[Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

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Enjay
 
 
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by Enjay »

Well, I had a good chance to mess around with the bubbles tonight and put them in some actual maps and they are very nice. :)
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Enjay wrote:Well, I had a good chance to mess around with the bubbles tonight and put them in some actual maps and they are very nice. :)
Glad you like them.

Here's a try at the insect thing. Basically you put in a bunch of thing #27000's as insects (maybe 6-12 per swarm looks fine) around the spot you want them to swarm and give them two parameters: the TID of a hate spot you want them to swarm around and the radius beyond which they stop wandering randomly and try to return to the spot. Basically, the smaller the second parameter, the more tightly the insects cluster around the hate spot.

Everything is handled in DECORATE, so no ACS is needed to ensure the insects swarm the right target. There's a basic demo map with a couple lights to see how the insects currently behave.

Currently the insect graphics are just black dots, and they may cause blood splatters to appear if the player stands in the swarm (although they do no damage). I'll keep working on this to see if I can improve it, but I think this might give you the basis for something more advanced.
j5bugFX.pk3
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Ceeb wrote:Woo, kickass. These are great for my lab levels. I have a suggestion, by the way. You should try and make a bubble spawner that shoots bubbles sideways, which then drift up. For vertical cracks.
That's a very good idea, and something I'll probably do soon (maybe Monday morning or afternoon if I get a couple minutes). I just need to adjust the parameters a bit to get the proper dispersal, but it should be pretty easy to add.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by Ceeb »

JonnyFive wrote:
Ceeb wrote:Woo, kickass. These are great for my lab levels. I have a suggestion, by the way. You should try and make a bubble spawner that shoots bubbles sideways, which then drift up. For vertical cracks.
That's a very good idea, and something I'll probably do soon (maybe Monday morning or afternoon if I get a couple minutes). I just need to adjust the parameters a bit to get the proper dispersal, but it should be pretty easy to add.
Credit me for that idea so I can feel important, please. :lol:
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Ceeb wrote:Credit me for that idea so I can feel important, please. :lol:
Hey sure, why not.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by Ceeb »

JonnyFive wrote:Hey sure, why not.
Score one for the furries. ;)
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by Enjay »

Thanks for the bugs. It's a starting point, and a cunning one at that. At present, they seem to move quite mechanically - very stop-start. I don't know how successful I'll be, but I'll see if I can come up with anything to reduce that.

The blood decal problem can be cured by giving the insects the +BLOODLESSIMPACT flag.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by Enjay »

OK, here's what I've got so far. I think it looks a bit better - but that could be as much down to the fact that I used insect sprites instead of a dot as anything else. I've changed things so that most of the moving is done by thrusting, thrown a floatbob into the mix and given them bloodlessimpact. The original, I thought, had the insects moving in a fairly horizontal plane primarily because they jumped past a thrustthingz instruction too often (IMO). So I'm thrusting them in the Z direction as often as horizontally. My thrusts are using lower forces generally though.

There could well now be some redundancy in the code - but I'm starting to lose track of the changes so I need to either have some time away from it, or have someone else look and see what they think.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Well, there's the updated bubbleFX resource with wall bubbles (see first post for the file link). Credit to Ceeb for reminding me to do this - make him feel important! :)

@Enjay: The improvements you made look really nice. I like the extended use of thing thrusts - the movement looks a lot more natural. I'll try to clean up the DECORATE a bit and tweak it a little.
Last edited by JonayaRiley on Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:25 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with better jigging!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Okay, I only made a couple minor changes. I scaled the bugs down just a bit, since they still looked kind of big, consolidated the movement code into one place, and added in some comments.

Also, I won't stick my screenname all over this one ( :wink: ) , since Enjay did a lot to make this better. Anyhow, here's bugFX version 3:
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bugFX_v3.pk3
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

Post by Enjay »

Unfortunately, I've come across something that severely limits the usefulness of this (all versions). The A_SkullAttack causes the insects to put enemies into their pain state (try putting a zombieman in that little muddy pool in the test level and flagging the surrounding lines as monster blocking). Enemies will retaliate to the "attack" but worse is the fact that they just stand around yelling in pain because the A_SkullAttack is called so often. If you remove the skull attack, the insects just fly away from their target and never seem to manage to get back. I've tried all sorts of flag combinations but I can't seem to get around this problem. :?
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Enjay wrote:Unfortunately, I've come across something that severely limits the usefulness of this (all versions). The A_SkullAttack causes the insects to put enemies into their pain state (try putting a zombieman in that little muddy pool in the test level and flagging the surrounding lines as monster blocking). Enemies will retaliate to the "attack" but worse is the fact that they just stand around yelling in pain because the A_SkullAttack is called so often. If you remove the skull attack, the insects just fly away from their target and never seem to manage to get back. I've tried all sorts of flag combinations but I can't seem to get around this problem. :?
Yes... I see what you mean. Also, there was a problem with using hate spots, because they're apparently big enough that they obstruct player shots. That was easy to fix, but this other issue might hurt this a lot. I'll see if I can come up with some way to work around it as well.
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

Post by Enjay »

OK, well here is another approach. Unfortunately, it is nothing like as customisable as the first one. Perhaps someone might be able to figure out a way to make it so though?

In fact, I don't really understand why it works at all. It uses code from the Afrit monster (the floating half-baron with the oribting fireballs) and I don't really understand why those fireballs work in the way that they do.

ATM, I've just set up 2 versions. 1 generates 12 bugs in a cloud, the other 24.

Disadvantages:
It uses far more and far clumsier code
It isn't as custmisable
The insect spawner doesn't seem to be able to spawn insects intil it has seen the player

Advantages:
It has no adverse affects on enemies

So, I'm not proposing it as a finished product, but maybe as something that could be used as a stepping stone to a finished product?
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

Post by Unknown_Assassin »

Enjay wrote:The insect spawner doesn't seem to be able to spawn insects intil it has seen the player
You could add +FRIENDLY flag and put a monster nearby

or

Maybe using Thing_Hate on another critter or something?
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Re: [Resource] Bubbles! (now with horizontal movement!)

Post by JonayaRiley »

Well, I think I may kind of sort of have fixed the problem. A little bit. Instead of using SkullAttack, using A_Recoil(-1) combined with A_FaceTarget and A_Stop provides a nice way to keep the insects inside their radius. I took out the the SPAWNFLOATING flag, added the FLOAT flag so the insects can properly change their height to match the insect target, added the insect target as a separate item (so the player can't shoot it), and added a bit of random spawn variance in initial insect position.

Whew... anyway, it seems to work pretty well now, subject to a little tweaking. Best of all, it won't send monsters into their pain states.
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bugFX_v4.pk3
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Last edited by JonayaRiley on Mon Oct 13, 2008 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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