Idea vehicle combat mod?

(Big Boss) #1

Just something i’ve wanted to see in RTCW since Halo came out.Would be nice to have at least a few vehicles that the player would be able to control.Maybe a jeep for the allies halftrack for axis.Don’t want to turn ET into BF1942 but a few vehicles would be fun. :moo:

(bani) #2

the q3 engine isnt really suited to vehicles ( non rotatable hitboxes, :angry: )

(jamez) #3

but, who said anything about hitboxes, how do they check for damage for the tank and truck normally…
also im guessing that the method doesnt support instant hit-type damage anyway

(bani) #4

if you want vehicles that can move realistically through the environment, hitboxes are key.

otherwise you’ll be restricted to movers on rails, eg fueldump tank.

(pgh) #5

NEVER seen a Q3 Engine based Game/Mod with controllable vehicles. And ive played alot of Mods and Games… :]

(Way2Evil) #6

I know that the Duke Nukem 3D engine could have driveable vehicles.
But I don’t know how much they are related.??
btw Duke Nukem 3D didn’t had any vehicles but Shadow Warrior did (Shadow Warrior = Duke Nukem 3D engine based)

(bani) #7

vehicles are doable - quakerally and military forces are some examples.

unfortunately as i stated the engine is not well suited to the requirements of vehicles so youll have a lot of work to do.

(Rain) #8

The existing vehicles in ET maps are made up of brushwork… The engine can do rotated brush collisions, but entities without a brush model can’t be rotated for collision detection (so you won’t be able to add vehicles to existing maps, for example.)
That said, the mover code is in need of some work as it is (gibbies in the tug, anyone?), so you do have your work cut out for you.

(MuffinMan) #9

how did they do it in CoD, which is afaik rtcw-engine? there’s one map where you drive around with a group of tanks, to my understanding this tank is just a big player model or what’s the problem here…?

(MuffinMan) #10

how did they do it in CoD, which is afaik rtcw-engine? there’s one map where you drive around with a group of tanks, to my understanding this tank is just a big player model or what’s the problem here…?

(SCDS_reyalP) #11

highly modified RTCW engine. With the engine source you can do anything. Look at half life/CS vs. quake1.

Also, since they only did the tanks in single player vs. AIs, they can probably get away with significant bogosity in the hit detection. Of course it can be done, it is just a matter of how much work… If you want to do vehicle combat, you might be better of starting with a game that already supports vehicles, such as BF1942 or tribes II

(Helk) #12

Actually all these games are Quake 3 engine, and vehicles are possible if you really know what you are doing, and I mean REALLY I’ve been looking into vehicles/rigid body physics… it would take a revamp of the collision system to use an external physics engine like tomoaka(sp) physics or the ODE http://opende.sourceforge.net/ I think

some very complicated math involved here but yes its possible, would be easier with the engine source ofcourse… CoD has the rigid body physics system with the tanks, and I hear Jedi Academy has recently added vehicles too

Cheers

(ildon) #13

JA uses a custom hit detection system called Ghoul2 that’s per-triangle I think, so it was probably a lot easier for them.

(bani) #14

quake rally does an impressive job with vehicles and physics. give it a try, then see if you can persuade the code out of the authors :slight_smile:

(rgoer) #15

What about having multiple hitboxes per-vehicle? Maybe make something like a Jeep out of multiple NPC opjects (4 nps for the wheels, 1 npc for the hood, one for the seats, one for the back, etc), that way even though the individual hitboxes don’t rotate, the overall pattern of hitboxes stays somewhat close to the vehicles actual shape.

(Helk) #16

to be honest I dont know what you mean by ‘NPC’ but im assuming thats some type of entity, unfortunately that would be a big waste of entitys (1024 max entities…) and they still would not have any type of rigid body physics

Could probably do some math for a ‘hover’ tank, that would be far easier to get away with looking cool

(bani) #17

this is what quake rally does, multiple hitboxes.

the problem is that if you dont do it carefully, you will have gaps in your collision detection and vehicles will be able to partially intersect before detecting a collision.