Dynamic Thermometer

"Using our brand new Dynamic Thermometer functionality, the LBP create thermometer is now more flexible than ever. This will allow for created levels to be massively bigger than ever before and even have much greater depth since a creator can now make use of up to 16 playable layers with some rather neat new gameplay objects to help our heroes transition between multiple layers instantaneously."

The Dynamic Thermometer is a tool of the Create mode Thermometer introduced in LittleBigPlanet 3. When enabled the level automatically loads objects that are in range of the camera and unloads objects outside the range. The size and width of the loading zone is adjustable in the Gameplay Settings menu of the Popit.

The Dynamic Thermometer when enabled causes a level to dynamically load objects inside a loading zone. Many games use streaming to reduce the amount of random access memory or RAM used allowing worlds to fit inside limited RAM.

Usage
By default, the dynamic Thermometer is not enabled. When enabled, objects too far off-screen are not ‘present’ in the level, and will not be handled or loaded by the game as it doesn't exist in RAM. The game will allow you to set the size of the loading zone and its width as well.

The Loading Zone Shape can be set to: Regular, Square, Tall and Wide.

The Loading Zone Size can be set to: Large, Medium, Small, and Very small.

With the smallest Loading Zone Size & Regular Zone Shape it loads 10 up- & downwards and 12 blocks to either side. It takes 22 blocks to deload up-& downwards and 36 to the side.

Obviously streaming will cause your Logic placed on objects to stop working when the object it is on is unloaded, so to stop this from breaking your level you can use the new Permanency Tweaker to force an object to always be loaded. Objects like global Logic microchips that must be active all of the time can have the Permanency Tweaker placed on them. Objects which are always loaded will affect the thermometer globally, so it is recommended to minimize and optimize the global logic to minimize global usage of the Thermometer.

The Preloader is another logic tool which allows you to have the game to pre-load or fully load areas of your level even when the loading zone would normally not automatically load them. One example is loading a section of your level which a cutscene will show later, so when the cutscene shows that section of the level the objects won't suddenly pop out of nowhere.

The Loading Linker is a tool which is similar to the advanced glue tool, but is used when you need two objects not glued together to be loaded as it was a single object, instead of the separate objects being loaded and reloaded when the parts go off the screen.

Trivia

 * The Thermometer sometimes turns orange when there is a lot of objects or logic loaded. When it is orange, the dynamic thermometer appears to have a smaller limit than the classic Thermometer rules. It is unknown why it does this.


 * When the game loads objects when the Thermometer is overheated, the newly loaded objects appear as flashing red spiky circles with black exclamation points while the thermometer is overheated. It does this to prevent it from crashing when it runs out of RAM.