Archive: 16 posts

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I've designed a four legged walker based off another made by Johnee. I have the walking part down, there's just a few details I want to do that I can't seem to get down. One of them being a resting position for the walker when the walker is not in motion. The legs are powered by 2 sets of pistons for each leg, one that pushes the leg up/down and one that pulls it left/right (I can draw it out if I'm not clear). I want the legs pushing up to go down to it's lowest point when not in use. I'm not exactly sure how I can achieve this effect. The other being an elevator coming from the bottom of the walker to go up when you're on top of the elevator and stay up when you're inside the walker. Then go down when you're back on top and stay down when you're out. I thought about usuing proximity switches but I'm not exactly sure how to set them up for this situation. I could go another way to make it work though. I understand that some things might not work well but that's why I'm here, to collaborate with others with ideas.

2010-01-30 05:42:00 Author: Unknown User

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The way I work my walker legs is to have their timing controlled by a wheel. The wheel has a mag key on its rim and it's surrounded by directional mag switches to control the legs' pistons. When the player isn't in the mech, it sort of squats down. I acheive this by have flippers with mag keys around the wheel to flip in and trigger all the switches, so they all move to their resting state. It also does this when it jumps: the flippers move in to make it squat down, then they all flip back out, and the key on the wheel moves out (it's connected to the wheel by a piston) so that all of the pistons extend: the legs stretch out. Obviously, the legs stretching isn't what powers the jump, but it's a subtle detail that helps sell the idea that it's jumping, not just floating up into the air. If you want to see the mech in action, my psn is Sehven and the level is called "Sehven's Mech VT-4b: Dire Wolf." If you want to see the logic that controls it... well I haven't given it out yet, but my earlier abandoned mech level is copyable. It doesn't have the squatting down animation, but it uses the same wheel driven leg timer to control the walk cycle. It's called "Sehven's Mech Mark II." Another benefit of using a wheel to drive it is it can walk forward or backward by spinning the wheel clockwise or counter-clockwise. As for the elevator thing, I'm a little fuzzy on exactly what you're saying. You want it to go down when you're on top of the mech? Or do you just mean when you're outside the mech? What you could do is put a sensor switch on the elevator to detect when the player is on it, and another sensor the encompasses the body of the mech where the player will be driving it. Run them through an OR switch with a directional output hooked to the elevator so that if the player is in the elevator or in the mech, the elevator goes up, but if not, it goes down. I would also set them to require all to make it multi-player friendly: at least the one on the mech's body even if the one in the elevator doesn't.

2010-01-30 06:43:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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Hm, seems like an interesting idea to try out for the legs. I'm a little lost on what you said about a flipper. I'll need to do some experimenting. Do all the legs go down at the same time when it's not in use then go back into it's syncing wakling motion? Seems like I have a lot of learning to do.

2010-01-30 07:15:00 Author: Unknown User

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What I meant by flipper. So you've got a flat piece of dark matter (or whatever material) with the switches on it. Then you've got a wheel motor bolted in the middle with the mag key so that the switches can all be set off in order. To make it go to its resting state, though, you want to trigger all the switches at the same time, which means every switch needs to detect a mag key. So I make 4 rectangles of wood, attached them near each of the the 4 switches using wobble bolts and stuck mag keys on each of them. When you want to trigger the resting state, the wobble bolts flip in and bring the keys to the switches so they're all triggered and all the pistons retract (assuming that's how you have your pistons and switches set). Hope that clears it up. As for learning, don't sweat it. I have yet to see a perfect walker.... at least a perfect two legged walker. I've seen a few that are reasonably stable but they're more of a an animated moving platform than an actual vehicle. I've been working on making a perfect bipedal mech since shortly after lbp came out and I still haven't got one I'm happy with. My latest one is, I think, pretty good, but it's kind of slow and breaks easily, so I'm working on a new one to hopefully address those issues.

2010-01-30 07:48:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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Oh shoot, I didn't think you were online, I edited my post a few times.

2010-01-30 07:50:00 Author: Unknown User

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Alright, so far I have a dark matter wheel around a spinning wood wheel with a key on the rim. The dark matter wheel has 4 switches on it (But I'm only using two of them at the moment). One switch is connected to all the pistons on the back leg and one is connected to all the pistons on the front and for the walking motion to take place I have one leg backwards from the other. Now the wheel spins and it seems to be work okay but then I set up the flip switch system to turn all the switched on at the same time and one leg goes up and one leg goes down. I might have missed something?

2010-01-30 08:03:00 Author: Unknown User

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The problem is that all your pistons aren't behaving the same. Instead of having one backwards from the other, set them all the same and set the mag switches to all be the same (don't invert some and not all). Then, arrange the switches around the wheel in a way that makes your walking animation work. For example, I use two pistons per leg on my biped, so I have 4 switches. Going clockwise around the wheel it's left leg back, left leg up, right leg back, right leg up. Each switch's range is set to about half of the circle area, so that they go on and off for roughly equal intervals. The end result is that when the left leg is going back (it's down at the time) the right leg (which is up) is going forward. When I trigger all the switches (the flippers move in) both legs move up and back, so the mech is in a squatting position. When I move the wheel's mag key out of range, both legs move forward and down, making the mech stand straight up. When the flippers go back out and/or the wheel's key moves back in, it goes right back into its walk cycle. When it comes to working out the order of your switches, it's basically going to be a matter of trial and error. Mine are arranged basically into quadrants of the circle, but not exactly: One switch at 9 o'clock, the next at 11:30, then 3 o'clock, and 5:30; cuz that's what gave my mech its best timing. You'll want to experiment with yours. You may or may not want to use twice as many switches since you're building a 4 legged walker. I think, though, that if the back right and front left legs move together, it should work fine: so you probably will be able to get away with only 4 switches.

2010-01-30 10:39:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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Hm, I think I get what you're saying now. I set up a quick model of it and it seems to be working, I just need to work on the placement and timing. I'm going to work on that for awhile and head back here with my results.

2010-01-30 22:37:00 Author: Unknown User

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Ah, through some trial and error I think I have a steady walking motion for my walker. The wheel idea works like a charm. As for the elevator part, I scraped the idea. The walker is too small to fit a suitable sized elevator. I replaced it with a backdoor that folds down into a ramp.

2010-01-31 18:41:00 Author: Unknown User

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Yeah, getting the player into the walker has been a kind of obnoxious obstacle for me. My latest one has the whole cockpit lower and raise, which brought unexpected problems: it breaks ridiculously easy. My first two mechs used grabavators but that wasn't practical for the new one since the control is a wheel you run on top of (meaning I couldn't have a hatch underneath). For the next one, I think I'm going to have the driver enter from above and have a canopy close over top of them.

2010-02-01 01:01:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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The driver can get in pretty easily with the back door hatch. The turret player would have to jump a weird way to get up there but I plan on having a base area for them to use to get into positions. Right now I'm trying to work on the turret design and functionality. I have The base of the turret with a flat gun shape on the side connected by a wobble bolt. I wish I could just put a grab switch on a three way switch but it just floats in place when you place it. Right now I have two grab switches next to the gunner (Front and back) with one shooting the gun/raising the gun up and the other shooting the gun/lowering the gun down. I'm trying to discover a way for you to control if the gun is firing or not and control it's angle with it being too difficult to control on the fly. A three way switch with a grab switch on the handle would work perfectly.. but sadly it just doesn't work. o-o

2010-02-02 02:02:00 Author: Unknown User

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Actually, I think I have an idea. I might be able to create a piston that you can pull and push. I'll put one key and one grab switch on the end of the piston you can push and two switches where you can push/pull it to. The key will control the angle depending on where you push it and the grab will control the gun fire. I think I'll work with that for awhile.

2010-02-02 02:20:00 Author: Unknown User

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That's how the turret on my Mk II works. The level is copyable, so if you need to tear it apart to take a look, go for it. Sounds like you've already got it figured out, though. The way I'm doing turrets now is a wheel that sackboy spins by running on top of it and a grab switch to the right of sackboy. The cockpit is a narrow V shape with the wheel at the bottom so there's nowhere to go (you can't run off the wheel). I know of three ways to make a wheel drive a 3way switch: my VT-04b uses the most complicated and least effective/reliable of the three methods (I didn't learn the other two until later): it has 3 different colored mag keys on the wheel and the corresponding switches to the side and uses a pretty ingenious (I didn't invent it) method of detecting what order the switches are being triggered. I think it was chimpskylark who came up with that method and it's published in his hamster wheel test level. The other two methods actually use two layers. You can glue a thin layer gear to the back of the wheel (it's easy enough to make a stencil from a gear object and use it to cut a gear shaped material). Then you have a pointer that sticks into the teeth of the gear and is held in place by a sprung bolt. It may take a few tries and some tweaking to get it just right, but you should be able to get it so that the gear will push the pointer while it's spinning and let it re-center when it stops spinning. Then you slap a mag key on the pointer and mag switches on either side to detect when it gets pushed to them and link them to a remote 3way. I can't remember whose level I stole this idea from. The last method is from one of rtm223's levels (he doesn't have many published and it's the one with wheels in the name). You have two wheels (you can double bolt the one sackboy stands on to the other one: if you don't have enough layers to spare, you can make the back one theck and the front one thack). The back wheel will use a motor bolt and the front one uses a zero friction bolt. Stick a mag key on the running wheel and two switches on the back wheel hooked to a remote 3way. When you spin the front wheel and the key comes in range of one of the switches, it will trigger the remote 3way which will trigger the back wheel to spin away (keeping its relative position to the running wheel the same) If you hook that same 3way to your turret's wobble bolt, you've got a wheel you can run on that will control your turret.

2010-02-02 04:08:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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Actually, this 4 WD Buggy I found in one of your levels has been very useful to me on this project. I found the three way switch with the two winches perfect for controlling the angle of the turret guns and the wheel with the switch and key was a great solution to how to stop guns firing on their own. I've learned much from just that. As for the wheel design you were speaking of, I'm not sure how it would fit in my design for now but I will keep that in mind for later designs, it seems nifty. Also, I think I should do some logic tutorials and learn the tricks of LBP. I don't know much of the lingo such as "Theck and Thack" and I'm not sure I have the right idea of a remote three way. So much to learn!

2010-02-03 04:45:00 Author: Unknown User

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Glad the buggy was helpful. I hadn't really considered that the logic would be instructive: it's actually pretty simple stuff that I just slapped together to showcase the independant suspension. Remote three way just means a 3 way switch with winches or pistons to work it. It's the way we use two switches to let us move something two directions. Theck=checkpoint thick. It's an object that occupies the thick layer but sackboy and certain other objects can pass in front of it in the same layer. Those other objects are called thack. Golfballs, the blade and handle of a knife (but not the handguard), the handle of a hammer, and several other objects can pass in front of a checkpoint thick object. There was a glitch a while back that let us create materials in these two layers, effectively giving us ten layers (4 thin, and the 3 thick layers could each be divided into 2). When I want overlapping objects but don't have enough layers to give them, I use theck and thack. Unfortunately, the glitch was patched some time back, so new theck and thack objects can't be created. I put some in my glitched material collection, but for some reason I'm the only one who can edit them, so they don't really do any good there. I'm working on a tutorial level for some of the vehicle tools I use, including the wheel design, a tilt sensor, and a motion sensor (you can rig it so when an object tilts, something happens, such as a rocket firing to push it back up or dark matter emitting under it to keep it from tilting any further). I'll let you know when it's up: something in there might help you with your mech. [EDIT] Ok, it's published: "Vehicle tools: Tilt and motion sensor and control pod (copyable)"

2010-02-03 05:43:00 Author: Sehven Posts: 2188

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I'll check that out when I can. I'll also show you the first finished version when I complete it.

2010-02-07 08:00:00 Author: Unknown User

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