Warping floors

Discussions about Chaos mapping for the UT series.
azrael
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Warping floors

Post by azrael »

Warping floors:
I need some help for a duel map I intend to make.
The basic premise is; as the players fight, buts of the chamber floor fall away.
Nothing too hard there right? Now for the difficult bit:
I want the pieces of falling floor to warp back to the top of the map and continue falling indefinitely, preferably so that players may continur to be able to use them as steppig stones as they fall past...


Basically, does anyone know of a good way to do this dynamically, without having to do too much coding?
Please?
General_Sun
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Post by General_Sun »

I'm not sure about warping, but you can set movers to move it up and down, but not sure about warping, But up and down might get kinda the same thing that you want to achieve?
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azrael
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Post by azrael »

Yeah, I thought of that, but it's not quite the picture I have in my head;
I was hoping to get the floor to fall away dynamically, based on the actions of the players, then continue on a "loop" of sorts until the map reset.

Actually, as I type this, an idea begins to form, but i'd still like to find out if it really is possible to send moveable bits of a level (statics or BSP chunks or whatever) through a warp zone... Just 'cause it'd be really 8)
TKATK
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Post by TKATK »

azrael wrote:Yeah, I thought of that, but it's not quite the picture I have in my head;
I was hoping to get the floor to fall away dynamically, based on the actions of the players, then continue on a "loop" of sorts until the map reset.

Actually, as I type this, an idea begins to form, but i'd still like to find out if it really is possible to send moveable bits of a level (statics or BSP chunks or whatever) through a warp zone... Just 'cause it'd be really 8)
iirc there was a goodkarma mutator,that maked karma work online

that would work
MassChAoS
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Post by MassChAoS »

Or you could make the floor move in such a way that it appears to be falling forever.
GB
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Post by GB »

if you used karma actors such as simple stone square tiles, then perhaps they would fall when players walked or shot them.

The only problem is that if they were to fall away then players would also have to fall as such, and if they touched the KActor they would suffer dropping damage. I dunnno if KActors can warp, but i did something similar (just a muck about) in ut2003 using the spheres from citadel in a huge deep tunnel - when u shot them they fell, as did the player.

Sounds like a really good idea for an arena tho - tactically shooting away the floor tiles to make it dangerous for ur opponent would be cool..
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lord_kungai
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Post by lord_kungai »

venalanatomica wrote:if you used karma actors such as simple stone square tiles, then perhaps they would fall when players walked or shot them.

The only problem is that if they were to fall away then players would also have to fall as such, and if they touched the KActor they would suffer dropping damage. I dunnno if KActors can warp, but i did something similar (just a muck about) in ut2003 using the spheres from citadel in a huge deep tunnel - when u shot them they fell, as did the player.

Sounds like a really good idea for an arena tho - tactically shooting away the floor tiles to make it dangerous for ur opponent would be cool..
Adding to that...

Is it possible to make a whole map like that? I mean, it would be cool if you could shoot away parts of a wall to get someplace faster or you could shoot at a pillar and make it fall on sombebody's head. Maybe you could get special awards announced for that, like "BONE CRUSHER" or something. But I think that involves splicing the entire map into smaller segments and making each of them destructible.
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Gen_Identikal
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Post by Gen_Identikal »

you could add movers which are damage triggered. The player spawn area has to be solid though iirc.
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BIGFOOT_PI
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Post by BIGFOOT_PI »

Basically make the floor pieces out of mover meshes. then make the movers damagetriggered- and set to "LoopMove". then set their numkeys to 4 (or how ever many movement stages you want). Then set each movement key to make the mover move down and out of the map, then away and outside of it, then up and directly above its original position, then the loopmove will take it back through its original position and keep on going like its still falling over and over. set the mover to CrushWhenEncroach to cause it to hurt players if it touches them, and set the the glidetype to MoveByTime so it stays at a constant rate of movement.

example pic:
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ps- I dont think a damagetriggered loopmover works with a regular proximty trigger (to simulate stepping on or near the mover causing it also to start moving too since you cannot make a mover both bump and damagetrigger moved) - when I tried it the mover moved but never came back around like it killed the loop moving...
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Gen_Identikal
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Post by Gen_Identikal »

just add lava at the bottom of ur level. Instead of having that complex loop thing BIGFOOT did just have a simple damage triggered UP/DOWN mover that falls into lava.
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azrael
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Post by azrael »

@ Bigfoot:
Yeah, that's kinda what I figured I would have to do, but it's way too much work for the 41 floorpieces I had planned for my small duel map... Plus, I wanted to do it with warpzones so that I could have a "bottomless map", with the players warping back to the top of the level with the floor pieces, to continue the fight til someone dies :twisted:
Of course, that last bit is technically a spoiler, so don't tell anyone, mm'kay? :wink:

@Identikal:
The whole pitfall ito lava bit has been done before... I recall a certain Duel map where one had to grapple to the ceiling at the start of the map because the pillars under the playerstarts dropped away into a lava pit... I don't really want to do that again, see above for what I did have in mind.
GB
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Post by GB »

lord_kungai, you could theorectically make an enitre map ouuta this stuff, but it would be time consuming and wouuld be perfromance hungry...

however, i did do a matrix inspired hallway as a test using the pillar from the ut2003 intro (the one gorge or whatever punches) , and ran about 40 pillars which exploded and stuff when u shot them. The trick is to hide the kActors after they land, cos if a player stands on them, the veiwport spins and rotates like crazy....

as for the mover idea - it would definatly work, but would be really time consuming, and possibly crush players when they lowered back into position (or at least have the potential to trap players ensuing an easy win for there opponant..).

I think the only to way to test warp zones and Kactors is to set up a quick test and try..Its a tricky concept tho, but if you pull it off it'd be a truly unique map...
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lord_kungai
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Post by lord_kungai »

Firstly, i have to admit, i don't know s*** about map design in UT, so I have only a basic idea of what you all said about movers and karma actors. So, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Is this possible?:

The entire map were fragmented into mover meshes
Each mover mesh is made to be interlinked with each other
Each mover mesh is made damagetriggered
Each mover mesh is made to have 'mass'
When a mover mesh is destroyed, the mover meshes around it lose their link with the destroyed mesh
When a mover mesh or a chunk of mover meshes are not linked to anything, they fall
Anything under the falling meshes (players, other meshes) get damages based on the speed and the total mass of the mover mesh chunk
Like weapons, mover meshes respawn after some time and unlinked mover meshes disappear after some time


But the above scenario will be dependant on the type of map

On a 'suspended' map, like Face 3, the entire map will have to be supported by one or more indestructable mover meshes, so that the whole frikkin map doesn't just fall. Also, if the mover meshes fall off the map, they are killed by the 'map boundaries', just like players.

On ground-based maps, like Maul, there is a layer of indestructible mover meshes a couple of metres below the 'surface' that support the map.

Reasons why this would be cool:

Somebody is sniping off a ledge. A player shoots the ledge and it breaks off, taking the sniper along :twisted:

Enemy has your flag and is heading for his base. You take a flak cannon and make an underground tunnel to his base. Then you shoot the wall above the entrance to his base so that it falls on him as he is about to enter :twisted:

(This sounds a lot like Worms Armageddon)
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GB
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Post by GB »

hmnn...

heres my perspective on what i can understand:

firstly, the movers wouldnt need to be held up by something - meshes can float quite happily and still fall as such when shot. A meshes position is locked, even Karma actors, until a force acts upon it such as shooting - it will then fall using a gravity. Jumping on mover meshes can also trigger them, which could be a prblem (this is why Karma actors would be of better use, because u can specify how much force makes them react).

the meshes also wouldnt need to be interlocked, just jutted side by side, and could fall independantly. The could also be set to collide with one another if they were karma actors, so that realistic falling effects could be created such as spins etc.

i also dont know if u could have the movers respawn - this would require an emitter really, to spawn ,eses, but i dont know if emitters can spawn Kactors, or movers which follow a certain path - in fact i beleive you cant.


To be honest, the mover method is too impractible for what you want to do, and the Kactor method is not flexible enough- movers are good for doing looped movements, but not so realistic for damage triggered and collision effects. K actors are perfect for realist debris and stuff, but cant be used to loop - once they react, then thats it. They also drain performance hugely, as they try to collide even with the level boundries.

the way to do it, at a guess would be this:

Have the terrain meshes such as face3 split into managable chunks. Place these into the map as karma actors and set the damage limit to effect them. this would at least give ypu a level which would be destroyable - the problem being it would not reset until it was reloaded (does duel reset the level each round?). unless you could script a "level reset" actor, the karma stuff would fall away and the level would gradually be destroyed until no-one could stand anywhere...


hopefully, i got whta yopu meant, and hopefully i have explained why some of the concepts would/wouldnt work.
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lord_kungai
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Post by lord_kungai »

venalanatomica wrote:firstly, the movers wouldnt need to be held up by something - meshes can float quite happily and still fall as such when shot. A meshes position is locked, even Karma actors, until a force acts upon it such as shooting - it will then fall using a gravity. Jumping on mover meshes can also trigger them, which could be a prblem (this is why Karma actors would be of better use, because u can specify how much force makes them react).

the meshes also wouldnt need to be interlocked, just jutted side by side, and could fall independantly. The could also be set to collide with one another if they were karma actors, so that realistic falling effects could be created such as spins etc.
I really have no idea what a mover mesh or a Kactor is, in truth. If I have understood right, if the pieces of the map are not somehow linked, the large-piece-of-broken-off-wall-crushing-the-enemy concept is going to get ruined. :cry:

BTW, what [piece of code, etc.] makes a player accelerate as he/she falls and get damaged by the ground according to his/her speed? Could that help
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