Plan for Mike Lawrence

A few world editor tips and a plea for what I assumed would be basic info.

First area of exploration with the editor was modifying the map size. Which you can't, but in a way you can.

After fiddling with the files and looking through several resources, it became apparent the terrain boundaries are locked at 2 Km. They are tiled, however, so a player can walk through a repeating terrain block ad infinitum.

What can be changed is the Mission Area. I want about 6 Km to work with. First, something that did not work.

I walked beyond the terrain block boundary while in the Terrain Terraform editor (the green boundary) and tried to drop an object at my location. As expected, it dropped the object at the coordinates in the "home tile" - i.e. the first terrain area tile in the middle.

But --- If I set the mission are boundary to *exceed* the terrain boundary, then I can place an object in one of the other terrain area tiles. This tells me the world coordinate system is dependent on the mission area, not the terrain block area. This is a good thing. To do this:

open the .mis file for your mission. In my case, I made a copy of the tutorial.base in a new folder called learning.pad. So, my .mis file here: example\learning.pad\data\missions\test1.mis.

Right at the top is the "new MissionArea" section. In here, the parameters for the mission area are set. I wanted 6Km, so I set the area line to look like this:

area= "-3000 -3000 6000 6000"

When I reloaded the mission and went into the mission area editor, it now showed x=-3000, y=-3000, w: 6000, H: 6000. Voila, 6 square Km to place objects in. The only drawback is the terrain area will repeat within this area, but that's fine.

The other thing I discovered was how to slow the frisky green F guy down. I ran him from one green boundary to another in 3 minutes flat, which comes to 24 Km/hr or about 10 mph. Not totally unrealistic, but one of the main requirements for my game is realistic movement, so I hunted around to find out how to slow him down. This is pretty easy, as it turns out.

File: example\learning.pad (or whatever directory you're project is in)\server\scripts\player.cs.

Then just look for maxforwardspeed. There are also settings for backward and sidestep speeds right next to it. Default is 14, so I cut it in half to 7. Now my guy jogs around instead of hypersprinting everywhere. Unfortunately, this is a static variable, but it's a place to start. Another interesting thing in her is RunSurfaceAngle, which tells the player what angle of slope he can handle. Default is 80. Set that to 45 so we couldn't climb everything.

Then, I tried to read about water. And hit a brick wall. It's not in the SDK docs and a search brings up some obscure script references. There appears to be no reference on working with water objects in the world editor. GG: BOO! I am *not* impressed by this lack of documentation, which has so far been pretty good. So, if GG or anyone else can point me to the documentation on how to tweak water just like we saw in the cool demo *cough*, I would be much obliged.

Same goes for lighting. There is zip on lighting. How do I place them? What are their properties? etc. I should have documentation on how to do that, too. Again, any pointing in the right direction would be appreciated.

Honestly, this lack of docs on basic features of the engine is disappointing. The docs were going merrily along and then just, well, stopped. (And if this isn't the place to register these kinds of requests, then point me in the right direction for that, as well.)

Well, that's it for now. More on player physics later as I figure things out.