Hideous Destructor 4.10.0b

[Matt]

Maybe this is related, but I've had trouble bouncing grenades through windows.

Illustration:


It seems the grenade gets hung up on the outside "corner" of the linedef.

I do recall at one point on the weekend getting rid of some code that was originally intended to preserve grenade momentum even after ExplodeMissile() is called. That's probably it. [EDIT: Or maybe not... the code is not only still in there, it's in there a couple times because lol proofreading]

Will revert unless someone with better experience with these things prefers it this way.

[Djames516]

I'm a bit unclear on how the ammo limitation works for the ZM66.
If encumbrance is on and I have a backpack, it seems I can pick up plenty of full mags, but only a limited amount of used ones.

Would it be possible to have it to where you can have more used mags, and would it also be possible to have a command to load used mags instead of fresh mags into the minigun?

[Caligari87]

On a slightly different note (maybe this is in and I haven't noticed), could monster AI be compatible with "stealth"-style gameplay? For example, having monsters go to your last known position and then lose track of you if they can't see or hear you? I think this is feasible because I had a moment recently where a zombieman had aggro'd to my derp and I was able to sneak around behind him for an easy kill. Extremely satisfying. Would have been even better if a quiet melee weapon like a knife were available to allow quicker kills than fists.

[Matt]

I'm a bit unclear on how the ammo limitation works for the ZM66.
If encumbrance is on and I have a backpack, it seems I can pick up plenty of full mags, but only a limited amount of used ones.

Would it be possible to have it to where you can have more used mags, and would it also be possible to have a command to load used mags instead of fresh mags into the minigun?

That's exactly how it works.

Right now "used mags" are just an abstract pool of rounds that (at least for the ZM66) get lumped in random amounts whenever they're dropped or loaded. This pool does not increase with the backpack at the same rate as the full mags, as there's no telling how many there "really" are.

Trying to change this paradigm is going to be part of a major overhaul of all the weapons that isn't so much embryonic as "a twinkle in grampa's pants" right now. Hopefully it will be a little smoother than getting everything up to speed has been when I started moving the player stuff to ZScript.


As for revisions to monster AI, that was a work that was in progress for a couple months back in the late winter, then everybody hated the new imps (still summonable as "hdimp", "hdmimp", "hdhimp") and they kept causing memory allocation errors and all the player stuff was vastly more urgent anyway. Trying to emulate them having eyes and noses and (worst) ears and thoughts other than "he here. i kill." is going to be exponentially more difficult than everything I've done to date.

[Djames516]

Right now "used mags" are just an abstract pool of rounds that (at least for the ZM66) get lumped in random amounts whenever they're dropped or loaded. This pool does not increase with the backpack at the same rate as the full mags, as there's no telling how many there "really" are.

So in other words, it doesn't keep track of how many used mags you have, just the number of rounds in those used mags?
So if for instance I pick up 2 used mags, each containing 20 rounds left, the game doesn't say "Now you have 2 used mags with 20 rounds each", instead it says "Now you have 40 rounds in your 'used mag pool'"?

And if I hit reload while holding an empty chaingun (and I don't have any full mags), the game could randomly decide for me to put in one magazine with 40 rounds, or 4 magazines with 10 rounds, or 5 mags with 7 rounds, 13 rounds, 10 rounds, 4 rounds, and 6 rounds, or basically any combination of mags that add up to 40 rounds? Is that right?

[Caligari87]

Vae, I managed to get a really clean and simple version of explicit magazine management in Tranquility (thanks to gutawer!) by pushing and pulling indices from a dynamic array on the player. It's actually super-cool and conceptually not that hard to implement. The idea is that whenever the player reloads, the gun just pushes the old mag onto the end of the player's mag array, and pulls+removes the next one from the front of the array. You could even have a passive routine on the player that likewise rearranges the array so full mags are always first, and empty mags are gradually reloaded.

This is basically how it looks from the weapon:

Code: Select all

	action void TQ_PickNextMag() {
		let plr = TQ_Player(invoker.owner);
		if(plr) {
			if(invoker.Mag) plr.Mags.Push(invoker.Mag); //push the weapon's mag to the last spot on the array
			invoker.Mag = plr.Mags[0]; //copy the first mag in the array to the weapon
			plr.Mags.Delete(0); //delete the first array index from the player
		}
	}

[Gollgagh]

eyy nice queue

add the sorting and you'll have yourself a priority queue

[Caligari87]

That can happen on the player with a simple bubble sort. Just a for loop in Tick() that iterates the size of the array and moves a mag to the back of the array if it's less loaded than the one before it. Not very efficient, but since there's probably only a few dozen mags total it's negligible.

EDIT: Also Vae, not sure if you noticed but I opened an issue on Github. Seems Naturist class crashes with an address zero violation.

[Matt]

Djames:

That's how it works right now. It was an improvement from the way it was done back then.



Caligari:

I had no idea that ticker started before level-entry.

Simple enough to patch though hopefully that entire function can be removed once I scriptify the weapons and the individual cooldowns can be done in the weapons' own tickers.

I'll take a look at the array method.


EDIT: So I managed to get exactly none of that mag stuff done but here's a custom loadout thing

[Somagu]

Hey, Vae, I happened to be watching some gun-related videos and noticed that the Bushmaster M17S rather resembles a ZM66. Moreso than any other bullpup-style guns that I've ever seen. Is that a coincidence? Is there actually a specific physical model for the ZM66?

[Matt]

I might have seen it before for all I can remember!

As far as the design goes, I just kinda slapped together whatever I thought would make sense for a good military AR that bears a reasonable semblance to the blocky grey things on the player and zombieman sprites and went from there (though there were a few explicit AK and G36 influences here and there).

That is an uncanny resemblance though.


EDIT: This does remind me though, I had posted a bunch of concept stuff for the ZM66 back in the day (long before I got Hemo to take over the first-person stuff at least):

http://riotouseaterofflesh.tumblr.com/p ... eventually
http://riotouseaterofflesh.tumblr.com/p ... he-weekend
http://riotouseaterofflesh.tumblr.com/p ... armour-and
http://riotouseaterofflesh.tumblr.com/p ... t-of-a-wip
http://riotouseaterofflesh.tumblr.com/p ... floor-plan

Bonus: celebrating the hatching of the thunderbird. Plus its gestation and conception.

Malus: the best monster

[Matt]

If this doesn't crash that's a 3.1.0.2 right there:

• hd_penetrate true by default.
• involuntarily punching and shooting while berserk.
• some cleanups and fixes to custom loadout menu.
• updated zscript version no. to 3.0.

[Somagu]

involuntarily punching and shooting while berserk.

RIP, berserk packs. Unlikely that I'll ever use them preemptively ever again. I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually. Thanks for the update!

[Matt]

I'm probably going to tone it down tonight. I tend to start these new features at extreme rates first simply because they're easier to test that way.

It's definitely not going to be the equivalent of a ZM66 cookoff at any rate!

[Djames516]

Veacrius, is there a list of Hideous Destructor releases, with release notes/change notes anywhere?
One of the reasons I ask is I'd like to find the latest, most stable build for multiplayer that was released before the heartbeat etc health system overhaul.