Chaotic Dreams

I was playing Devastation earlier today and thought how cool it was when I killed this guy and he fell into a pile of boxes and the boxes fell over the corpse realistically due to the Karma engine. So anyway I was thinking how cool that would be in UT2k3, and since ChaosUT2 is my favorite mod in development, I decided to post some ideas here:

The idea is to create a bunch of miscellaneous Karma objects in addition to the very few that come with UT2k3. Things like boxes and barrells, and stuff, with generally low polys (and thus less complicated Karma physics), that mappers could put around levels and pile up in places. The objects could be shot around, and be destroyed, could be kicked with the chaosut kick feature, and would react to other karma objects (like corpses).

There should then be an option in server set up to disable them, so an internet or high ping server might turn them off, but a lan server could keep them on, and an option to set how many karma objects are allowed at once, and whether or not they should respawn when destroyed.

Anyway, I think it would be a cool idea and probably easy to implement since the objects would be simple (a box only has 6 polys!),

That my firend is a great idea, but will not work right in Multy Player unfortunatly.

You see, the problem is thus: Karma data does not replicate.


What would end up happening is the boxes would get blasted around and each client (player) would see the boxes in diffrent places.

If we ever do a single player Story, then believe me it will be all Karma'd out

Well, maybe it doesn't need to replicate. It could just be eye candy. Make it so that boxes and such don't block players or bullets, but can get bumped if someone walks into one. Then, it won't matter what each client sees since the objects don't affect movement or shooting. A client-side option could be used to turn them on and off. Even if they don't replicate, it would still look cool to see a corpse fall into a pile of boxes, even if other people don't see the same thing.

Shadowstar wrote:Well, maybe it doesn't need to replicate.

It's not that easy.
It would be pretty unfair if stuff blocks your view on your screen but not on mine. Players would criticize that and they'd be right.

That's why you allow players to turn it on and off on the client side. If you want to play a game for the eye candy, then you turn it on, if not, turn it off. It's up to the player.

And, if you play offline against bots, it won't matter whether its on or off since bots can see in the dark and through static meshes anyway.

They can, yes... but we are trying to see if we can blind them with a flash grenade

FurrySound{Moo}

Can't you shrink their awareness radius/distance/whatever to near 0 or 0% (more if only partially blinded)? And if so can you do it and have them maintain reaction to sounds (if they react to sounds anyways).

Once the flash starts to wear off scale the awareness back up to full, etc.

Well, I know that bots that aren't properly pathed like to play lemming on levels with edges, in that they tend to run in one direction or stand around staring at walls and hardly ever notice players unless you walk right up to o them.

If you blinded them, maybe you could have them shoot at random intervals and ignore pathing info. Could be funny to watch a blinded bot blundering around and ricochet a napalm grenade off a wall into himself...

You know it would be cool if flaming bots ran around waving thier arms in the air and screaming like in movies...

It's the Gorge and Arclite grenade launcher comedy team! One gasses himself, the other napalms himself... Ah the joys of Chaos