>In TI 1.0, this room had something else in it.
: Anyone who played Missed Island will remember the "target
: practice" trick in which a monster is made to trigger a switch by
: shooting a tick on a moving platform; a version of that trick used to be
: in this room, but with an invisible bob in place of the Enforcer normally
: used. Since TI 1.0 seems to no longer be available from anywhere, and I
: was never able to get a straight answer from Nardo on what the old secret
: was meant to do, it looks like the tru7h will never be known. A mystery
: for the ages.
I can clear up this mystery. :)
Kain designed this level, and his solution to creating the lightning was this elaborate target practice trick in the secret room.
Unfortunately right after TI 1.0 was released it was discovered that there was a freeze error in this map - look out the first or second window in the level at the central tower and BOOM, freeze. Likely the bug wouldn't affect anyone playing this on AO, but back in the day, Infinity was the only choice of game engine. :) Kain was nowhere to be found, so I feverishly ripped this map apart and rebuilt it, scavening polygons from here, putting up walls there, all in an effort to fix the problem, which I had assumed was a too many points in a row or too many lines error. Turns out the problem was with the number of different types of monster in the map - it tweaked some limit in the Infinity engine and when you looked out that window you were looking at too many different kinds of monster at once (even though you mostly couldn't see them). Anyway, thats my story - the real reason for the freeze is a mystery in itself and the only thing that really fixed it all was removing some of different classes of monster from the map.
The whole shooting gallery idea to run the lightning effect used up two monsters, and was to my mind, needlessly complex. So I callously ripped it out, and just changed the lighting definitions to do flickers at random intervals. Voila, lightning.
Interesting side note: the pressure to quickly get a fix out for this map (and a few glitches elsewhere) in a 1.1 patch over the course of a weekend left me with a twitch in one eye for several months.
