Map Objects

A map contains many objects, including houses, roads, trees but also traffic lights and other decorations. The vanilla game allows the use of ‘admirers’ to give certain behaviour to objects. A good example is the Nightlight2: it makes the object visible during night and invisible during the day. Another example is the SunAdmirer, that makes an object only visible when the sun is. (It is invisible in bad weather or the night.)

Seasons adds some more of these ‘admirers’ to the game, to allow for seasonal objects, such as a BBQ in the summer or a hearth in the winter.

How admirers and objects work

Admirers are object classes with an onCreate method. You have probably seen the term onCreate before. The method is called during the loading of a map or placeable if it is specified to an object.

The generic use of an admirer is as follows:

  • Select the object
  • In the attributes editor, add a new use attribute of type script.
  • Name the attribute onCreate
  • Give the attribut a value in the form of modOnCreate.<admirer class>, like modOnCreate.IcePlane
  • Add any attributes that are used by the used admirer.

Note that adding such a script will not change the appearance of an object. The scripts only run when playing the map.

Defaults: vanilla compatibility

When testing your admirers, you will notice that without Seasons running, the objects do not change visiblity. That is because the script to do so is not available. If a game encounters an onCreate script call that it can’t fulfill because the class is not available, it will be ignored. That means it will not change the state.

If you want an object to be visible on a map when Seasons is not active, set it as visible in the Giants Editor. A good example is a BBQ. If you want to hide it, like a snowman, set it as invisible.

There is one more issue, and that is collisions. Setting an object invisible does not disable its collision. This is by design. The solution here is simple:

  • For objects that you want hidden when Seasons is not active:
    • Add a new user attribute named collisionMask (integer)
    • Put in the decimal collision mask value of the object (like 255 for 0xff)
    • Then set the actual collision mask for the object in the attributes to 0.
    • This causes the game to load with no collision, and then Seasons will turn on the collision when it is visible.
  • For objects that you want shown when Seasons is not active:
    • No need to do anything special.

Object types

As of Seasons 1.0, there are three objects that can be used by maps. They are detailed below.

For each admirer, the name of the class is specified, to be used in the onCreate attribute. Also any attributes for that admirer are given, with a possible default value. If you omit the attribute the default value is used.

If you are missing something or want something special, make your own objects or ask the team for it to be added in a future version.

Visibility per season

Make an object appear in one or more season, while hiding it in the other seasons. By default the object is invisible for all seasons.

  • class name: modOnCreate.SeasonAdmirer
  • attributes:
    • mask (integer, default is 0)
    • collisionMask (integer, default is the objects actual collisionMask)

The mask values are as follows:

  • Spring: 1
  • Summer: 2
  • Autumn: 4
  • Winter: 8

Add the value for each season you want the object to be visible for, and put that value into the attribute. For example, 10 will show the object only in summer and winter.

Visibility for snow

To create a snowman or visual heaps of snow, you can use the SnowAdmirer. With it you can make an object visible when there is snow. You can also hide objects if there is snow, by adding the hide attribute and checking it. Lastly you can specify the required snow level for the object to be visible. Each level is 6cm of snow.

  • class name: modOnCreate.SnowAdmirer
  • attributes:
    • hideWhenSnow (boolean, default is false)
    • minimumLevel (integer, default is 1)
    • collisionMask (integer, default is the objects actual collisionMask)

Frozen lakes

It is not possible to freeze a lake. It is however possible to make it look like it is frozen, by adding a plane just above the water with a frozen ice texture. Then use the IcePlane admirer to make it visible only when the ground is frozen.

Make sure you set the plane invisible so it does not show when not using Seasons.

  • class name: modOnCreate.IcePlane
  • attributes:
    • collisionMask (integer, default is the objects actual collisionMask)

For a nice guide to make frozen lakes, see this video by ShyWizard (for Seasons 17):

Notes

Seasons disables collision masks when hiding the objects, unlike the vanilla admirers. Note however that this does not work when using an admirer on a transform group containing nodes with collisions.

You can use multiple admirers together by using transform groups. Make sure the most restrictive is on the actual node, as per the note above. An example is a BBQ that is only visible in summer when the sun shines.