Hey everyone, the recent Flash mod discussion has got me interested in further ideas of changing the game to suit a mod. Something I've been pondering was the concept of a mod(s) where giant characters such as Mechs/Godzilla types (at or near scale) would be actually playable. A possible scenario would be having to face Earth's defenses (military, superheroes, etc.) Obviously the game would have to be scaled differently. As it stands, Freedom Force can't properly showcase many of the giant characters such as Valandar made (a lot were scaled down). Just something a little different I'm thinking of doing just for kicks
i've thought of that! you would have to skope everything's scale down. you could make it a 'god game' and have the giant player create buildings that produce workers or fighters.
Couldn't you just set the camera farther out instead of rescaling everything?
Yeah Bearded, a "god game" mod as you call it might be interesting as well. Epimethee ,what you're saying makes sense. I am not sure, if just zooming out would achieve what I'm thinking of since I would like too be able too zoom in too and not just be able to see up to a close to scale Red Ronin's ankle. ;) I don't know, just throwing the idea out there. I was thinking of making other objects like, buildings a little closer to scale and changing the "look" of the game. Create something more epic. Could be a lot of work involved to do it all. But if it looks cool and interesting, I'm not opposed to tackling it piece by piece. I'll have to play around with the idea in the game. Constructive criticism is always welcome, thanks for your opinions.
the first part wouldn't be a lot of hard work, just tedious. take everything and scale it down. would only take about 5 minutes for each object.
how many Kaiju skins and models do we have? king kong would be easy. godzilla maybe? who is female by the way.
Say you take a large map like Tom's New York map- convert it to a Tokyo map with Godzilla on the rampage. :thumbup: Godzilla's huge though. Between 150 ft. and 300 ft. is basically the range. 300 ft? The game would have to scaled wayyy down. King Kong is usually portrayed at 35-55 ft (at least in American Films) heh heh
I wish there were better ways to simulate water in Freedom Force. You can't really have bayfronts or ports which are usually featured in Tokyo/New York type maps. Really interested in what Tom and Alex are doing with their new game-what they will come up with. They mentioned taking a stab at water combat! I bet they'll do it too. With Freedom Force we have to be a lot more creative..work within the limitations of the old engine. That's part of the challenge though. ;)
Quote from: panoramac on October 25, 2010, 10:13:20 AM
I wish there were better ways to simulate water in Freedom Force. You can't really have bayfronts or ports which are usually featured in Tokyo/New York type maps. Really interested in what Tom and Alex are doing with their new game-what they will come up with. They mentioned taking a stab at water combat! I bet they'll do it too. With Freedom Force we have to be a lot more creative..work within the limitations of the old engine. That's part of the challenge though. ;)
I made some vague efforts to get water into my new york megamaps.
The ideas I had were things like:
1.drop the level of the water bottom low enough that flyers would appear to "swim", either underwater, or at "surface level". Essentially, all the "dry land" would be a few stories height above the "sea bed". The problem becomes that non-flyers cannot ever get out of the "water". Plus, problems with the FF engines limits on vertical height on taller buildings meant dropping the ground level was not practical.
2. What I settled on was having the "river bed" be about 5ft below the main level of the map, so characters of normal height would walk on the "river bed" but sort of look like they were swimming, head above the water. Of course, shorter chars look like they are drowning, and taller ones wading in a curiously shallow Hudson river, but there you go.
Both the above have the "water" as a plane or block of translucent colour, which has no bounding box so characters and objects do not collide with it. Boats and such can be placed on the map at any height so appear to be "floating" on the surface.
It worked a little better on the island maps I made, where I could slope the beach gradually below the water. But I don't think that anyone has ever used any of those maps, not even me, lol.
I'm hoping that in Alex' game we can use "finite state machines" so upon entry to water a new set of physics and behaviour rules take over, ie characters (and objects) bob at the surface or sink to the bottom depending on weight, swimming ability, buoyancy etc. Aquatic chars would get bonuses to movement, strength, whatever their character gets, and airbreathers would get some penalties, like, oh, I dunno, drowning...
Back to the original topic....you may find scaling down to have practical advantages, because the FF engine has limits in how it deals with 3d stuff that become horribly apparent above a certain height.
There is a very good reason Irrational made a separate map for the top of the "empire state" building, and never had the sort of skyscrapers you find in my NY maps.
The game engine can only calculate the positions of objects up to a certain height. Beyond that point you can no longer rely on bounding boxes to generate collisions properly, nor can you rely on the engine to allow you to click on terrain or objects which are a sufficient height above "the ground".
The vertical height of 95% of FF/v3r content is low enough that this is never apparent, but I kept running into it making the NY maps. Try flying a character up to land on the Chrysler Building or the Helicarrier, and then get another character up there to attack them, it becomes obvious the game simply cannot do it. Or maybe it can, and I missed something obvious. As it was I had to make separate "roof" objects for the higher buildings and position those on the map just to make the bigger buildings stand-upon-able.
Of course, if your characters are the only thing of large height it may not be an issue at all, and camera zoom out may work, rather than scaling down.
Thanks for the reply Tom. I probably wont mess with water in the FF games, since it sounds like it might have been more trouble than it was
worth. Those ideas about using finite state machines in your new game sounds really interesting. For FF,I'll definitely play with the idea of scaling things down. How much to scale is the question I think. Really think it would be cool to have new city maps like Tokyo in FF for some kind of giant character type mod. Maybe some shiny new night time maps--they're most enjoyable for me.