When the Dynamic Thermometer is enabled, the Thermometer indicator turns yellow.
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 player 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.
Object Groups[]
Objects that are glued together, connected by a logic wire, spawned from an attached Emitter (but if part of the object is broken off, undoing/redoing will break the link), or manually grouped using the Loading Linker are considered as one object for the Dynamic Thermometer, such as for loading zones.
To improve thermometer usage, try to minimize the number of objects attached and loading as one by ungluing them and only gluing objects that must move as one, as they enlarge their related loading zone to fit all attached objects. In addition, too many objects in a group will fill the thermometer faster than if they were separated, if this occurs the yellow-orange thermometer will appear showing that it is inflated due to the excessive number of sub-objects in a group.
Be careful when using emitters, as the spawned objects if they travel too far from the emitter will inflate the loading zone size and thus make the emitter itself load farther away. The inflated loading zones can make them emit objects while the player is farther away from them than intended. This is most noticeable if an object falls downwards, uncontained by level floor and walls, which causes the emitter loading zone to now droop to the background's floor, and possibly increase in width if the object(s) also roll(s) to the sides. However, for objects that have stuff break due to physics, when a player undos or redos, the links will break and stop counting as part of the emitter's group.
Permanency Tweaker[]
Streaming will cause your logic placed on objects to stop working when the object it is on is unloaded. To stop this from breaking your level you can use the 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.
Preloader[]
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, or a loading screen to appear in the middle of the cutscene.
Loading Linker[]
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.
Modes[]
The yellow orange Dynamic Thermometer indicator.
The Thermometer appears to have three modes when dynamic Thermometer is turned on which are represented by it changing colors. The three modes are yellow, yellow-orange (yellow with a hint of orange), and orange (orange leaning red). When it switches between the modes, the old color drains out and the new color fills in to match. It also does the draining and filling if it switches from the regular red Thermometer to the yellow orange or orange Dynamic Thermometer mode, or vice versa, but not when it switches from the red regular thermometer to the yellow dynamic thermometer mode or vice versa, as the yellow one appears to be a simple recolor of the regular yellow thermometer.
The yellow mode appears to be the default mode of the thermometer.
The yellow orange mode appears to appear when objects that consist of too many connected sub-objects are loaded in. The amount of sub-objects connected to a single object seems to ramp up this thermometer way more. To avoid this mode, try to break up the objects into objects with less sub-objects.
When it is orange, the dynamic thermometer appears to have a smaller limit than the classic Thermometer rules. It is unknown what triggers this mode of the Thermometer.
Trivia[]
- 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 due to running out of RAM. This is different to the normal yellow exclamation point spiky circles that appear when the game attempts to render too many objects at once.