Half-Life-style damage indicator in ZScript?

[wildweasel]

So, I'm working on polishing off the to-do list for ww-cola3 finally, and one of the items that is vexing me atm is my method for displaying the direction of incoming damage. I'm currently hijacking the mugshot for this, but things like player skins and other IWADs are messing with this. I can add +NOSKIN to my player class, but this has undesirable side-effects at the moment. Is there a better way to handle it using ZScript?

[Matt]

angleto(inflictor), then storing that somewhere on the custom playerpawn and accessing it on the hud?

[wildweasel]

That sounds like it has some merit, but I'm afraid I'm not very good at ZScript in order to put that into practice, and poring through gzdoom.pk3 for examples has left me a bit clueless. Would you mind elaborating a bit for me?

[m8f]

Damage Direction Overlay has an example of displaying the direction of incoming damage in ZScript.

[wildweasel]

Well, if that's literally just a drop-in mod, Cola3 has little business importing it as-is...can't make much sense of the code to adapt for my needs, either. Thank you for the pointer, though.

[Matt]

To get the relative angle, first we need to get the direction the thing inflicting damage is coming from. The simplest way I can think of is by overriding the player's DamageMobj(), so somewhere in your playerpawn definition you would have:

Code: Select all

    double angletoinflictor; //used to store the damage angle
    override int damagemobj
    (
        actor inflictor,actor source,int damage,
        name mod,int flags,double angle
    ){
        //calculate the relative angle
        if(inflictor)
        {
            angletoinflictor = deltaangle (angle, angleto(inflictor));
        }

        //do all the regular stuff
        return super.damagemobj
        (
            inflictor,source,damage,mod,flags,angle
        );
    }

Then in your HUD you would access the player's "angletoinflictor". There are so many ways that this could be set up I'm a bit stuck writing an example; you can even use SBARINFO and give the appropriate inventory dummy items in the above DamageMobj call (including "DamagedForward", etc. so you could pass on the angletoinflictor info - in which case you could just demote the angletoinflictor variable to a local variable called only in the function and not stored on the actor).

[wildweasel]

Well, I'm still running into problems, though not with any of the code given to me here - I just can't get it to a point where I can even display anything on screen, and I'm positive it's because I'm doing literally everything else wrong.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUY5D8 ... sp=sharing - Here's a link to the project as it stands. Most of the problem code is commented out, so it doesn't crash on startup, but I have literally no idea what I'm doing with any of it.

[Matt]

What's DamageTimer and where is it supposed to be defined?

[wildweasel]

What's DamageTimer and where is it supposed to be defined?

damageTimer gets pulled from within the player class in /zscript/ColaPlayer.txt. Or at least, I think it does, I don't think I've quite done that correctly.

[Matt]

If it's a property of WWColaPlayer then it has to be called through a casted pointer.

I see that's already been done further down in the bigger version of DrawDamageIndicator, but before that there's a missing set of conditionals for the block starting with "damageAlpha = current / 35.0;". I'll change that from "if" to "if(1)".

I'm going to guess that the while loop at the end is intended to fade the thing over time. That won't work, because all of this is going to be done in the same tic. I'll change that to an if.

You've got 2 variables both based on playerpawn damageTimer. I'm going to just use one for both of them to the playerpawn.

Remember that if you define a variable within a function, it's going to remember only what happened during that function call - next time it's called you start fresh, and it can't be accessed in another function.

I can't find where DamageTimer is being changed (should be added every DamageMobj and reduced by 1 every tick) so I'm just going to add them.

[Nash]

@ Matt -

I've put something together based on the info your gave, but my problem is that it's only accurate for projectile monsters and melee monsters. For hitscanners, the direction seems to be way off. Any ideas?

[Matt]

No idea!

The worst part is that if I do this:

Code: Select all

//debug
actor ppp=Spawn("InflictorPosition",inflictor.pos);
ppp.angle=AngleTo(inflictor)+180;

            // update the HUD's damage indicator
            lastDamageAngle = DeltaAngle(Angle, AngleTo(ppp));
            wasDamaged = true;
...
class InflictorPosition:Actor{
    default{+nointeraction renderstyle "add";scale 0.4;}
    states{spawn:BAL7 A 10 bright A_FadeOut(0.1);wait;}
}

it actually works fine!

Something to do with the bullet puff disappearing for blood maybe?