Lights and night animations

Info

This guide assumes you already know how to create animations. If you do not, it's a good idea to check out the animation guide.

Night light definitions are practically the same thing as animations. They are defined the same way as animations, but have a few additional attributes. These attributes are:

"light": true // or false

This makes sure the animation lights up and doesn't get darker at night. It should be always true if you are defining night definitions. False by default.

and

"light switching": true // or false

which makes the animation show up all the time (false) or only at night (true). If you are adding window lights to your building you should set this on true.

That's pretty much everything. If you want to append your night definitions to your buildings you should follow the default animation guide. A list of in-game night definitions will follow later (probably), see lower.

Tool for aligning animations easier

Counting x and y coordinates for each window might be tiring and take a lot of time. The easiest and most user-friendly solution is to use ian's Animation Dev Tool. This plugin will allow you to create huge animation arrays quickly and effortlessly. No in-depth animation knowledge needed!

You can also use this tool to fetch in-game night definitions for manual animations. Good luck! :)

Custom animations

Your buildings will probably use mostly in-game night definitions. However, you can add your custom ones that fit the game style if the shape you're looking for is unavailable. The default window light animation color is FFFBE5 and a gaussian blur of around 4 (paint.net value).

Rotation aware night animations

As you may know, rotation aware buildings require to have frames that are multiples of 2 or 4. The same applies for rotation aware light animations too. Otherwise, you might not get the expected result.

Let's assume we have these shining graphics for the building itself and the animation (made by THEMAX):

Then our JSON will look like so:

[
  {
    "id": "$Themax_example_kiosk_night",
    "type": "animation",
    "light": true,
    "light switching": true,
    "frames": [
      {
        "bmp": "night.png",
        "count": 4,
        "h": 32,
        "w": 32
      }
    ],
    "rotation aware": true
  },
  {
    "id": "$Themax_example_kiosk",
    "type": "decoration",
    "author": "Themax",
    "width": 1,
    "height": 1,
    "frames": [
      {
        "bmp": "normal.png",
        "count": 4,
        "h": 32,
        "w": 32
      }
    ],
    "animation": [{"id": "$Themax_example_kiosk_night", "x":0,"y":-25}],
    "rotation aware": true,
    "draw ground": true,
    "needs road": false,
    "text": "A newspaper kiosk based on those you can find in Paris.",
    "title": "Paris newspaper kiosk"
  }
]

Here is our JSON, first we define a night-animation draft, and set up a single frame sheet with "count", "h" and "w" corresponding to the total width of the frame divided by 4. Alternatively, you can just provide 4 separate frames. Most importantly, we add a "rotation aware": true (mandatory, otherwise it won't work).

Once that's done, reference the animation from the building and you should be good to go, adjust the "y" part accordingly so it matches your texture.

There we go, now we have a working rotation aware building with rotation aware functionality. You may also use "frame": index in your animation object for greater control and other attributes as documented by the animation attribute object and the draft.

Android Video tutorial by FVI

Code from the video:

[
  {
    "id": "$nightanimation123",
    "type": "animation",
    "light": true,
    "light switching": true,
    "frames": [{
      "bmp": "HTHLM1.png",
      "count": 1,
      "h": 32,
      "w": 32
    }],
    "rotation aware": false
  },
  {
    "type": "residential",
    "id": "$greenhalftimbredhouse",
    "text": "A house", 
    "author": "FVI",
    "ordinal": 1,
    "meta": {"pca": {
      "version": "4.0.3"
    }},
    "frames": [{
      "bmp": "HTH5.png"
    }],
    "width": 1,
    "height": 1,
    "needs road": false,
    "draw ground": true, 
    "animation": [{"id": "$nightanimation123", "x": 0,"y": -25}]
  }
]

_{This page has been adapted from topics that are on the official TheoTown forum.}