Happy accidents

One of the interesting things about working with Metaplace is that, with all of the different API calls and graphic effects, you can do all sorts of things -- some planned, some not!

For instance, the module that I just published today provided something like a "circle of transparency", which, from Ultima Online, would make objects that blocked your view of yourself transparent, so you could still see things near you on the ground, or that are attacking you, or just to see yourself for whatever reason. This is a client-side effect, where the client just clears out a circle of user-specified radius based on the objects it renders. Of course, I don't have access to the Metaplace client, nor does it have support for this, so I had to write a workaround, as I usually do.

An actual circle was out of the question (or is it? Hrm...), so instead, I went for a method of making any object whose sprite overlapped with the user's become invisible. This requires a lot of the screenspace/worldspace calculations that I've talked about. My original plan was to just make the sprite invisible to the user by changing the sprite, or through some sort of effect. As I was working on it, testing the algorithm for determining sprite overlap, I thought, "I'll just have it show a glow effect on the objects that it wants to turn transparent". This would be a temporary effect, just to help me visually see what the code wanted to hide. The effect didn't seem to be appearing on the objects it should, so I started messing around with it, changing values and effect types to see if the glow was perhaps broken. Once I figured out the issue (and I unfortunately cannot remember what it was), I had the effect set to the "bevel" effect, and had the object hiding itself.

Well, let me tell you, this effect was even better than I had planned. I had *planned* to just have the object vanish! But with the bevel effect, you can see through it (since I turned on the "hideObject" setting) but still get a sense of what it is you're seeing through, because the edges still have the bevel effect applied. Fantastic! If you want to see the effect, go take a stroll around my rotateplace world, stepping near the trees.

This lucky stumbling on a solution was a bit surprising, since I had previously made a demo world where you can play with all of the effects (I'll talk about them in a future post). But even after having all of that hands-on experience with bevelling and effects in general, I never thought of using it as a transparency system that including the "cloaking border", as fellow-tester Dalian described it.

This is what made me think of writing this post: there are all sorts of things that you can do in Metaplace, whether it's modules people have written to single lines of code, that you're able to put to uses that no one likely thought of. Once in a while, I've looked at the latest release notes, read about the latest functionality that was introduced, and said, "hey, not only can it do this, but you could use it to do THAT, too." But generally, I read about new functionality and think either "ahh, they finally added that feature we've been asking for", knowing what the original request was for, or, "hrm, they added this feature out of the blue; I wonder what the Metaplace content folks needed it for," and come up with a reasonable idea. But who knows what kind of interesting uses are still undiscovered, because we read about these features and just recognize the "intended" use?

And that brings up the other side: having a need for some feature, effect or functionality, and not having it... what do you do? Well, I kinda pride myself as the King of Workarounds, and I can usually find a way to do pretty much anything needed in Metaplace, even if there's nothing close to an obvious way to do it. The workaround may be ugly, may be laggy, may be considered illegal in thirteen states, but I can usually find one. And I think that, too, speaks to the beauty, the flexibility of the Metaplace platform: even if you can't do something, you can still do it.

Edit: I just realized that this post probably had me sounding like a huge Metaplace fanboy -- I didn't say anything bad! How's this: the best tool we had for workarounds, the OutputToUser() function, was taken from us. So there!