Archive: 4 posts

---

Having availed myself of the forum search and discovering nothing useful, I figured I should start a topic. I'm trying to make a level that is a square with four floor/sides. The idea is that the player will go through one warp point in the level and come out of another, but "retain" his gravity between them. So you've got one portal on the floor, and one on the wall to the right. Jump through the portal on the floor, feet-first, and you will "fall" sideways out of the portal on the wall (which is now, more or less, the ceiling), landing on the wall to the left. If you now run up to the first portal (now on a "wall", for you) and enter it, because you are face-first, you will emerge from the second portal face-first as well, so this time you "fall" toward the (original) ceiling, and the first portal is directly above you. That's the basic gameplay mechanic. I started out by trying to make the room-square itself simply rotate in mid-air, using an anti-grav to lift it, selector logic, and four gyroscopes. The problem with this was, the rotation of the room would send the player flying due to the physics engine, which destroys the illusion that he is merely "falling" from the portal itself, not to mention often flung him straight out of the square itself. I also tried attract-o-tweak, which seemed like a (somewhat) elegant solution: rather than use a selector on gyroscopes, I could use a selector to activate all of the "leftward" attract-o-surfaces, causing the player to fall left after teleporting. The problem is, the attract-o-tweak has a really small radius of only 50. Which disappointed me, seeing as how stuff like the controlinator can have a radius of, what, 5,000? As a result, I can't get my player character to "fall" onto the surface because he never actually gets PULLED, due to the radius being teeny-tiny. The other problem with attract-o-stuff is that it doesn't act as a "gravity well", really. If you put a platform above the attract-o-surface, you'll break attraction upon landing on it. So I'd have to make every "platform" out of four walls with individually triggered attract-o-tweaks, which is doable but seems nightmarish. So, short version: How can I disappear a sackboy(/bot), have the room rotate 90 degrees, then have him appear someplace new without the momentum of the room's rotation sending him flying at a million trillion miles per hour? Or, alternately, how can I make attract-o-gel have a further pull radius than 50?

2013-01-02 04:53:00 Author: Unknown User

---

SOLVED! (note to mods, I know bumping your own thread is poor form (use edits! I hear you shout) but this thread is already at the top of the board, plus this solution is really a separate thing and wall of text is hard on the eyes). Here's how to do it, for those interested. Retain the room rotation using four gyroscopes to rotate the room. What you need to do is set a delay on your teleports so that you don't reapper until just after the room has become stationary. I did this with a wormhole. Create the wormhole entry and exit (I used a player detector to activate it and made it invisible so it works like a portal). Connect the entry wormhole output to an OR gate, the OR gate to a toggle, and the toggle to a timer. Connect the timer's output BACK to the OR gate's other input, and connect the OR gate also to the timer's reset function (this seems circuitous, I know, but I couldn't get the timer working by connecting its output to its reset, no idea why; perhaps I n00b'd it up). Now, set the timer for 0.5s and connect its output to the input of your exit wormhole. What happens is upon triggering the warp, sackboy will be held in netherspace for half a second, then sent to the exit, and the timer will immediately reset itself to allow re-use. Now, connect your warp trigger—again, I used player detector, but button will work too. But you MUST have one, AFAIK, since using triangle-to-warp itself doesn't function as a switch...? Maybe it does, I didn't try TBH—to the selector you connected to the gyros. If your rotating space is being held up with a mover, rather than an anti-grav tweaker (so no dampening) and your gyros are on default strength and speed, the effect is such: Enter portal. Sackboy disappears just as room begins to rotate. Room rotates smoothly and quickly, and just as it finishes sackboy falls from the exit portal. The only issue is since wormholes make your camera go freaky with player tracking, you'll totally SEE the room rotate; I solved this by accident since my camera level is zoomed out to view the entire arena (it gets confusing otherwise, it needs to be seen in totality), but unless you know how to make the camera not track the empty space where sackboy entered a wormhole, it can be odd. If anybody cares I can UL the proof-of-concept stage so you can see it work.

2013-01-02 07:39:00 Author: Unknown User

---

Wouldn't it be easier to place a movie camera on the second portal? Turn the movie camera to 90 degrees and it'll look like the player is falling sideways when actually he falls normally.

2013-01-02 10:07:00 Author: Frenzie Posts: 308

---

Well I considered fixing the camera in place using local space to make the room "stay still" while sack fell sideways, but it got really headache-y since LBP2's controls are camera independent. I don't want my levels to play like They Need to Be Fed (or Gap the Mind!) where half the challenge is figuring out what buttons to push. And I think the problem inre player tracking is when Sackboy enters a wormhole, the game's camera registers this XY coordinate position as his location until he reappears. So with a rotating room, you wind up staring at a blank space on the wall where the wormhole USED to be... I suppose I could solve the player tracking issue by sticking a camera on the exit wormhole and having it triggered by the same AoE as the room rotation and worm hole activation, though you'll still get the weird player tracking glitch where the game doesn't register Sackboy as outside the wormhole for a second or two and he's already fallen. But, I mean, I actually think the game looks good with the camera pulled back to see the whole square chamber. I dunno if that's bad game etiquette for LBP2 creators, but for me it's REALLY confusing playing the levels zoomed in. They're brain-teaser-type mazes, really, and seeing the whole space is critical to solving them; it's like doing a maze on paper, you want to see the whole thing. I think of games like N(+), where I cut my teeth on platform creating, or stuff like Fez and Braid which also employ similar physics-warping mechanics, and I know that if Braid were to track Tim as close as LBP2 tracks Sackboy, I'd SCREAM at my TV in frustration being unable to see where I was going. I guess it's just particular to the puzzle itself that the camera should really be pulled way back and pretty much not move (though, if the illusion is well-done, it should look like it "moves" 90? to track the new gravityc)

2013-01-02 21:56:00 Author: Unknown User

Posts: 1077139    Threads: 69970    Members: 9661    Archive-Date: 2019-01-19

Aus dem Archiv wurden alle persönlichen Daten wie Name, Anschrift, Email etc. - aber auch sämtliche Inhalte wie z.B. persönliche Nachrichten - entfernt.
Die Nutzung dieser Webseite erfolgt ohne Speicherung personenbezogener Daten. Es werden keinerlei Cookies, Logs, 3rd-Party-Plugins etc. verwendet.