Question Control Orbs, basic question from a newb.

[Gazdude72]

HI all, what an awesome game and great community, glad to be here! Now for the stupid question time. I use VM mainly in VR mode ( quest2 ) and generally use scenes created by others and swap models to my tastes, I don't create anything myself, yet.
In some scenes I see four different coloured Orbs, I understand these are "control Orbs" but have no idea how they work! I try moving them about and somethings change. but I can't seem to work out which orb does what and how to manipulate them properly.
Any clues? I've looked at the video guides but they cover so much about creating things and technical items I'm not ready for yet. Is there a specific point in any video I could jump to, or can someone explain in simple terms what to do?
Thanks for reading ?

 

[TToby]

Hi,
this is no easy question. Maybe you can link the scene, so we can have a look.
Many things in VaM are represented by orbs, you have to select them to see what they are.
Those colored orbs could be from the timeline-plugin, from a light-setup, or triggers, or something completely different.
VaM is not a simple game, but a kind of sandbox tool. With some experience and a lot of tinkering you can do almost everything you can imagine.
To get there, especially for more complex scenes, there are many different options, plugins and workarounds, and everybody has his own style.
If you will look at 5 scenes from different creators which will roughly do the same, you may find 4 different ways to do this.
Even for very experienced users, it often takes quite a while to understand how something was done by the creator, or maybe even why.
Many of the stuff is done from a development process and often has unneccessary, over-complicated or even completely unused parts in it.
If you want to learn how to do your own scenes, you maybe want to look at very simple scenes to start with the basics.

 

[Gazdude72]

Thanks for the reply, I think I get what you're saying, a scene to use as an example is The Dark Gift series https://hub.virtamate.com/threads/the-dark-gift-episodes-1-6.5351/#post-13409 , episode six scene 4 for example has 4 coloured balls visible to the player and they obviously control the actions of the models, but I can't figure out whch one does what, and I see I'm not alone.
The creator doesn't seem overly helpful and I guess it's his choice what the orbs do and they aren't standard across different creators or scenes? Trail and error it is then, lol.
Thanks for the encouragement, I'm slowly working my way through the how-to vids and hope to make scenes myself and share here. Might be a while but I'll get there, and it's great to have a responsive and helpful forum as a resource.

 

[TToby]

OK, I didn't took a look at the scenes, cause my VAM time for today is over....
But just take a look at all those dependencies!!!!!! What a monster! I guess it is the longest dependencies list I have ever seen!
IMHO, this is a very inconvenient scene to learn VAM.