Orc Theft Auto

#1 I don't know about your modification. I think it would be loads of fun having AI that can hijack the car. I would however, add code so that when the AI hijacks an occupied car that the player in the car is released.

#2 you should be able to melee attack him out othe car, more fun.
I noticed the ai hijacking thing a while back, and noticed how bad the ai are at driving.
a hack is when an ai jacks a vehicle, call a function that deletes the ai, deletes the vehicle, and spawns an ai vehicle, all at the same time.
there is a resource for dynamicaly reloading a vehicle datablock, so there are no hicups, then when the ai vehicle gets jacked back by you, the whole proccess happens again in reverse.

#3 Noticed that did ya? Just wait until the first time you have an antelope or even a butterfly run over (and pickup) a weapon :D

There are several ways to prevent this behavior -- if you're so inclined.

You can use a "use/enter" method to take control of the vehicle instead of upon simple collision.

Since bots don't have a client you can throw this at the beginning in your onCollision code:

if (!isObject(%obj.client))
    return;

Or even test explicitely for bots:

%className = %col.getClassName();
if(%className $= "AIPlayer")
    return;

You could even write an AIPlayer class onAdd() replacement that set the canMount bool to false instead of true. Like many things in Torque there is no one set way to do things and there are often many alternatives that you would never think of.

In my codebase you can shoot people (players and bots) inside of vehicles, and if there is a driver when you attempt to "use/enter" the vehicle it does a mass comparison to see if you can pull them out. Some bots are "smart" enough to know they can yank you out of the car -- others just get run over :D

#4 Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Those are great ideas.

A few years back I had also coded something when a bullet someone, it would detect WHO the bullet came from, so it would not allow AI character bullets to do any damage to other AI players. This way when AI players ended up in a single file line shooting and chasing me, they would not "do each other in".

Torque is just a lot of fun to play with. These suggestions are great and I think I may implement DeepScratch and Michael's suggestions.

#5 @Michael,
shooting at players/bots inside vehicles?
how did you get that working?

#6 @deepscratch: it's more of a gimmick than a feature, really. When the vehicle is damaged I just do a check to see if there is a pilot, if so then pass some damage on to him based on armor rating, with an increasing random chance to kick him out. Most of my vehicles are one man hovertanks (think "A Boy And His Tank") so that works out ok. It is kind of hacky with passengers though.

At some point I was thinking of maybe having protected and unprotected mountpoints for passengers with possible hitboxes (theory only). Another of my untested theories is that if the players' collision box protrudes outside of the vehicle convex then you might/should be able to shoot them -- I remember in Tribes (might have been a mod) being able to snipe the pilot and also shooting weapons out of the passengers' hands in an APC or a LPC.

#7 @Michael

Then maybe you can help me with this: I want the vehicle to have three lights. green, yellow and red to represent the health of the driver.

How would you go about doing this, since from what you're saying, you can access a driver through his vehicle and vice versa.

#8 @Nmuta: I'm just storing the player's body as the "driver" in a dynamic field of the vehicle when one is first mounted. Then in vehicle::Damage() I can do something like %obj.driver.damage() to affect the "driver".

I suppose you could do much the same, but also call getDamageLevel() to see how damaged the player is and attach the appropriate color light to the vehicle -- that's a nifty idea by the way!

#9 This question is for anyone:

I am trying to write a function that allows you to "eject" an AiPlayer from a car.

In the console I am accessing the car from its number, for example
4085.engineTorque ; gives me my engine Torque from the datablock,

so I know I'm accessing the objects correctly,

but

4085.unmountImage(0);
4085.unmount();
4085.unmountImage();
4085.unmount(0);

all of these fail to eject my AiPlayer from the car after he's hijacked it from me. I only have one mount point, which is zero.

Any ideas?

#10

doPlayerDismount(%vehicle, %player, 1);

Where %vehicle is the vehicle in question, and %player would be the player or AI.

That's the closest thing to the functionality you're wanting.... there is no automatic kicking to the curb of players from a vehicle function, though you could write one.

Maybe something like this, just keep in mind this is off the top of my head and I haven't tried it myself:

function kickToTheCurb(%vehicle, %vehicleData)
{
   for (%slot = 0; %slot < %vehicleData.numMountPoints; %slot++)
   {
      %onBoard = %vehicle.getMountedObject(%slot);
      if (%onBoard.getClassName() $= "AIPlayer")
         doPlayerDismount(%vehicle, %onBoard, 1);
   }
}

%vehicle = the vehicle object
%vehicleData = vehicle datablock (reference to # of mountpoints should go there)

Honestly I don't know if that will work but in theory... :D

#11 Ok, at first I thought "doPlayerDismount" was an existing function, but now I see that I also need to write the "doPlayerDismount" function myself. I think I saw one already written on these forums somewhere. Thanks for the pointers.

#12 Oh! There is, I misquoted. Sorry about that!

function Armor::doDismount(%this, %obj, %forced)

But hey, I was close for doing that from memory... what can I say, it was late and I had had too much jager ;)