Help with picking entities in scenes

[Quan]

I have moved onto using scene files and the LE Editor to build my levels but I am struggling to work out how I can pick a entity and change its properties from inside Blitzmax on the fly.

 

I have a directional light called sunlight which I would like to rotate and turn on / off etc. In the past I have just been creating a light in Blitzmax which is fine because I know what it is called but I can't seem to work out how I would find the sunlight entity from inside the loaded scene.

 

Can anyone help me or point me to a example on the wiki.

 

Thanks

[Flexman]

After scene = LoadScene(....) call a function that uses an iterator to go through all the entities and process them as you wish. The following code (not tested as I hacked it out from a failing memory) should be enough to demonstrate one solution.

 

It goes through all the scene entities, finds one that's called 'light_directional_1' (use any name you have assigned in the editor), it creates a pivot object and parents the directional light to it. You can then rotate the pivot to rotate the light, hence move the apparent sun position across the sky.

 

 

' CREATE A PIVOT FOR ROTATING THE SUN ENTITY '
Global sunpivot:TPivot

' ASSUMES scene IS GLOBAL AND MAP HAS BEEN LOADED '
Function ProcessSceneInfo(scene:TEntity)

Local entity:TEntity
Local name:String;

For entity = EachIn scene.kids
	name = entity.GetKey("name", "")
	Select name
		' FIND OR SUN USE THE NAME OF THE DIRECTIONAL LIGHT HERE '
		Case "light_directional_1"   
			sunpivot = CreatePivot() ;
			entity.SetParent(sunpivot) ;
	End Select
Next
End Function

 

And you can use this as the basis to do other useful things.

[Quan]

This is what I was after.

 

Thanks

[cassius]

I use this routine

 

For Local e:TEntity = EachIn CurrentWorld().Entities

Select GetEntityKey(e, "Name")

[Quan]

Works like a charm, thanks again.

 

I still have a load more questions but I'll have a play for a bit and see what I can work out first.

[Quan]

I am still a bit stuck when it comes to changing a entities properties inside a scene from Blitz max. Working with the sun idea, what I would like to do is change the colors during the day.

 

I have tried doing e.color = Vec4(1,0,0,1) inside the selection loop but this ended up changing nothing visually and is probably going about it the wrong way.

[Quan]

After playing some more I have changed the code a bit by making sunlight:TEntity = e after which I can turn the sunlight, hide it etc. But I still can't seem to change its color with EntityColor. I think I know why because its now a TEntity instead of a TLight but I have no idea how to convert it.

 

But my understanding of how things work increasing quite quickly.