Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ] Posts: 132
I've been adding destructible statics to see how they would perform in this mod. In the "streets" map, I've converted all the streetlights, traffic lights, benches, etc into PCOs. I then just use the damage system to code vehicle materials to do instant death to the PCOs with the special material. Which are the small statics littered throughout this map.
I did something similar with the target dummies in my BFH'42 mod. However in that mod, I had the target dummy held in place by "HoldObject" command so that it would become mobile the instant it died. This allowed vehicles to plow through it without slowing down.
However in this mod there should be a speed penalty for plowing into things that you shouldn't.
So instead all the new PCOs have mobile physics turn off. When they die they emit a copy of the mesh as a mobile wreck mesh via the effect system. That part the target dummies also did. However this time the vehicle will slow down a little bit when it hits the object since it doesn't quite get out of the way in time, thus achieving the slow down that would penalize racers hitting them. (wreck objects themselves won't be really be solid in multiplayer environment since SimpleObjects are not networked. But the slowdown effect is the result of the object being hit not disappearing from the map quick enough, so this slow down effect should still work in multiplayer)
Video of it in action:
List of statics I made destructible:
city_signcityredlight city_busstop (main bus stop building is non destructible. However I made the sign posts separate objects and those are the ones that are destroyable) city_lightstreet city_newspaper city_bench
In my work, I did not disturb the original templates. I made copies and added "_deluxe" to the end of the bundle template names that are placed on the map.
So for example, to edit a map to use a destructible version of an object I made into a PCO, I just replace "city_bench" with "city_bench_deluxe" in the staticobjects.con file using Notepad/Wordpad's find and replace function and I can quickly upgrade all the statics I need into the new destructible versions.
Thus I offer this as one of my suggested improvements. It needs to be tested for multiplayer to see how they perform. About the only con I see with this is the added clutter on vehicles with radar. But still, it makes all those small statics less annoying now that they don't impede vehicle movement completely.
Here's the files that I put together. They don't replace existing content. So this shouldn't brake existing maps or disturb existing statics. It can be added to any map via said adjustments to staticobjects con file and if it works out one could either start adding this to more maps or add them globally by changing their names to replace the originals.
IS82Destructibles.rar (a patch for streets is also included for quick testing on Streets. This map would be a good benchmark to test this as it has quite a few of these littered through out the map)
List of new folders/files edited in non patchable RFAs: (just to log what is changed and what is vanilla)
Game.rfa:
materialManagerSettings.con - Added new material template and added entry to load new con file in collision_Armor folder collision_Armor/DesctructibleStatics.con - New con file that defines custom material for destructible statics.
Objects.rfa:
Destructibles - New folder with Objects/Network/Geometries con files that define new templates for destructible statics. Effects/Destructibles_Wrecks - New folder that contains custom Effect templates that emit the wreck meshes for all the destructible statics.
Everything else is in _001 patch format and can easily be dropped in for testing. Backup the objects.rfa/game.rfa before replacing them if you intend to roll back or to multiplayer on non modded version of the mod. That should be common sense of coarse.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Yeah the bench hops around a bit. They all kinda do. I could probably fix that by adding springs, but it may cause lag. May not be worth the effort if they don't work in multiplayer to begin with. So I'll hold off on the springs for now.
Only a couple statics would need them. The benches and newspaper objects would benefit from it. The poles/signs however will not.
The target dummies in my BFH'42 are decked out with springs to keep them stable and they work pretty well, but I don't know how they would perform with many of them on the map....
Then again, the springs will only be active once a object is destroyed by a vehicle (since the springs would only be on the wreck mesh), so it would be a non issue....Something I can add once this is tested first.