I've seen this in tons of games but I don't know how this is done.
I want to make an event where you can make a room dark(not too dark, you can still see it) but have it where there are some torches/lights and have a small circle of light surrounding them.
This can be done with the Show Image event command, and a transparent circular image.
There's one around here somewhere, I was looking for it just the other day.
But yes it definitely adds a certain "mysterious" element to the dark dungeon you are exploring.
Oh I know how to do that. But thats if I'm making a dark room where the light follows you around. Here, I'm talking about making a dark room where you can see whats around you but light itself coming from the environment and not the player.
It sounds like that would still be done with images but I feel like this would create a problem with overlap.
If all the light sources are fixed, then you can make an image for each dark room with the light sources already placed in the correct positions. However, that would be really complicated and take a lot of work and planning ahead.
I hope it will be possible with ARC's multi-tilesets.
I tried to incorporate this on a 2k3 game and eventually gave up on the concept. Unless you want the constant circle that follows you around, it doesn't really work that well unfortunately. I think there are scripts to do this in XP, though. I'm actually trying to basically move the game to XP for the sake of having that and a few other systems in the game itself.
I am posting because I just came across this script and thought about this thread. I know it is a bit old, but this may be a solution that many people would find useful.
Light Circles Script for XP
http://www.775.net/~heretic/downloads/LCS_v12.exe
The effect isnt perfect, but should be sufficient for your needs. It does exactly match the OP's request.
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Okay, now it seems that I cant get to HBGames where I found this, so I cant link to where I got it from. I'll just upload it to my server for now.