To animate my light, I have taken a sample and edited it to fit within my playable area, this is placed in such a manner to draw players into a firefight for the rocket launcher placed on the walkways above.
The material integrated into the light itself is comprised of multiple texture layers, panners and rotators, these each control a cloud texture sample which is ultimately applied to the light, panning between a black and white shade, giving the effect of a flickering light in-engine, but saving greatly on budgets and subsequently GPU and/or CPU strain.
I have control of multiple values within the rotators and panners, allowing me to speed up and slow down both panning and rotation. These are attached to the UVs of the Texture sample, control the pan and rotation values of the sample and in effect control the flicker rate of a light source, these can be edited accordingly to give any desired rate of flicker.
A standard electrical type flicker is desired in my level, but other design concepts may require other types of flicker.
More flickers may yet be implemented into my level, but for now I have two in place, one on the walkways which create the top tier of my deathmatch map and one which is to represent a flickering light in a exit sign. These are both currently running from the same material, but I may also duplicate my current material and subsequently change the values to give a different flicker rate to the object.
I could also create a pulsing light with ease in my level, modifying the texture of the light with a single gradient varying between black and white, this would pan vertically or horizontally in accordance with the texture itself, and would pan at a certain speed, alternating between a lit and unlit fade effect, this would give me the effect of a pulsing light without the strain of physically animating lights within Kismet.
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