Screen Flash White

I'm trying to do a quick flash of white that covers the entire screen...

My solution so far has been to make a layer that is all white and turn it to invisible by default.

Then, when I need it to flash I turn it on...

Turning it back off is the problem.

I want it to stay on for just a moment -- 25 or 50 milliseconds. The way I have it now (totally lame) is I have an Always event running every 25 milliseconds that just turns the layer invisible. This sort of works, but sometime the flash doesn't show up (clearly a timing issue).

I realize this is clearly not the correct way to do this -- and my guess is the answer to this is really simple and obvious -- but for the life of me, I can't figure out how it's supposed to work... Is there the equivalent of a "turn on/wait 25 milliseconds/then turn off." command?

Also, if this runs at 60 frames a second, aren't I going to get different length flashes than if I'm running at 85 frames a second?

Make a little white sprite, with a private variable for its opacity time.

Now with a start of layout event set the sprite to 0,0, set its width and height to the screen.(not necessary, just tidier for your layout.)

private variable being 0 set the opacity to 0.

If the pv is greater than 0

-set opacity to 100

-set pv to clamp(whitesprite.value('privatevariable') - 100 * timedelta, 0, 100)

Now, when you want to trigger the flash set the pv to 10 or so.

Make a little white sprite, with a private variable for its opacity time.

Now with a start of layout event set the sprite to 0,0, set its width and height to the screen.(not necessary, just tidier for your layout.)

private variable being 0 set the opacity to 0.

If the pv is greater than 0

-set opacity to 100

-set pv to clamp(whitesprite.value('privatevariable') - 100 * timedelta, 0, 100)

Now, when you want to trigger the flash set the pv to 10 or so.

Cool thanks!

I did this exactly, except I kept using the all-white-layer-visibility for the flash itself. I tried the sprite stretched across the screen and then set to 0 opacity -- but it seemed to drop the frames per second more than using the layer version.

Either way, thanks for the timer code. That'll be really useful in a bunch of places!

The gradient object has a built in timer.

Did you stretch it across the whole layout or the just the display? If you set it to the size of the displayed area, and have it on a layer that is set to 0,0 for the scroll x/y rate, then it should be quite efficient.

Did you stretch it across the whole layout or the just the display? If you set it to the size of the displayed area, and have it on a layer that is set to 0,0 for the scroll x/y rate, then it should be quite efficient.

The display area and layout are the same on this project. 1920x1080.

I'll check the scroll x/y rate and see if that helps. Thanks.

The gradient object has a built in timer.

I'll try it that way... Didn't know that!

The sprite object also has a "flash" action :

-> Sprite: Flash for 0.5 seconds with 0.1 seconds interval

EDIT : And the "on flash finished" event that goes with it.

Dunno if it'll slow down everything though.