Plan for Leo Altmann

Wow, I actually got around to posting a .plan... In the works: playermodel selection, energy shields.

I don't believe it! I actually got around to posting a .plan! Will wonders never cease. In any case, I'll do a brief summary of what's in the works. At Spent Lemon, we're currently taking a bit of a break, after the release to the testers of version alpha 02 of our project, currently dubbed HoloTAG (spawned from an inside joke involving a certain parent opposed to violent video games). That little thing called finals looming over our heads. But we're still working away, mostly on design and concept stuff now. But I've been doing a little coding in my spare time (eg, between 11.00 PM-ish and 1.00 AM-ish and weekends when i'm not busy...).

So what's on the horizon:
We're finalizing the concept sketches and design of our playermodel (and the plot as well.. :D) so we can finally model it and replace the re-skinned 3dGPAi1 model we're currently using as a placeholder. I've been starting on a system to allow selection of your player for in-game, though I really havn't had much time on this yet.
But the big fish I'm wrestling with as of late is the health system for the game. Basically, what we decided we wanted was something primarily based on energy shielding, but with some armor componant. The current playermodel design has the character in a patchy, scrap-metal ish body armor, but with a shield generator on the back. Seems weird to have this armor on the player with a shield-based system, no?

So, with that in mind, i've been pondering what kind of health system i could scheme up to incorporate both shield AND armor. The concept that seemed to work best in my mind was something similar to one I've seen used in a few spaceship games, but that seemed like it would lend itself to an FPS. Essentially, your main defense is your shields, which recharge fairly rapidly. When shields are depleated, damage is done to your armor. But, unlike the shields, your armor does not recharge. When it's gone, you're flat as a cat on a highway.

Upon pondering the implementation of such a system into torque, and wondering if such a thing was possible with only scripting, (and seeing that it looks as if no one on the forums has done such a thing before), it hit me: There's already the energy system set up and integrated, that i'm not using in any way. Why not just modify the code to use the energy as the primary thing that takes damage, and when its all gone, move on to health? This seemed like it wouldn't be esp. hard to code either. Again, I have not yet actually looked into this, due to the lack of time, and the fact that I'd like to do this all in one sitting, I will probably get to it on the weekend. But in theory i see no issues. I will most certainly keep the .plan updated with progress on this, and if it works well, maybe submit it as a resource too.

Very briefly, in other news, I cant wait to try the TBE alpha. This means I can actually do source code mods on the PC now! Up until now, I havn't been able to do any such things, since I didn't have the cash to lay down for a micro$oft compiler or the time/patience to wrestle with minGW, and while I could compile and mod on the mac, it didn't make sense to break compatability. As such we've been using an unmodified 1.3 comiple on mac and the TGE demo executable on windows... :P

Well, I really should be off to cram for my french test tomorrow. More on shields when the time comes...