Lights in Sequence

How do I make a light flash in a repeated sequence

Kinda how you see the Engine in StarTrek? the pulsing light in the tube?

I never really watched StarTrek, so I don't know what you're really referring to but you can trigger lights to turn On and Off, and you can also change their Appearance.
You can choose from flickers and pulses and such. Is that what you were asking about?

No.. I understand that.. what I want is to have a stack of lights, like 6 of them.. the bottom comes on and then goes off as the next comes on and it repeats all the way to the top of the stack and then starts over at the bottom.

Then all you need to do is trigger it that way using logic_relay. You might want to use a logic_auto, too, depending on how you want the lights to start their sequence. Logic_auto will make it start on map spawn.

If you don't want the "lights" to light the world, this is quite possible and cheap.

However, if you want the lights to light the world, its going to be quite a problem with light entities, your going to run into the "too many light styles on face" error. You should use dynamic lights and trigger em on and off. There would only be one dynamic light on at a time so it would be quite realistic.

Just do what amanderino suggested, trigger a logic_rely entity that controls the lights.

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Aaron's Stuff

Aaron, I have never used one of those before.. can you make me a small example map that I can look at and see how its done?

Can this be done with texture lights?

-No, it cannot be done with texture lights, because texture lights have no properties in Hammer.

Aaron is right about using dynamic lights, but if your lights are in close proximity, then I would use one regular radiosity light entity to switch on and off and just use sprites for the actual individual light effects.

That is, either method you use a similar setup with the logic entities. It's a matter of specifics (how will the setup look?) depending on what they are... a pulsing engine from star trek, or an airstrip lightway, is what will determine which entities you want to use.

I've done a similar setup in a map I never released where the player needed to know which way to go, so I made two rows of scrolling lights moving in one direction to point the way. Here's a video of it:

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-If the video is not working, please go here to view it.

A simple setup would be to do the following:

each sprite would get its own name:

sprite01
sprite02
sprite03
etc...

These are our three lights to pulse.

STEP 1: Create a logic_relay entity and a logic_timer entity and name both appropriately (and differently!). Also create your three sprite entites and name them differently. Give them their appropriate settings based on how you want them to look, and make sure they start off.

STEP 2: Go into the properties of the logic_timer.
-Make sure it doesn't start disabled and give it a refire interval based on how fast you want your lights to pulse. a.k.a. the time it takes for all the lights to turn on and off.

STEP 3: Add an output from your logic_timer:
-OnTimer; logic_relay; trigger; delay 0

STEP 4: in the logic_relay output add these outputs.
-On Trigger; sprite01; ToggleSprite; Delay 0
-On Trigger; sprite01; ToggleSprite; Delay 0.10
-On Trigger; sprite02; ToggleSprite; Delay 0.10
-On Trigger; sprite02; ToggleSprite; Delay 0.20
-On Trigger; sprite03; ToggleSprite; Delay 0.20
-On Trigger; sprite03; ToggleSprite; Delay 0.30

SUMMARY: In this example I made three sprites pulse within one tenth of a second (pretty fast) of each other. If you want the loop to stay continuous and without faulter then you would want to go back and make your refire interval on your logic_timer to be 0.30.

-And that should get you the effect you're looking for... I hope.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Love the vid.. thanks for the quick tut RIVEN..

What I am wanting to do is have this in side a glass tube and have the look of the lights moving up though the tube.. not so much see the lights as you do the glow from it in the tube. I was thinking of having different colors as it travels up.. and put a machine sound in it... a humm or something.

Yeah Riven, the map looks cool! Seriously, get your website finished and publish all your work asap! Too much Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead demo I think :dodgy: :P .

Riven said:
-No, it cannot be done with texture lights, because texture lights have no properties in Hammer.

Oh, my bad. I guess I kinda assumed you could do this in Source seeing as how you could do it in Goldsource .

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Aaron's Stuff