so i was wondering... how hard would it be to create some kind of dynamic rope thing in QC?

i'm thinking, you would put down a func_rope and then specify the length of the rope. then target at an info_notnull.

for the code, i first thought it would be pretty easy, all you'd have to do is first spawn an entity chain and then set each of the nodes in the chain to obey quake gravity.
then, all you'd need to do is check every frame to make sure the next link hasn't moved out of range and if it has, move it back along a straight vector.

but then i started thinking that you can't just iterate forward through the chain because you would have two anchored positions with only the center moving freely and then my head exploded. :( 

and this is the best part: i started trying to code it because i was too lazy to make brushwork wires in my map. �_� 

ropes are easy enough, just set up a havok-like physics system and include inverse kinematics, then set up the constraints between your rope links, and mark the two ends as unmoveable. :) 

With two anchor points, you have the trail of gravity come from both at once. The only tricky situation is in the middle. 

if all you want is a rope that doesn't collide with anything, including itself... it's doable.

To solve the rope position for a static rope, you just set it up at spawn: guess and then iteratively refine the locations of all entities until it's within a certain tolerance.

If you want it to be dynamic, you don't need iteration, but you give the rope some elasticity and then have it accelerate to the correct position every frame. With the right values, it will look pretty good. Otherwise it will be bouncy and rubbery and go crazy. 

You also need to render the rope. I guess you would use a model that represented a segment of rope X units long. Whenever the distance between segments is not X, you will see gaps or overlap. Or have a bunch of frames in the .mdl to represent a range of distances, and quakec can select the frame based on the actual distance between joints on that frame. 

Here's one tutorial I found, not sure how easy it would be to implement in quakec though: http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_string.htm 

If it's static, a rope hangs in a cosh curve ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary ). You can just calculate it with a scientific calculator I guess :-) 

The thing I'd want the most from creating a good rope system is just frustratingly out of reach of the QC - to be able to control endpoints of a polygon independently of each other. The use would be to attach some end of a polygon to one "entity" and the other end to another, so you could create a continuous mesh that you could deform individual segments of.

Without that, I'd say you're better off just creating a static mdl prop to represent a rope. One trick that I think could work well in a map is creating a reaction to "wind", and ropes would be a great prop for displaying it. The idea is to have a global wind variable which stores a value between say 0 and 40 representing the wind force in that frame.

You'd want a slow random walk which would move the wind through these values, it's possible that adding crandom()(sic) to it every 0.1 seconds and capping the value within the range would suffice. Scaling the adjustments by frametime(and then back up with a larger constant) would allow you to recalculate the wind strength every frame which might improve the animation. It might also benefit the model to make it more likely to move the wind towards the middle values than the extremes.

You then need props through your level like ropes, "ye olde inne" signs, torches, lanterns and flags which are specially designed to react to the wind. They might be give specially designed models which have frames from 0 to 40 corresponding to the strength of the wind. Then they would only need to have think functions which regularly update the entity's frame to match the wind in that frame, maybe with some jitter.

In some cases, like the sign at the inn, you might only be going for simple rotation back and forth. Then you would be better served using .angles rotation since some engines transmit it with higher precision, and you would avoid the floating vertices rotating a sign two degrees each frame is bound to produce. You would also not need to use granular values between 0 and 40, but just use the floating point wind value directly to calculate the angle.

Then just add some howling wind and creaking timber sounds and your windswept landscape is complete! 

i was actually not going to bother continuing but those posts kind of encouraged me to at least try...

ended up with this:
http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/ropes1.jpg

each segment is 16-32 units long (they contain 16 frames in 1 unit long increments).

each frame, i iterate through the chain and add a velocity vector pointing towards both the next and previous points.

this works somewhat, but you have to tweak the tension (speed multiplier of the velocity vector) or it jitters a lot.

it also doesn't really work with longer ropes because you need super high tension to keep it from falling apart but those levels of velocity cause excessive jittering.

so yeah, with the expense of iterating the chain every frame and needed many segments with 1 entity each, it just doesn't seem worth it.
if i do try to continue with ropes generated at run time, looks like i'll have to look into static ropes, probably with a cosh function like mwh posted (thanks for that).

it's a shame though because i had hoped to get the ropes to react to rockets passing by and explosions. oh well. :S 

if your FPS drops, the required velocity to keep the segments together becomes increasingly larger. at some point around 30-45 fps, the velocity is too high and the chain breaks. 

..my idea is to have in my map many different skinned monsters per class (4 or 5 soldiers with different colors, 4 or 5 knights, ..)

Easiest way to achieve this ?

-I'd happily skip the creation of every different skinned monster in qc code(since I want to change only clothes color for each!) 

Store the new skins in the mdls; give the monsters a "skin" "#" field in the map (# being the index number of the respective skin). 

 

there's 2 ways to create reskin monsters.

1. Create all new .qc files for each reskin, using the same frame macros but renaming the function names (so they don't conflict at compile time).

2. Integrate all the types of monsters into the same original monster code so that at key points in the code, it checks to see what type of reskin it is and then behave different accordingly.

method 1 is the easiest to understand and and read because everything is seperated into individual files. the monsters will adhere to the standard monster coding setups.
method 2 is the easiest to code because you don't have to rewrite anything and just add in little snippets for things like different attacks or a different ai_run routine.

also of note, a lot of the behaviour is controlled by the checkattack function, so simply having a seperate one of those can help distinguish between reskins.

if you're planning on doing this much coding, you should probably check out inside3d. they are more focused on coding while this board is more focused on mapping. 

re 460: clairvoyant? o.0 

i see what you meant now.

also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21D-21MLrAE

not sure what those 'shivers' are... i can't only guess it is a symptom of irregular framerate. a momentary dip would cause it, i suppose, although i thought i fixed that. :P

also, i obviously need to find some way of adding in damping of some sort because those things will bounce around for ever. 

Does anyone have/have a link to the lost chapters src from qexpo? http://qexpo.quakedev.com/booths.php?tag=necros doesn't go to the page. I've seen it linked somewhere here, just can't find it.. 

http://qexpo2005.quakedev.com/booths.php?tag=necros 

 

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/qcgui1.jpg

another program with debatable usefulness. :P 

is it possible to determine if the player is inside a triangular space with just the info of the 3 vertices and discounting vertical axis with QC?

making a monster that traps the player inside a triangular area but it would be awesome if the monster could tell if you were actually trapped (inside) or not. 

god damn it...
as usual, after thinking about it for a few minutes, i figure it out a few seconds after posting.

i can just use the dot product of normalized vectors from the origin vertex.

we need a delete button. :P