Archive: 21 posts

---

http://bwctesting.com/lbpk/crimson_hollow/level-promo-banner.png (https://karting.lbp.me/v/fc8f) So I've got a new battle arena for you all to enjoy! This level builds upon what Arctic Rumble did and takes some elements to new heights while adding brand-new elements for your battling pleasure. LEVEL LINK! (https://karting.lbp.me/v/fc8f) COPYABLE VERSION! (https://karting.lbp.me/v/fm89) FEATURES BIGGER, BETTER ~ Larger, multi-level arena inside an active volcano with jumps, grapple points and tunnels for every angle of attack. MORE RANDOM ~ Dynamic, random terrain changes makes every match different. OBLITERATE EVERYTHING ~ 5 Killstreak weapon perks, all brand-new weapons with some serious firepower. PRIZES GALORE ~ 15 Hidden treasures (including every killstreak weapon) for you to collect and use elsewhere. GET REWARDED ~ New medal system grants you in-game points and prizes for pulling off special, brutally difficult (we'll see!) feats. Total point gains is over 12,000, so they are worth the effort! Can't figure them out? Hints are scattered throughout the arena. SUPER DETAIL ~ A lot of time went into creating what I hope is amongst the most original and detailed arenas around. EVIL BATS ~ These guys really want to ruin your killstreaks, avoid them at all costs! COPYABLE ~ I think there's so much packed into this level that I figured it'd be great to share with the community on how this level came to be. Expect a downloadable version soon! IT'S OUT! KNOWN ISSUES I've done the best I can against lag, but I'd appreciate knowing if anyone is having issues with it as well so I can take further performance measures if needed. - ENHANCED! As with the last level, killstreak logic is finicky and hard to test alone. Let me know if a weapon perk won't fire. Some lava platforms cause you to fall through for some odd reason. I've addressed it the best I can but it's probably still out there. - FIXED! Due to the sheer weapon complexity, I've had to remove the lobbed bombs from the level. I'm working on a more stable solution. - FIXED! SCREENSHOTS https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/709039/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/713649/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715649/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715651/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715631/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715637/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715647/data.jpg https://lbpk-production.s3.amazonaws.com/player_creations/715645/data.jpg

2013-06-26 21:01:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

Whoaw. O-O Now that's what I call a good post! I really liked your Arctic Rumble level. You're very good at making Arenas. Got this in my queue. Owait ...

2013-06-26 21:58:00 Author: Schark94 Posts: 3378

---

Hahah, it's all about presentation man. Thank you, I figure it'd be good to really focus on one aspect and do it well. And if you have the thermo, take that good aspect and crank it up to 11. Funnily enough, AR gave me a really good crash course in efficiency; so while I'd say this one is twice as complex, I still have plenty of thermo to throw around. Once I fix the custom weapon logic, I'd love to add something else to it. Any ideas?

2013-06-27 17:47:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

I copy the copyable version, but i didn't understand anything at all at the logic (i'm not good at it so far). That would be great if you could explain, the different elements on some of the different chips

2013-06-29 19:03:00 Author: gipsy Posts: 408

---

That would be great if you could explain, the different elements on some of the different chips Sure! What elements are you most interested in? Spawn logic (killstreaks, medal scoring) Terrain changers (lava columns, effects) Movie intro (transitions and effects) Moving obstacles (those stinkin' bats) All of the above! I ask because you've probably noticed that there's a lot of work here, so explaining it all well (with pictures I might add!) would take a while. Wish there were in-game notes.

2013-06-29 19:42:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

I must look at it again to answer to you, but i would say at first " the spawn logic" (wow) and the "terrain changers" So far the movie intro is the only thing i understood. For the points 4&5 i don't see what it is about,that's why i said that i must look again.

2013-06-29 20:08:00 Author: gipsy Posts: 408

---

Alright, I'll explain the spawn logic first. Hope you like walls o' text. The goal of this chip: 46035 Is to A) manage killstreaks (in the red box) and B) hand out prizes for achievements (in the blue box). Because there is no way to realistically tie a person's score to logic like this, this chip essentially becomes a player's personal scoreboard that tracks their hits and rewards players when goals are met. So lets talk about killstreaks. The top-left corner contains the 4 key pieces to getting this to work right: a receiver (http://wiki.lbpcentral.com/Receiver), a blast sensor (http://wiki.lbpcentral.com/Weapon_Blast_Sensor), a transmitter (http://wiki.lbpcentral.com/Transmitter), and a counter (http://wiki.lbpcentral.com/Counter). The receiver is simply set to blue and receives all incoming signals sent by players who were just killed. This receiver is attached to a kill counter to the right that has a limit of 5 kills before it grants a reward to the user (in this case, weapons) and then resets back to 0 when that limit is reached so the player can get the same perk again and again. Below this is a blast sensor that triggers when a player is hit by a weapon and dies. This is linked to the kill counter's reset port, so that when the user dies his score is wiped and he then needs to get 5 kills all over again to receive the reward. This blast sensor is also attached to a transmitter that sends a signal out to every receiver (including the play who just died) that is set to blue, which is all the players. So how does it know who killed whom and not give everyone a score? It's in the settings on the blast sensor and the receiver. The receiver (that gets a signal when someone is killed) has the option "only from owner" checked. This option is very useful, because it tells the receiver that when it gets a signal, only the player that actually triggered that signal should accept it. To illustrate: we get email all the time, sometimes spam. Even though we get tons of email though, we usually only care about email that we want from our friends or replies to something we sent out. This works the same way. Whenever a player dies, all the other plays get a signal "email" that "spams" everyone who doesn't care, but the only player who accepts that signal "email" is the one that was waiting for a reply from the person he just killed. This "email" signal is sent by the transmitter attached to the blast sensor. What prevents a person from just sending signal "emails" to themselves (like firing a mine and driving into it) is another option on the blast sensor. It only activates when a player is hit by "other blasts"; meaning, that only weapons fired by players other than themselves will be accepted. The result is a very small piece of logic that does a very complicated thing of tracking whether a person who just died was: NOT killed by themselves WAS killed by another player AND only the player that killed him would be the only one who'd get the score From there, the counter gets filled. When it completes its count, it activates a randomizer and cycles back to zero. This randomizer selects at random (sometimes) a port on a selector. This selector in turns channels that current to a timer, a hud tweaker, a loadout tweaker (http://www.wiki.lbpcentral.com/Weapon_Loadout) and a sequencer with sound effects. The hud tweaker displays the "X Acquired!" message to the user, while the sequencer plays the music. The timer that is attached to the loadout tweaker is to fix a bug. Weapons that have long durations (like a shockwave) will not be replaced when the loadout tweaker gets activated, so a countdown timer (which keeps sending power until the time is up) will keep replacing the person 's existing weapon until the weapon attack finishes. This does have a side effect of giving the player a free ammo round if they act quickly enough, but its the best I've got. Ok? Onto medals. The medal logic (the blue box) hands out prizes when a specific goal is reached. This can sometimes be to reach 50 total kills in a match, or survive a match without getting hit, etc. Each row of counters/timers is a specific goal with 5 in all. All of these are tied to the killstreak receiver, so kills are recorded accurately. When a goal is met, 4 things happen. A score giver gadget (http://www.wiki.lbpcentral.com/Score_Giver) is activated (giving the player a varying score), a prize giver gadget (http://www.wiki.lbpcentral.com/Prize_Giver) is triggered (giving the player a trophy prize), a hud tweaker is run to display the star on the person's screen as well as a text indicator ("you have acquired a medal!") and a sequencer is activated to play sounds. That's about all I can think of, let me know if something seems unclear. By far the most complicated part is how the logic knows who killed whom, it took me 2-3 revisions before I settled on this one, and is the one also used by Arctic Rumble. I'll see if I can get something together for the "terrain changers" portion soon; now THAT one is gonna be a lot of photos. Hope that helped! EDIT: I remembered a few other points on killstreak logic. It's fickle: This is obvious for anyone remotely familiar with this game, but it bears repeating here that the logic doesn't always work as intended, especially when its copied to other players. You will experience bugs at times like the kill counter granting rewards too early or too late (common), getting many "X acquired!" messages at the same time (rare), the weapon perk not being applied (very rare) and the more troublesome one being... It's limited: This problem is the reason why there are only four perks max per player. For a reason that still bugs me, any weapon loadout tweakers applied to a play that exceeds four (in this instance anyway) will never allow you to fire your weapon perk. This is something that I ran early into coding Arctic Rumble (Cirrus5005 might remember this with his problems with the Frostbite Launcher perk) and since that point I've just thrown my hands in the air, said some unkind things about the game's mother, and moved on. How can I claim 5+ perks though when I can only show four? Easy. Just change the perks for every other spawn and make the first one (the one the majority of the players will spawn from) have the coolest of the bunch. Be aware of this limitation if you intend to expand the logic though!

2013-06-30 05:24:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

Yes that help a lot. Very understable. I haven't made 5 killstreaks (shame on me), weather in arctic rumble, nor in crimson hollow, that 's why i didn't see what it was about. Thanks. PS: i'm waiting for the next explanation (take your time, i'm patient)

2013-06-30 18:46:00 Author: gipsy Posts: 408

---

NOTE: I've updated my last post with new killstreak details. I haven't made 5 killstreaks (shame on me), weather in arctic rumble, nor in crimson hollow, that 's why i didn't see what it was about. Understandable, its tough to score on these levels at all. Ok, let's start with "Terrain changers". This will also cover point 4, "moving obstacles " too. Let's take a look at the major chip running this: 46048 This chip runs a few different operations like changing the terrain (orange box), activating the bats (purple box) and getting around an annoying problem with giving a certain medal to players (red box). The logic on this chip is passive and is not influenced by anything outside of it, so its kind of a "master" chip. Alrighty, let's talk terrain changers. Like Arctic Rumble, the fundamental way this works is based around timers. The one below the top-left timer (attached to the music player) is the one that starts everything. After around 100 seconds (half the game's total time) it runs a series of timers. The one above runs an "enhanced" version of the music already playing during the match for more drama, the ones below generate gameplay effects like controller rumble, camera shake, earthquake sound effects and the like. These timers are split from the main one because they only happen once or stay on all the time. The timer directly to the right of the center one does the heavy lifting and loops every so often. From this looping timer, a current is set to three randomizers that choose from a set of three different transmitters to activate from a total of 9 transmitters. Each transmitter corresponds to a location in the lava field to change, according to this diagram: 46049 Each lava plate or ramp has a chip like this attached: 46050 Which when triggered by the selected signal, runs a series of timers/counters, special effects and sounds to lift the plate and lava column up for a time, then drop it. The reason for the many timers is I wanted some fancy effects for this, so if you look closely you'll see that the plate rises in time with the lava column but falls slower on the drop, making it more awesome-y. What's cool about this setup is that it is totally random, and that no matter what, around 3 areas will be chosen every time. The red box handles a quirk when handing out scores to players. I wanted a medal handed out to players when they had survived a match without dying, but what was happening was that because a player did not trigger the event (like hitting a player and getting points) the score giver didn't know who to give the points to and just gave it to everyone; whether they deserved it or not. The solution was to use the same trick I used for killstreaks. The timer at the top-left corner of the red box is connected along with a player sensor to an AND gate. The player sensor's range is set to max, so that every player is triggering the sensor all the time during the match. But because it's attached to an AND gate, that current must also be combined with the timer, which only fills in the final 5 seconds of the game. Once that timer fills (making sure that only when the match is about done do the deserving players get the medal), the player sensor current can go through and is sent to a transmitter, which is then routed to every player. On the spawn logic (bottom-left corner) is a counter set to 1:1 (so it starts with it being filled) and a transmitter connected to another AND gate. If the player dies, that counter is reset and can no longer be filled. When the signal from the master chip comes through, it will be blocked at the AND gate if the counter is reset due to to death, but if not, it gets through and grants the player the score. This also grants the correct player the score because instead of a timer triggering the event, the player indirectly did it by being inside the player sensor's range and activating it. The last bit on this chip (in the purple box) selects a random transmitter from a pool of 2 every so often. These transmitters are connected to two groups of bats on either side of the arena and when activated, run along a pathfinder motor (select the "edit path" tool in the tools bag to see them) that zig-zags over the map for 30 seconds. The group of bats has their own sound effects and weapons that trigger when a player is too close, attempting to poop on them. That's about it for that, anything else?

2013-07-01 23:13:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

Thanks professor Hiroshige0 I learned a lot about logic

2013-07-03 13:06:00 Author: gipsy Posts: 408

---

You are very welcome! I hope this will make everyone's next creation a bit more special. If there's any other questions, let me know.

2013-07-03 16:58:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

Looks awesome will check it out

2013-07-04 19:39:00 Author: WESFUN Posts: 1336

---

Queued.

2013-07-04 20:04:00 Author: fireblitz95 Posts: 2018

---

Thanks a lot for all your interest! Has anyone experienced much lag on this arena? I've been attempting to streamline it down.

2013-07-05 19:18:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

So this is a deceptively complex level, it's clear that you've put a lot of thought into the gameplay experience the player will have and it will take more than a couple of playthroughs to experience everything. Unfortunately, due to the crappy nature of this game online, the most i've been able to play this level online with is 2 other people so I still don't feel I've gotten to experience this level to it's full potential. What I will say though is that one of the things that bugged me (also about your Arctic Rumble battle) is that ther kart handling appears to be set to default, which, IMHO is horrible for battles. The turning circle while drifting is enormous and on a level like this, with so many nooks and crannies to fit between, maneuoverbility is key. I honestly feel a handling tweak would be hugely beneficial. I did it on my 'Bapple' track, I put handling to about 80% and also adjusted the 'angular drift velocity' settings, which allows the karts to make sharp, hollywood-esque 180 degree turns easily. I feel a similar setting would work well for this level, but it's up[ to you to test it to see which you feel most comfortable with. Oh, btw, the opening cinematics were EXCELLENT, really cool camerawork!

2013-07-12 17:17:00 Author: atheistsw Posts: 147

---

What I will say though is that one of the things that bugged me (also about your Arctic Rumble battle) is that ther kart handling appears to be set to default, which, IMHO is horrible for battles. Honestly, knowing how far to take kart modifications has always bothered me. I've been trying hard to find the right balance of changing things just enough to make things interesting but not far enough to unpleasantly surprise a player (are those stun missiles heading towards me going to just stun me, or kill me? I die a lot on tracks with custom weapons.), so my initial rule was to never mess with core aspects of the game but to build on them. But you are right, my one major flaw with my designs so far is that everything always start out huge (I had severe issues with rendering lag on this one to boot) but when I'm done dressing them up, it starts to get tight. Thanks for the insight, you have no idea how hard it is to get someone to say something critically constructive about my work. I can never tell if there's some critical flaw that everyone just never mentions. EDIT: I've taken your suggestion and updated the handling; it works 10x better now. Thanks!

2013-07-12 18:19:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

Impressive logic and looks great! Can't wait to play.

2013-07-14 02:15:00 Author: Cdub0817 Posts: 47

---

So I played the new version with the improved handling and this is now one of my favourite battles ever, it's so much fun and I love the dynamic nature of the arena! I opened up your copyable version to take a peek and am mightily impressed by all the different programming you've done to get these dynamic changes to happen. Plus I was really intrigued by your custom tracking shot using a camera attached to a pathfinder motor, will have to try that in a future track for sure!

2013-07-14 10:48:00 Author: atheistsw Posts: 147

---

Glad you all liked it, was lot of fun to experiment with. A lot of those movie tricks should be credited to TheAdipose (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN0nTGqqkbT3OV8aVBM-Uwpgeox1BdUso), his idea on using transmitters and after-movie cleanup was genius. Let me know if my previous explanations on how it all functions need clarifying... I wonder if there's enough there for a blog post? I've toyed with the idea of writing something on my (mis)adventures creating custom weapons.

2013-07-15 15:02:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

---

This is a good level, well it's not "the most original and detailed arenas around" but is original and with good scenery and atmosphere. Fun battle and it's evident that you have dedicated many time in fx and logic. Good work.

2013-07-15 19:55:00 Author: SergioChileno Posts: 60

---

Ahahaha, notice I said "amongst the most original and detailed arenas around"? I've actually had to scale back a lot of what I wanted to do on this one, the addition of a ceiling and other factors created some serious lag. I miss those pulsing crystals, waving vines and extra lava tunnels I had originally. What suggestions would you make to improve this or any future arenas?

2013-07-15 22:01:00 Author: Hiroshige0 Posts: 114

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.