Star Trek Online - Helpful Tips on Holodeck Effect

I played around with this a fair bit tonight following the Mapolis tutorial and was still a bit unclear after watching the video so I figured i'd write up what I found and some neat uses. Here is the video tutorial Mapolis made in case you didn't see the link in the release notes: http://starbaseugc.com/index.php/sto...-out-tutorial/

Some rules first that may not have been clear from the video of what is happening:

You MUST place the holodeck fade-in, fade-out, and holodeck objects in the EXACT same position. This includes X, Y, and Z positions.
You don't actually need Holodeck 01 if you want to achieve a partial holodeck malfunction effect, I will explain below with screenshots.

What happens when you "fade-out" the holodeck and what are the steps to do that?

First, you trigger the fade-out effect, this can be from an objective trigger, from a place marker, or any other trigger that you want. Make sure the player will actually be located INSIDE the boundaries of the holodeck object.
Second, you have to make sure to hide the holodeck 01 object. What actually happens when you trigger the fade-out effect is it instantly creates a holodeck of the same exact size as holodeck 01 (and since you have them in the same exact place - nobody will notice the swap!). After it creates this exact duplicate, it will fade it out to be invisible and have no collision. The fade-out effect will still be there you just won't be able to see it or interact with it which is the desired end result! You have to hide the holodeck 01 object for the effect to work, otherwise the fade-out holodeck clone will appear, fade-out and then you will still see the old holodeck 01 there.

How do I do the "fade-in" effect, and what is going on with it?

First, you trigger the fade-in effect. What this does, is it fades in a holodeck the same size as the holodeck 01 object. The fade-in effect does not have collision though which is why in his video mapolis put invisible walls in the exact dimensions of the fade-in effect to stop you from clipping through the wall. You can trigger these to appear at the same time you trigger the fade-in effect.
That's it for fade-in!

Ok, so that is pretty redundant to what Mapolis put in his tutorial video but he didn't cover some other neat scenarios that you can do with the awesome effect he provided us. What if you want to be in a mission map, be walking along, an explosion or fire occurs from external forces (ships firing on you) that causes the holodeck to partially malfunction and then glitch back into working again? We can do this effect right now with just the fade-in and fade-out effects. You don't even need to mess with fancy invisible walls or the holodeck 01 object itself.

Steps to produce a damaged holodeck fade-in and fade-out:

First, place a fade-in and fade-out object on your map in the EXACT same position. I recommend 3.8 as a Y height (vertical position) as this seems to work well with rocky ground and will make the floor partially appear and partially be clipped into the ground.
Second, place a trigger of some sort either an objective, or my favorite thing a place marker. For this effect you probably want it to automatically trigger along with an explosion, a fire or some other event. So under the "Special" tab grab a place marker and drag it onto your map, somewhere INSIDE the area that a holodeck 01 object would take up (basically, the fade-in and fade-out effects do not show you the size of holodeck 01 even though they will use that size, so you can temporarily use a holodeck 01 object for placement purposes and then delete it when you are ready to playtest the map). We will use this first place marker to reveal the holodeck.
Third, place another place marker that you will use to hide the holodeck. This also needs to be INSIDE the area of where the holodeck will appear.
Fourth, go to the fade-in object and set it to appear on "Component Reached" and then choose your first place marker (for the reveal). You will want to then make it hidden after you reach the second marker. So your states will be Hidden -> Component Reached - Place Marker 01 -> Visible -> Component Reached - Place Marker 02 -> Hidden.
Fifth, go to the fade-out object and set it to appear on "Component Reached" and then choose your second placer marker (for the hide). So your states window will look like: Hidden -> Component Reached - Place Marker 02 -> Visible -> NEVER -> Hidden.
That's it!

Potential issues you may run into and how to fix them:

When you trigger the fade-in or fade-out effect during testing, your character is teleported to its most recent spawn point. This means that you tried to fade-in an object that the player would have been embedded inside of and the foundry has safety features like mapolis mentions in the video. You need to adjust the Y-height of your fade-in effect or the X and Z position if the player is trigger it and they are inside where the boundary of the holodeck will appear at (remember - you can use a holodeck 01 object to see this exact size and shape to make sure you don't mess up!). This shouldn't happen on fade-in due to the lack of collision I think.
The holodeck object doesn't disappear when I use the fade-out effect! Check to make sure that you set in the States tab of your holodeck 01 object for it to go hidden on the same trigger as your fade-out effect!

For a screenshot to show what this might look like here is the "damaged holodeck" for a mission i'm working on: http://www.greatpcs.net/holodeckshow.jpg

Here is the holodeck in the process of fading out as the system comes back "online" from being damaged:
http://www.greatpcs.net/holodeckhide.jpg

Here is what my editor screen looks like in the Foundry for an episode i'm working on that uses this effect. You can see I have lots of other triggers and effects that go off in coordination so you can get pretty creative with it such as making the arch appear temporarily etc:
http://www.greatpcs.net/foundryholodeck.jpg
In the above screenshot you can see I have my first place marker to the right of my fade-in and fade-out effects, and my second place marker to the left. When the player reaches the first one, I trigger my fade-in effect, when they reach the second one I trigger the fade-out effect and hide the fade-in effect. NOTE: you may want to trigger an invisible wall if the holodeck boundaries don't encompass the normal map wall boundaries and if the player can turn around and go backward to avoid your trigger so that the effect doesn't get faded out like you want. Just think of what a confused player could do and plan for it!

Another tip: be careful of how many effects you trigger when you are fading in or out the holodeck as a lot of explosions etc can lag the effect so it doesn't look as nice (at least on the testing server - not sure what it will play like published).

Hope this helps, feel free to ask any questions you may have on using this effect and thanks a million to Mapolis for the awesome addition to the Foundry tools. Oh, and to take screenshots of the Foundry without needing Fraps or some tool, just put STO into windowed mode and the default Print Screen + Paste into mspaint will do the job just fine (The Foundry doesnt seem to support screenshots at the moment from the in-game method of hitting PrintScreen and looking at your STO folder..).