Duke4.net Forums: Custom breakable screens? - Duke4.net Forums

Hi Guys,

A quick question. In Duke3D there are a lot of breakable (tv) screens. Is there an easy way to add new breakable screen tiles (other than coding an sprite actor that changes when hit by a weapon)?

- Jaap

You can have your new tiles overwrite existing breakable screens if there are some that are not being used in your map.

Jaap, on 31 January 2016 - 02:20 PM, said:

It is possible without replacing existing screen sprites, but it is fiddly and not perfect. I've attached a demo; (A) just shows how to set the thing up, note switches are invisible (use the 'I' key in 3D mode and you will see them as a transparent greenish colour) - to make them invisible, in 2D mode hover over the switch, press F8, select flags and enter 32848 (32768 + what the flags would normally be, which in this case is 80, or 50 hex).

In (A) you can repetedly flip the displayed texture; in ( B ) this is made to only happen once (using the masterswitch instead of activator) and the hitag of the switch is set to 19 to specify breaking glass sound effect. Problem: texture switches just the once, but the sound effect plays with every kick. Hence ( C ) which uses a helper sector for playing the sound just once and puts an invalid sound number on the switch so as to shut the thing up (0 causes a default sound to play). In practice the help sector would be placed on the other side of the breaking screen.

In ( B ) and ( C ) note the speed sprite set to 12288, this effectively makes the floor rise (and hence display second texture) immediately. You calculate this value as the difference between the floor and ceiling height of the sector, which you can determie in 2D mode by pressing the F7 key.

You can now kick, plus shoot with pistol shotgun and machine gun. And the player can smash it with the use key like I said, not perfect.

RPG/Explosion ? Not detected I'm afraid. You may be able to rig something up to do this - refer SE19, "ceiling falls from explosion" but I never got it to work

TTFN,
Jon

OK, not good enough, 3/10. Heres a Mk.II version. Responds to RPG, does not respond to player pressing "activate key", does respond to kicking.

It uses a mask wall to display the unbroken texture and a closed door to display the broken texture. SE19 also causes ceiling to fall when explosion detected (though you wont get the breaking glass sound in this case).

Two important things with this setup:

1) The furthest (hidden) wall uses a switch texture. It needs to be placed far enough away so that Duke can't press it but far enough such that it is kickable. Normally these two distances are the same (I think) but the blocking wall has an effect here. The use of a mask wall allows the player to still shoot the far wall that has the switch texture on it.

2) There is a second blocking wall in front of the effect i.e. the blocking wall nearest the player start position (or lowest one of the two blocking walls if you view in Mapster). Why is this ? Well try removing the blocking and then kick - you seem to be magically transported through the other blocking wall !! Wee bug in Eduke (or more likely a bug in original Duke3D that is preserved in Eduke).

Hard work ! Replacing an existing breakable tile is certainly easier, but it's still probably easier than using a custom actor if you are not familiar with CON editing (not particularly difficult, just a bit of a learning curve first).

TTFN,
Jon

PS: I suspect the issue I had previously with SE19 was I was using it in an extremely small sector. This version uses a much larger sector.

------EDIT----

OK, now I'm more awake, here is final version which adds breaking glass when hit by RPG (has accidental advantage of you also get a little debris when RPG hits). Also modified the side wall angles as I forgot to take account Duke could shoot at quite a narrow angle. Right THIRD time = qwality . I left previous version attached in case examining the differences help.

It's always impressive when people find clever new ways to add new map effects in the base game without code.

An EVENT_DAMAGEWALL is on the horizon. I'd like it to be as fully featured as EVENT_DAMAGEHPLANE, but that's a tall order since there is only one type of breakable floor/ceiling.

Trooper Dan, on 31 January 2016 - 09:05 PM, said:

He-he, I like puzzles though I'd more impressed if I got it right the first time - damn getting old.

It's a testiment to how flexible the system is, even if it was put together in a somewhat ad-hoc manner.

Hendricks266, on 31 January 2016 - 09:13 PM, said:

How about a more general EVENT_WALL since as well as knowing when a wall is hit by weapons, it'd also be handy to know:

* when a wall actually blocks a player - via which CON code could interpret it as the player pushing a wall (example: player pushes side of drinks dispenser causing it to move out the way)
* player presses "use" on a wall (example: you shouldn't have done that to that electricity panel, here, have some health damage).
* wall property changed (cstat or displayed picnum). For example in my CON library I'm detecting things like glass breaking so that I can ensure all panes of glass in a liquid tank break together, or you break a pane of glass in a church and a lot of angry newbeasts spawn. By also notifying that a picnum has changed you could also detect things like monitors breaking.

OK, the last two can be achieved already without an event but it does require CON code continually monitoring wall(s) of a sector which has performance implications.

TTFN,
Jon

The Mechanic, on 01 February 2016 - 02:18 AM, said:

The Mechanic, on 01 February 2016 - 02:18 AM, said:

That would need to be an event related to clipping/collision.

The Mechanic, on 01 February 2016 - 02:18 AM, said:

That sounds useful, but there's no need to overload this event with multiple functions, which would be sloppy engineering. I'll look into this.

The Mechanic, on 01 February 2016 - 02:18 AM, said:

EVENT_DAMAGEWALL will cover the example you gave. Right now we're not going to create something that notifies scripts when any structure member they specify changes, and it would be poor practice to create a special version for wall picnum and cstat.

Hendricks266, on 01 February 2016 - 09:39 AM, said:

Was just thinking that a more generic something-has-happened-to-a-wall event instead of a specific weapon-has-hit-a-wall and might be of use in future.

Hendricks266, on 01 February 2016 - 09:39 AM, said:

OK, I'll give ya that one Just thinking aloud.

Hendricks266, on 01 February 2016 - 09:39 AM, said:

I was trying to get across detecting "something has changed", not specifically it's cstat, picnum, or whatever, just that _something_ has changed.

Anyhow, even if limited to just detecting weapons then that will still be most useful.

TTFN,
Jon

Wow, thanks for the help guys. I did not expect so many answers already.

The event EVENT_DAMAGEHPLANE seems interesting, too bad there isn't anything on it in the wiki. I just took a quick look at the code that calls the EVENT_DAMAGEHPLANE. A nice way to make breakable ceiling or floor screens but it could use a EVENT_DAMAGEWALL brother to make breakable screenwalls, bleeding walls and what not. :-)

I dunno what the policy on changes to the eduke code is but I would love to try to add that brother to EVENT_DAMAGEHPLANE (I do have some c and c++ experience).

EDIT: Oh snap that was so damn easy to p.o.c. it took me well about 5 minutes!

- Jaap

Jaap, on 01 February 2016 - 11:47 AM, said:

Then I'm skeptical that it met all the desired engineering specifications that gave me pause. Patches welcome.

Hendricks266, on 01 February 2016 - 01:45 PM, said:

Well I just hacked it together. RETURN contains the wall that was hit, if it is higher than 131072, the wallmask/overpic thing was hit (subtract 131072 to get the id of the wall. set RETURN to -1 to stop prevent the rest of the walldamage code be executed. THISACTOR is the sprite that did the damage.

sector.c change A_DamageWall:

void A_DamageWall(int32_t spr, int32_t dawallnum, const vec3_t *pos, int32_t atwith)
{
    int16_t sn = -1;
    int32_t j, i, darkestwall;
    walltype *wal = &wall[dawallnum];

	int32_t RETURN_in = dawallnum;

	if (((wal->cstat&16) || wal->overpicnum == BIGFORCE) && wal->nextsector >= 0)
	{
		if (sector[wal->nextsector].floorz > pos->z)
		{
			if (sector[wal->nextsector].floorz != sector[wal->nextsector].ceilingz)
			{
				RETURN_in += 131072;
			}
		}
	}

    // NOTE: pass RETURN in the dist argument, too.
    int32_t ret = VM_OnEventWithBoth(EVENT_DAMAGEWALL, spr, screenpeek, RETURN_in, RETURN_in);

    if (ret < 0)
        return;

    if (wal->overpicnum == MIRROR && wal->pal != 4 &&

....

in event_defs.h change the GameEvent_t enum (similar change to con_lang.lua):

...

    EVENT_DISPLAYACCESS,
    EVENT_MOVESECTOR,
    EVENT_MOVEEFFECTORS,
#ifdef LUNATIC
    EVENT_ANIMATEALLSPRITES,
#endif
	EVENT_DAMAGEWALL,
    MAXEVENTS
};

change to gamedef.c EventNames array:

...
    "EVENT_MOVESECTOR",
    "EVENT_MOVEEFFECTORS",
#ifdef LUNATIC
    "EVENT_ANIMATEALLSPRITES",
#endif
	"EVENT_DAMAGEWALL",
};

Example con code that spawn steam when a wall is hit on the position that was hit. When the wallmask/overpic is hit and the overpicnum is 182 it also spawns steam:

onevent EVENT_DAMAGEWALL
{
	setvarvar GTEMP1 RETURN

	getactor[THISACTOR].picnum	GTEMP2

	redefinequote 254 EVENT_DAMAGEWALL THISACTOR %d RETURN  %d PICNUM %d
	qsprintf 254 254 THISACTOR RETURN GTEMP2
	echo 254
	debug 254


	ifvarg RETURN 131072
	{
		subvar RETURN 131072
		

		ifvarn wall[RETURN].overpicnum 182
			break

	//	setwall[RETURN].overpicnum W_SCREENBREAK

	//	setvar RETURN -1
	}
	else
	{
		setwall[RETURN].picnum 268
	}


	// Spawn steam
	espawn STEAM

	getactor[THISACTOR].x x
	setactor[RETURN].x x

	getactor[THISACTOR].y y
	setactor[RETURN].y y
	
	getactor[THISACTOR].z z
	setactor[RETURN].z z

	getactor[THISACTOR].z z
	setactor[RETURN].z z
	
	updatesectorz x y z sect 

	ifvare sect -1
	{
		updatesector x y sect 
	}

	setactor[RETURN].sectnum sect


	// Calculate angle
	getwall[GTEMP1].x GTEMP2
	getwall[GTEMP1].y GTEMP3

	getwall[GTEMP1].point2 GTEMP4

	getwall[GTEMP4].x MX
	getwall[GTEMP4].y MY

	subvarvar GTEMP2 MX
	subvarvar GTEMP3 MY

	getangle GTEMP4 GTEMP2 GTEMP3


	setactor[RETURN].ang GTEMP4

}
endevent

Let me know what you think. I am sure I missed a lot of things (it's just a proof of concept).

Lol, I just looked at the code that determines whether a wall or a mask part of the wall was hit and noticed something funny.

If you put glass on a wall that is on a sloped sector and you shoot the part of the glass that is below the floor height (ignoring the slope on the glass won't break. Instead it is registered as a hit on the wall instead of the mask .

if (((wal->cstat&16) || wal->overpicnum == BIGFORCE) && wal->nextsector >= 0)
        {
               [b] if (sector[wal->nextsector].floorz > pos->z)[/b]
                {
                        if (sector[wal->nextsector].floorz != sector[wal->nextsector].ceilingz)

Anyway, about the wall damage event. Is this a feature that will be added and/or is there anything I can do to help realize it?