Game Development Community

Different Control system

by Nick "Dig" Koirala · in Torque Game Engine · 12/11/2002 (6:15 am) · 5 replies

I know I should probably work this out for myself, but everyone here is so helpful (grease grease).

I have twin jet engine hovercrafts in my game, based on the hovervehicle class. Two things I want to do one I already know the answer to, but I'll give them both incase there's any good advice out there!

1. I want wake and contrail effects. The crafts are mostly on water and should disturb the water somehow. At the moment I have a nice dust effect over land but using the splash feature only gives me water effects when I hit the water very hard.

2. I want to have independent control of the engines (like twin track tanks, if you follow me) instead of the arrow keys as the current config has I want 'A' and 'Z' to control the left engine and ';' and '.' to control the right engine. different combinations will make the craft turn, and give a more unique feel to teh game.

CAN I script these or do they require engine modifications, in either case any idea where to start.

Like a lot of people here I have plenty of other work which keeps me from figuring this all out myself :)

If you promise not to steal anything and not to distribute anything (especially the model, its a temporary place holder I 'borrowed'.)
then the first trial is available from my site. www.littlemonkey.co.nz (Downloads -> Horace Initial BETA)

Its not the gameplay yet, just allowing some people to try out how it works of far. Still VERY much work in progress....

Cheers,
Nick

#1
12/11/2002 (10:32 am)
You could try binding the left-right axis to one engine, and the up-down to the other... That way you wouldn't have to really reconfigure anything, except labelling the axes differently in the UI, and changing the default WASD or arrow keys binding to be az and ';...
#2
12/12/2002 (6:29 am)
I see what you're going for here (I too am working with hovercraft), though I don't have any code snippets or links for you. =/

I CAN say, that by default the hovervehicle class is not set up to do what you wish.

You will have to modify it so that it actually has 2 points of thrust/ engines.

You may want to modify the class, or then again, if you created your vehicle as two seperate entities (right and left) then perhaps you could "weld" them together in a script. If that were done, then pressing forward on one engine only, would cause you to bank and turn by default. (theoretically of course. ;) )

Just a thought.
#3
12/12/2002 (1:50 pm)
If you absolutely had to do it in script, maybe you could use applyImpulse at each engine point in response to a trigger, instead of the built-in functions.
#4
12/12/2002 (2:41 pm)
Download link no workey :(

nm, ing for me :)
#5
12/12/2002 (5:56 pm)
It should be working now... My monkeycities site is hosted on a fairly unreliable server unforetunatly. It was very cheap though so I find it hard to complain!

Littlemonkey doesn't have much room left on it :(

Hope you can get it,
Nick