We've got the animations, the streaking warp effect, and the ability to make planets appear and disappear.

Anybody used these to simulate going to warp and traveling between systems without a map transition in The Foundry?

You know I was thinking about that for my second mission as it's going to be a pursuit of another ship if I can figure out ways to make it work. Too bad we don't toggle a background layer on and off so that you could actually have the warp effect go away when entering the new system.

This is a cool idea, I'll have to play around with it. The only thing I can immediately think of is having a reliable timer to switch between states or some way of making the transition feel right. It would be extremely complex but would make for a very interesting mission.

I did something like that in "Parallel intersections" in the second map. I think the effect worked out really well, but it took a lot of tinkering to make it work well. I think I used about four or five different triggers to alter the map to make the whole thing seem "natural". Without giving away spoilers, there are two prime states to the map, and I found that if you instantly switched between those two states, it was a little weird. So I built in an intermediate state, but that took some other things to make it make sense, like forcing the player to be there, and stay there with invisible walls.

In other words, for an effect like this, I'd suggest you build state A, and state B, say orbit of planet 1 and orbit of planet 2. Then you build an intermediate state, "at warp", and go from A>warp>B, deactivating the previous state as the next becomes active. But to have it work out right, without the player getting trapped in a planet, the player has to be trapped in an invisible box during the warp state.

So you have to get them to the box location, then have them interact with something to put up the box and go to warp and despawn state A, then interact with something again to despawn the box and warp state, and finally put up state B. If you let the player fly around freely during the warp state, they could end up places you don't want them to be.

Yes, I am doing this in my mission. I wanted to create a way to make it seem more like the shows, where you explore space, not just move through sector space and then jump to a system. Originally I was thinking of having interstellar space and then switching to another map, but I decided having to load so many maps would be irritating. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out so far.

It works out pretty well, however it would be better if we could cause animations to play automatically instead of having to tie them all to interacts. That way we could automatically make a drop from warp when you "reach the system", rather than having to have a button to "Drop To Impulse". It's not so much the interact that is a problem, just that your mission objectives list gets kind of cluttered.

I did something like this in one of my test-missions when the Foundry was on Tribble. I didn't like the effect so I created a "warp-map" - a map with the streaks and invisible walls holding my ship in the right position. I also had another ship flying before the player ship (because it was a chase). There was some dialog and stuff going on but actually almost no triggering at all.

But I think if enough triggers are used, the effect could actually be pretty convincing.

Does anyone have an example map for me to look at how the effect looks?