DescentBB

Here's an Idea, If someone made Naval Units for D3. It'll be quite difficult to make them stay on water.

You know like a Destroyer Boat. or a patrol boat.

The weapons for the Destroyer: 4 Mass Drivers(ouch!) and 4 homing missiles or 2 cyclones.

weapons for the patrol boat: 1 rapid fire Vauss.

And make sure they have ground points.

I don't have 3DS Max.

Is this a good idea?

Keeping a vehicle restricted to one plane of motion is incredibly difficult to acheive in D3. While writing OG3 I tried multiple ways of doing this; first I just changed the player's X, Y, and Z co-ordinates but that caused problems with ship control. Later I tried using Newtonian forces to keep the player in check but it drove Wolf on Air crazy because it made his force-feedback stick act like it was in the middle of an earthquake.

[edit] Where did the Delete option go?? [/edit]

Battleships... now theres a level idea for ya

"Keeping a vehicle restricted to one plane of motion is incredibly difficult to acheive in D3."

DC, that's not true The code I have (more likely "had") of your hover code that used the position-changing method would cause the D3 physics engine to think the ship was travelling very quickly upon passing a ledge, especially with higher framerates, because of the way you were setting the position and not adjusting it over time. Note the presence of a "last position" variable in the object structure, and think about how the physics engine might use that in combination with the amount of time the last frame took to draw and other available data to perform an accurate physical simulation


The biggest problem would be knowing which plane to keep the player's naval contraption to. You wouldn't want to outright set their position to the closest point on that plane... That'd just suck, and you wouldn't be able to do anything like wave effects (though the implementation of such a thing would be very advanced; you'd have to draw the water polys yourself and manually handle the physics).

And then the ability to fly normal Descent ships and land on some of the larger watercraft would be absolutely awesome. To control the various guns on the ships. That'd be pretty cool.

okay, I'll shut up now

The code wasn't totally mine, Kevin Bentley wrote a lot (most?) of it.

pATCheS, there were still some flaws with the code no matter what. The code did indeed cast a ray perpendicular to the ship to orient itself to a plane, otherwise it looked pretty weird going up slopes. Unfortunately, that would have limited level geometry to very simplistic shapes, because it had trouble dealing with step-like shapes. We eventually canned the whole hovering idea because it was more fun to have free range of motion anyway.