D2X-XL's trigger system has been enhanced quite a bit as time has passed, but most of these changes were rather small and of incremental nature, so to speak. Meanwhile the trigger system has however reached a new level of versatility and power, and this I believe warrants a worklog entry about it.

Master Triggers

Master triggers really give a boost to Descent's trigger system, allowing to combine various trigger-driven actions and even cascade triggers if need be, thus breaking the limit of 10 targets per trigger. A master trigger is a trigger that simply points to other triggers it operates when being activated (I chose two different terms because there is a difference between operating and activating a trigger I will explain further below).

Timed Triggers

I was asked to add timed triggers quite a while ago, but it wasn't until recently that their main advocate (pokeman7452) could convince me to implement them; a task which I found much easier than I had expected. A timed trigger is only activated after a certain time has passed since it has been operated. The delay can be anywhere in the range of 100 ms to 15 minutes (900000 ms). You can even make them have a random delay by giving them a negative delay value, in which case the actual delay will be somewhere between 1/10 and 10/10 of the value entered (in steps of 1/10 to make differences in delay time more apparent).

Enable/Disable Triggers

The purpose of enable and disable triggers is to enable and disable other triggers, which is quite important once you start to build more complex timed trigger systems containing several stages of execution.

Trigger Properties

To harness the full power of the trigger system a few new trigger properties had to be added:

• "autoplay" triggers are automatically operated by D2X-XL as soon as a level is loaded
• "permanent" triggers will not be disabled after having been operated
• "alternating" triggers will switch to their opposite behavior (if they have one) after having been activated

Sample Application

Using the above trigger types and properties, I have built a hologram consisting of illusionary walls that gets erratically turned off and on again, serving as a decorative environment effect. To accomplish this, I have an illusion off trigger and a disable trigger operated by a timed autoplay master trigger. The illusion off trigger turns the illusion off when activated and flips to an illusion on trigger as it was set to "alternating". The disable trigger turns the master trigger off, keeping it from being operated by D2X-XL's trigger autoplay function while the effect is active, and gets flipped to an enable trigger in the process. A second delayed master trigger iss operated by the autoplay master trigger and in turn operates the illusion on and enable triggers, turning the hologram back on and re-enabling the autoplay trigger, making it available again for D2X-XL's trigger autoplay function. Both master triggers have a random delay to make the effect blink erratically off and on. The "alternating" property allows reuse of the illusion on/off and disable/enable triggers, making the process of building the effect much easier.

As you can see, the enhancements of the trigger system actually add some limited programmability to it. Maybe that is why I love them so .