More reactive HD decos

[gopostal]

First, credits.
Textures are Lightning_Hunter's most excellent work. I compressed and recompiled them to be more online-friendly and all subsequent work I add into this will use the single texture pack and be called externally. This will keep the mod size small but still allow full access to LH's textures.
The smashed crate and barrel models are Krull0r's work.

I'm working on a mod to make decorations more interactive and interesting without negatively affecting gameplay. Currently boxes and wooden barrels will fragment into bits and leave a smashed mesh behind (for 60 seconds, then cleanup happens). If you hit them with a weapon that damages by 'burned' or 'exploded', like a rocket for example, then the fragmented parts burn. Chairs and tables also have this behavior and I'm working on a smashed table mesh to add. Burned wood takes a burnt texture, all others use the HD textures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lPAQZV23jw

I'm still undecided whether to let the fire spread or make it damaging. It's a great effect but it can seriously overwhelm you in a smaller room or in a room with lots that could catch fire. I've had the entire forest burning when testing the Fire Dragon I was doing.

I plan on working through the decorations and redoing the ones that could benefit from some immersive updating. I'll work on this through the Christmas holiday but if you want it as-is to playtest just let me know. I made it into a mutator that you can single-click run and it will replace for you in maps. It preserves any contents the decoration has and will not replace decos who have altered drawscale since these are probably being used in a non-standard way.

[yrex]

Don't make it damaging. All decorative fires in Unreal are non damaging.

[UBerserker]

I'm sure the DP bolts do not cause things to burn, it's shockwave/melting. Only the Eightball has incendiary potentials and anyway all the wooden decorations would make for very minimal burning.

[gopostal]

Surprisingly the DP's bolt has the same damage type as the rocket does

Code: Select all

MyDamageType="exploded"

I made the fragging monitor for simple damage types since that's the easiest/lightest way to check. I'm open to suggestions though.

[UBerserker]

I know, I just said that the DP doesn't burn things. It just melts things or break them apart by pure explosive force.

[Lightning Hunter]

Nice idea gopostal. Do you still have a standalone version I can give people on the UnrealHD Moddb page for online use?

[gopostal]

This is the package for the online HD textures project: http://www.megafileupload.com/gq13/HDSkinsProject.7z

It has a good readme as well as full source code. This is released for anyone to use however they like (aside from the texture utx file, that work is not mine to give). This exact mod is currently running on my server and happily coexisting with the mod package and even the Christmas stuff. Admittedly this way of doing the texture replacements isn't perfect but it does allow for them to simply and easily be added to any server and used by everyone who joins. The work Lightning_Hunter put into those skins, well that deserves to be seen by way more people than will ever use it just offline. I'm skipping a formal release thread since I did this mainly for LH to add as an 'extra' for his modDB page. He can post it up there and if it's found to be useful I'm sure it will propagate across the community.

@UB....I've been thinking about your post. We probably were talking past each other (you were discussing theory, I was stubbornly thinking only about the code side) but I understand what you are saying. I'm considering some 'energized' effects for the destroyed decos but I wonder if that's not really the realm of the weapon itself and not the decoration.

[Lightning Hunter]

Thanks for all your work on that, Gopostal. When I get the time, I will release it on the ModDB page!

[Dr.Flay]

Perhaps the fire damage could be a mutator option or config switch ?
It seems a shame to go most of the way with the realism and end up with holograms.

[gopostal]

I'll add the flame damage as an option eventually I think. Probably make it with the switches:
CanCauseBurnDamageToPawns= True/False
CanLightPawnsOnFire= True/False
bCanSpreadToOtherDecos= True/False

Filtering it to spread to other wooden decorations can be tricky but I can make it work. I guess if you want realism then spraying rockets into a warehouse full of crates ought to result in a raging inferno if that's your thing. I can tell you from playtesting that it will cause you to rethink how you just willy-nilly blast away at things especially if you are in a forest. More than once I've set a couple of trees on fire only to have it trap me eventually as it spread across the hillside and I wasn't paying close enough attention.

Been adding more decos to this. The table, chairs, lamps, lanterns, and barrels are all properly destroyable now. Short vid:
https://youtu.be/w9oyS-D4XZU

Sorry for the added music. Afterburner picked up the stream I was listening to. Anyway when destroying the hanging lanterns I added a check to suppress any light actors found in a small radius (40 uu) to remove any extra lights added by mappers. You can see the lightmap remains though, not much I can do about that. Still it's a visual improvement.

After the holidays I'll add this to my server and send it out if anyone wants to play around with it.

[Lightning Hunter]

I like the barrel effect of being split apart. Good work.