This component adds the ability to generate a light flicker value, which can be plugged into light intensities, or material parameters, or anything else you want.
It works on the same basis as Quake, Half Life: Alyx and countless other games; there is a "flicker string" made up of lower-case letters a-z, where a = 0, m = 1 and z ~= 2 (actually 2.08 in practice), meaning the default value range is from completely off, to double brightness.
You can use all the Quake in-built flicker patterns, or make your own.
The flicker component is a non-scene component that can be added to any actor, just search for "Steves Light Flicker"
If you select "Custom" in the flicker pattern field, you need to supply your own string of a-z characters in "Custom Flicker Pattern". With the default min/max of 0-2 the character values are:
| Char | Value |
|---|---|
| a | 0 |
| m | 1 |
| z | 2.08 |
The max is slightly over 2 as you can see, that's because to make 'm' (char index 12) exactly 1 the divisor has to be 24, meaning 'z' as character 25 is slightly over ('y' is actually 2).
You can change the output range from the default of 0-2 if you want, just remember that 'z' will slightly exceed the max.
By default as with Quake every character in the pattern applies for 0.1s. Change the speed multiplier if you want that to be different.
Whether to start playing the flicker immediately, or whether to await a call to Play().
When not playing, the component does not tick.
The component will just output values when it's played on the OnLightFlicker event:
It's up to you to feed these into light intensity values, material parameters etc.