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I've started on my second mod, which I want to be a lot more straight-forward and light-hearted. I want to showcase the map, itself, above all else. I've fleshed out about a fourth of it, which is a little bigger than the entire dungeon of the first mod. It should play through at a faster pace, since the enemies will be skeletons and there will be no reason to leave the dungeon until it's completed.
So with my latest mod I wanted to throw water beneath a lot of the bigger areas, because I like the way bones float across their surfaces. I got a very hard lesson on how water works, and it's kind of a pain in the ass. I thought I could grab a tile of flowing water and throw it down, spin it around, and have it point in any direction I wanted.
Nope.
First, there's the water object, which holds the information related to its size, scripts, keywords, and the water type. The water type is actually what defines the water's appearance. For creating flowing water, you're required to use three different layers that interact to create the water's surface. Wind direction and speed are the two big ones, because they dictate in what direction and how quickly the water flows. This value can be different on all three layers, allowing you to give the illusion that the water is flowing out in three different directions. The difficult part is discerning which direction the water on the layer you're on is flowing, because you can't turn off the other layers, and the direction is in degrees, out of 360, lacking any indication of which direction 0 or 360 might be. On top of all of this, a water object can have only one water type. You have create a new object and type for every different direction or speed you want to use.
In the end, it does look really good. Worth it? Maybe, but there's definitely an easier way than this.
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