I have the initial proof of concept built out for handling a secondary blade on a staff saber like Darth Maul or the Inquisitors. If you want to run two physical blades from a single Proffieboard these new Secondary Ignition/Retraction Effects and the new Conditional Effects will allow you to gain independent control over each. To start, in your presets you will set up one blade as the Primary blade (this will work just like a single bladed saber) in the style code, then you will set up the “other” blade as a Secondary blade in the style code. This will allow you to have a separate ignition and retraction for the Secondary blade that you can control in several ways.
The way it will work is your Primary blade will control if the saber is ON or OFF through normal button/gesture controls. After igniting the Primary Blade you can then set up the Ignition and Retraction for the Secondary blade, meaning you can ignite and retract the secondary blade as long as the Primary blade is ON. If you retract the Primary Blade through normal controls this will also retract the Secondary blade and turn the saber OFF. The Secondary Retraction only runs while the blade is ON and only retracts the secondary blade.
The Secondary Ignition/Retraction use the existing out.wav and in.wav sounds for your font but play them independently from the Primary allowing you to get the sounds to match. There are a few ways the Secondary Ignition/Retraction can be controlled.
- a 3rd Button (easiest will be addition of a 3rd button to the saber)
- a new button control for 2 button sabers (1 button may not be possible without someone removing a feature and modding the prop on their own unfortunately) - TBD
- a separate Conditional Effect - in the demo I set up a Conditional Ignition effect on the Primary Blade, if the blade is held parallel at the moment of Ignition, the Secondary Ignition will trigger once the primary blade finishes igniting we can add a delay to this as well, a la Darth Maul in TPM. We can actually set many different Conditional Effects and have different ones in each preset if we wanted.
In addition, for this demo I have set up Conditional Effects for Blast and Clash, this allows us to choose which blade the effects appear on because we don’t want two blades showing the same effect. The Conditional Effects control which blade the effects appear on from within the style code as well. So the normal controls for each effect still run the effects and then via the style code we select which blade will show the effects. The Condition in the demo is whichever blade is pointing up, if parallel the Primary Blade shows the effect. This gives us control over how the affects appear, so blasts and clashes will always appear on the blade that is pointing up (when the effect is triggered), allowing us to switch the effect back and forth by simply changing the angle (like battling two opponents).
I am still working with Fredrik on Conditional Lockup effects, but the plan will be to also have Lockup react to a condition so the style for each blade controls which blade shows the Lockup effect. This is still in development currently.
For those interested, I created the “faux” double blade using a SubBlade and SubBladeReverse with the “primary” blade starting at the middle pixel in a normal SubBlade and the “secondary” blade using SubBladeReverse so that it also starts at the middle but then moves our to the hilt.
There’s still a ton more coming, so stay tuned!