicBricks releases. Life could have been one huge over-complicated plugin that can do all. That would imply some WTF level of UI, some plugins out there have that. Instead you now have a collection of more or less one-purpose plugins you can stick together like Lego bricks, hence LogicBricks. That hopefully makes it more understandable and manageable, yet at the same time more flexible.
The main demo scene has been updated accordingly. Before there was a scene specific StateMachine plugin controlling the intensity, thrust and some other parameters of the Life plugin. For non-coders this was a black box, not useful for any other scene. NOW there is a LogicBrick StateMachine plugin doing exactly the same as before....except now you can look at it, understand what it is doing, tweak the parameters, add more states and so on, no coding required. You can replicate the structure in your own scene and modify it for your needs.
Have a look at the diagram, it's also displayed in the scene itself, so you have it at hand when dissecting the scene.
Changelog
- BreathingCore: Making "OnChooseBreath" available as VaM Trigger so you can connect to a LogicBrick/StateMachine.
- DriverThrustTrigger: New sub-plugin replacing DriverThrustSFX. Way more options for you by exposing to VaM Triggers. E.g. connect to LogicBrick/RandomSound or my Connect plugin.
- Improved UI: Getting rid of annoying scrollboxes around info panels.
- Demo: Split demo scenes into separate VAR to avoid hard dependency on LogicBricks.
- Demo: Updated and reduced to just two demo scenes, SimpleBreathing and Thrust+SFX. This avoids cluttering the scene browser. Also better naming to not confuse new users not realizing this is a demo scene, should Meshed decide to include this version in VaM by default. (VaM currently ships with Life 10)
Download
- This is an EarlyAccess release! Download will be available for free under CC BY-SA license after 2020-12-06. You are allowed to reference this package in your own VAR packages, even if they are paid or use a different license. Links to my Patreon are always appreciated.
- Beware of some browsers mistakenly renaming .var files to .zip when downloading from Patreon. More details on how to install VaM content and missing dependencies here.
