Factories can also be used to make a game playable through physical motion (as opposed to simply touching icons on the map), even when it is played at many locations.
Factories can also be used to randomize the locations in a game.
Factories are an alternative to placing location-based triggers by hand in advance. Instead of one specific pointer to an ARIS object, they allow an author to create a general set of parameters under which an ARIS object will be automatically produced for players. Authors can specify what, where, how many, and how often objects come into being for either each player or all players of a game as a whole.
When you create a new factory, the actual names of the options you see in the window are:
To the right of that window, you will also see all the usual options for a locations, like Availability Range.
The name and description of the Factory only appear to the author. Each produced object inherits its display qualities from the original.
1. Create the objects the factories will be pumping out (plaques, items, etc.)
2. Create factories for these objects and set the parameters.
3. Create a "start factory" trigger in an appropriate scene.
4. Put appropriate locks on the "start factory" trigger.
The combination of all the parameters in step 2 can be a bit confusing at first. Having a couple basics down will help parse the rest.
Where
For each factory, there is a doughnut (maybe moving) in which objects may be produced.
How Often
Think of the Success Rate as a timer. Each time it comes up (while a player is in the game, or when a player rejoins the game and the timer length is longer than the time since the timer last went off for the player), the factory checks to see if the doughnut contains the max. number of objects. If so, it does nothing. If not, it adds one more.
The Factory never adds more than one object per cycle of the timer.
The timer runs per player when the max. number of objects is defined per player, and for “all players” otherwise.
Factories generate triggers for your objects. But you also need to create a trigger within a scene to start the factory itself. The factory trigger is always a sequence type trigger. In the long run, you will always use it to specify what the player needs to do (how to unlock the factory trigger) to start the factory.