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BioWare's Dance Club Example Module

The Dance Club module is a single area featuring a dance floor and examples how you can use flashing lights and custom music to create a club environment.

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Dance Club Example Module
Released by BioWare, Designed by BioWare's Jonathan Epp
Sound sample provided by Dave Chan. Additional help from Keith Warner and Alain Baxter.

Instructions

The Dance Club module is a single area featuring a dance floor and examples how you can use flashing lights and custom music. Once you have installed the module and hak pak, you can load up the module to enter the Dance Club and check out this interesting environment.

NOTE: If the "Number of Dynamic Lights" setting (in Advanced Video Options) is at the minimum, the flashing lights don't work.

Designer Comments:

You can also read the tutorial on how we added the custom sound to this module.

"What possessed me to make a dance club module? Well, back in the day of the Beta Toolset, people were discovering creative ways to use the existing tilesets. By using proper lighting and making good use of placeable objects, people were able to make believable swamp, underwater and lost city terrains, to name a few.

So I thought I’d try my hand at creating a unique environment using tiles and objects that were obviously intended for a different use. The question was, what sort of environment did I want to try? I’m not quite sure how I ended up deciding to make a dance club, but I thought it would be an interesting challenge.

The first thing to decide then is which tileset to use. For no particular reason I went with the City Exterior tileset. Even though the tileset is meant for exteriors, in this case it suited my needs as an interior area.

The most important step though is the lighting. The easy part was to make the area mostly dark, with some lights along the walls. But a dance club needs a dance floor with flashing lights. I first experimented with changing the tile lights of the dance floor through scripting. That was pretty cool, but it required a certain function call (RecomputeStaticLighting) that pauses the game for a split second. If that function is called once, the player will probably hardly notice, but when it happens every few seconds it can be somewhat annoying.

I then came up with a different solution. I placed a number of invisible placeable objects on the dance floor. Then at regular intervals I apply various 'light' visual effects on those objects. This actually worked out better than I had expected. For those who are interested in the script that controls the lights, open the module in the toolset and take a look at the appropriately named script 'light_control', which is attached to the 'light_control' invisible placeable object.

Once that was done it was just a matter of adding a music loop and some other ambience. Not necessarily the most useful module in the world, but it certainly was a fun experiment!"