"Light effects" in 2K2's spells
 

I always assumed that the lights in 2K2's spells were achieved using normal light/particle effects (I'm talking about things like the trail of light behind bullets, not the projectile GFX). However, I recently found that they're (mostly) still displayed even with lights/particles turned off (and thus must be something else or the disabling of lights/particles is being overridden somehow). I was wondering how these effects are achieved if not with lights/particles.

It was a change with the new Graal. Disabling light effects/particles/weather doesn't actually disable it. Only gives a check for if it's disabled. So they only get disabled if the person wrote in the check as well. I posted about this before because hardly anyone scripts in checks, so disabling lights and such doesn't actually help those who need them turned off to get better speed.

what are the commands/functions if they are checked?

I dunno, something like
if (lighteffectsenabled) {}
You'd have to look them up to see, they're booleans.

There you go >:]

Well, I've been scripting those checks into things on Val Dev.

Ya, it's just really annoying when you're on a computer that can't handle that much lighting effect, and even though Graal will run full speed when no lights/particles are being displayed, there's that one pesky smoke effect or such that slows you down.
And you hope to just turn it off but find out that the scripter did put any checks in so it doesn't make a difference. This happens everywhere and it defeats the purpose of the options... especially if someone new to Graal tries to use them and wonders why they don't make a difference.

I scripted the weather check for weather on GK. I think people do but you need to remind them because most scripters have fairly decent computers.

Ya. That was one thing I always liked about Graal. It was accessible.
Fairly small download, the requirements weren't too high(used to be), a fast internet wasn't really needed.

Any reason it was done this way rather than (at most) adding an optional parameter for overriding disabling on the light/particle commands?

Well, its possible that some feature/quest/event in the playerworld needs some type of light or particle effect working for it to be displayed correctly, to get the full effect of it, like if having lights or particles disabled gave you some unfair advantage or disadvantage. Though at the moment nothing comes to mind so I can't really be clear on that.

For the weather thing, thats completely scripted so Graal itself wouldn't know how to disable it.

Yeah, but that could be solved with an extra parameter and wouldn't require every server to go and modify any scripts that use lights/particles to make it so that they can be disabled.

I think I might have a solution, two new variables could be added to TShowImg: forcelight and forceparticles. These would be false by default and it would basically mean you could disable lights or particles in the F3 menu and it would be shut off for all scripts automatically unless forcelight or forceparticles is true in the TShowImg object, since that is what is used for controlling the displaying of both.

Meaning if scripters need a certain effect enabled against the user's wishes they would be to specify it themselves.

Dunno, all I know is I made a post about it and asked nearly the same thing. All I kept getting was because new Graal uses light effects for fonts and similar things. That's all they would say, no comment on why the options couldn't just be hard-coded to ignore the necessary things like fonts, and only apply to script.

::high five:: That's exactly how it should work. Luckily I have a good computer so for my gameplay it doesn't matter, but I know plenty of people with ****ty computers that could use this.