[High Treason]

Anybody ever figure out that the logo I use on my YouTube videos and such was actually made in Build? So was the background art and channel banner.

The same method was used to produce an easter egg for a website I haven't finished or put online yet. Said site resides on a server running MS-DOS / JNOS 1.11a, the easter egg has the server stream video to the viewer and writes a cookie to their hard drive (containing the song lyrics. Fitting as they state "In the morning we will part, and you won't forget me!" which they won't, not for 24 hours or so until the cookie is erased anyway. Here's the hi-res version of the video, the server has to use a 13MB version which is lower quality due to the available bandwidth being shit. If the browser doesn't support HTML5 the site falls back on GIF/WAV which doesn't sync, but means I can legitimately claim the whole site works in Internet Explorer 4.

The same method is also regularly used in my cartoon to speed up 3D backdrop drawing. I still draw by hand, but render shots of Build to image sequences to use as a basic wire frame or to mark an object's movement with backdrops which are hard to trace on with the light pad.



And lastly, I've talked about this before, but I am honestly very proud of it. I give you what, to my knowledge, is the single largest "machine" ever constructed in vanilla Duke 3D... The 24 hour digital clock;



Broken into segments, this is one of the larger ones and controls the hours. The timing has to be precise, driven from a 13-tick "bellows" hanging off of the side of this area. Due to the way the game timing works, the clock loses accuracy, being off by two minutes every 24 hours. Lezing's clock in Last Pissed Time is only a 1 hour clock which doesn't roll over and uses a single incremental raised sector. My clock face, however, is also a work of insane patience and sanity testing...



One of the clock faces in the level. If the timing slips, this actually feeds back into the "clock circuitry" and breaks the mechanism. This also has desirable effects though, as every stage of the clock means certain tags are active. The very same mechanism used to trigger each part of the clock can be used to make AND / OR / XOR etc possible and the clock can be used to control almost any effect. It could also be expanded to show days, weeks, months, even years and decades up until you run out of walls/sprites in the engine.



The entire clock with surrounding machines. I don't remember what all of them do exactly... On the left is the "wave machine" which controls the ocean waves. Below the clock is an area which I think controls the 4 story elevator and the locator-less subway. The rest are controlling puzzles, the 'electricity supply' and things like that. One of them, using those 45-degree blocking walls near the targets utilizes mirrors so that shooters offset to the target still hit it because the shrinker shot bounces off of the mirror, I think this is one of the random combination puzzles - the switch combination is randomized and it uses a machine similar to the clock face to give the player some of the code. It never uses the 4th position of the multiswitches the puzzle is made from as it may self-trigger if the code ever reaches 4-4-4-4 and it seemed easier and fairer to the player if none of them were allowed to be 4, even though only one would have to be moved. Of course the mechanism stops working and locks the code when the player gets to a certain point in the level.

With careful timing and planning, almost any effect is possible. This and Nitro use randomizers. The whole premise of Nitro relies on an AND mechanism to check which 'items' the player has as well as a carefully timed one to check if the player is running or walking.




The original clock mechanism was beautiful to look at as it did not use bellows, instead not using seconds and relying on bouncing the shrinker shot over a set distance, equal to 60 seconds of travel, to operate the clock. Of course, as the mirrors moved it lost time and was scrapped early on for the more accurate, more resource heavy mechanism present today. The simpler mechanism was actually heavier and killed frame rate thanks to mirrors seeing one another and rotating to "reject" bout 11 shooters every minute, meaning a lot of sprites were bouncing around doing nothing and causing problems. You can download Quantum Physics, the map using the clock, and look at these devices for yourself. Keep in mind that the map uses some tricks whereby it lies about what sector an object is in, so saving the map might break it, best to use a copy you haven't had open in Mapster if you want to play it. On the other hand, if you want to actually be in game mode while going inside the mechanisms to see them working, I recommend disabling your sound as the noise of the shooters hitting closed gates is overwhelming.

I devised a mechanism to make the clock more accurate which involved the last position turning off the "bellows" and waiting for a shot to cover a certain distance (two seconds worth) before turning them back on. I never implemented it because who actually sits in a map for 24 hours. Even I just increased the tics-per-second in the game to see what happened and who knows if the in-game timer in the level stats display is even that accurate really, for all I know my clock might be more accurate than that but I never thought to test the game timer that way. If you want to do it, be my guest, but you may as well watch paint dry.

Ha, every time I look at this stuff all I can hear is this.

Edit: This keyboard is fucked, sorry if there are any spelling/grammar issues in this post.

[Captain Massive]

I was looking through some old files and found this burried in the Mapfaq 2.1 stuff Myst Elevator by Semicharm.

And its really cool and hard to describe other than its really complicated.



:Note - I left the zip file intact, its the last map in there EX5MYST.map

Attached File(s)

•  ele_trk.zip (61.31K)
  Number of downloads: 213

[Captain Massive]

Vertizontal Hatch

I'm posting this here because I don't want to write a full tutorial on this and making videos are out of my wheel-house.



Let me know your thoughts on this

New name spruced it up and added music - just because.......... REASONS!.

Attached File(s)

•  Vertizontal Hatch.zip (1.78MB)
  Number of downloads: 219

[blizzart]

I´m looking for something like this for ages. Thank you very much.

It´s a little bit buggy on classic:

[Mark]

Very cool effect.

[deuxsonic]

Shouldn't that be a hatch? A vertical door is just an ordinary door I think. I guess it depends on if you're talking about the axis of motion or the axis the door is facing. What do people use?

[Micky C]

Captain Massive, on 30 July 2016 - 01:10 PM, said:

Let me know your thoughts on this

It's not very good tbh, in that it gets sectors to overlap in-game which is something you really want to avoid.

I made a "vertical door" years ago in CBP 8 using TROR. It didn't drop or anything but it opened well.

Something you could do instead is have a thin sliding door sector along the inner sides of the door which will push the whole thing open. Alternatively, you should use the shrinking sector effect if you wanted.

[Forge]

Micky C, on 30 July 2016 - 07:24 PM, said:

Alternatively, you should use the shrinking sector effect if you wanted.

that's what i used in my last solo map to simulate a floor hatch. Worked just fine without the mess of over-lapping.

[Captain Massive]

Micky C, on 30 July 2016 - 07:24 PM, said:

It's not very good tbh, in that it gets sectors to overlap in-game which is something you really want to avoid.

I made a "vertical door" years ago in CBP 8 using TROR. It didn't drop or anything but it opened well.

Something you could do instead is have a thin sliding door sector along the inner sides of the door which will push the whole thing open. Alternatively, you should use the shrinking sector effect if you wanted.

Youz cant the tag under water door sectors 27 since they are allready tagged 2, or top ones either because the SE 31's would cease to function.

The thin sliding door thing sounds promising, but I'm having trouble picturing that in my head - as too what that actually involves.


The overlap does mess up classic, so fair enough , and it does mess up the gravity/scuba gear affect.

I'll try a few things, the only hard part was drawing and pulling the teeth of the door close together. ( It was literally like pulling teeth to make )

The actual effect took mere minutes.

[Captain Massive]

Forge, on 30 July 2016 - 07:53 PM, said:

that's what i used in my last solo map to simulate a floor hatch. Worked just fine without the mess of over-lapping.

Wish I could do that but wont work under water.

It is buggy and does stuff like

<--This

I tried a few things but cant get the same effect without overlapping it.

Maybe I'll try working on reversing the effect on my 4-way_split door and come back to this later.

[Mark]

My latest attempt at an effect was a failure but I wouldn't know for sure until I tried.

I made a square opening in the ceiling of a room.

Using TROR I extended that opening up.

Then in the ceiling of the lower section I created 2 bridge sectors that act like sliding hatch doors that meet in the middle. That part of the effect works fine.

Then in the upper section I placed an SE50 spotlight pointing straight down. My hopes were to have that light shine down into the lower section as the hatch slides open.

The failure is that the bridge sector hatches in the ceiling when closed do not block the spotlight. It shines through as if there was nothing blocking the light.

Oh well, it was worth a try for what could have been a cool looking effect.

[Paul B]

Mark., on 04 August 2016 - 04:56 PM, said:

My latest attempt at an effect was a failure but I wouldn't know for sure until I tried.

I made a square opening in the ceiling of a room.

Using TROR I extended that opening up.

Then in the ceiling of the lower section I created 2 bridge sectors that act like sliding hatch doors that meet in the middle. That part of the effect works fine.

Then in the upper section I placed an SE50 spotlight pointing straight down. My hopes were to have that light shine down into the lower section as the hatch slides open.

The failure is that the bridge sector hatches in the ceiling when closed do not block the spotlight. It shines through as if there was nothing blocking the light.

Oh well, it was worth a try for what could have been a cool looking effect.

This reminds me of the effect I was hoping to achieve in my Entrapped.map the hatch into the restaurant from the sewers. Hmmmm... I never thought of adding a polymer spot light though. I'll have to play with this too it sounds interesting.

[Paul B]

**** UPDATED *** Sept. 24 2016

I was trying to achieve something I thought was almost impossible and I stumbled on the solution through trial & error. I have just made a controllable start\stop pivotal sprite crane which can go back and forth. The direction is reversible via a switch and I believe this could open the door for some really cool effects. As far as I know this has never been done & please correct me if I'm wrong?

This all stemmed from me fooling around with those inter-locking gears leading to this new creation. Duke can position the crane at different angles depending on the Speed sprite value then run along the inside of the top crane arm to the next rooftop depending on which position he flips the switch. Enjoy!

(Movie of Demo Map with narration) https://dl.dropboxus...s/DukeCrane.mp4

Don't forget to download the map and try it out yourself.

Turns out I may not have been the "FIRST" to come up with this type of combination. David B created a very similar effect in his Milltown Rampage release by creating some mechanical switches found in Thedocks.map. However, I may be the first to implement it in such a large scale using TROR to mask the relative floor problem and using the "Speed" sprite to control the angle \ direction of the sector.

Demo Map Available here:

Attached File(s)

•  PivotCrane.zip (7.22K)
  Number of downloads: 175

[oasiz]

Can't check it yet but you should use something like OBS to create a small video (really easy) and add this to the main thread !
I want to push people to show off their stuff instead of just pasting maps since a small video explains so much better what it can do.

I don't want stuff to get buried in the middle of the discussion, kills the whole point of the main porn thread vs. discussion.

[Captain Massive]

Interesting spin on a rotate bridge. (pun intended)

I've never seen it used to that extent with sprites my dishwasher in hogwash used the same affect on a tiny scale but without any sprites.

It only has 1 issue that the relitive floor can break the illusion from the bottom, but this could be worked around.

[Paul B]

Okay, I just wanted to bump the forum post to show off my finalized demo map and video shown in the link above. I wasn't sure how to embed the video into the post from my dropbox link but In any case it works. This was my first attempt using OBS Studio. =) Feel free to download the map to use as a reference.

[The Mechanic]

Paul B, on 24 September 2016 - 12:36 AM, said:

Okay, I just wanted to bump the forum post to show off my finalized demo map and video shown in the link above. I wasn't sure how to embed the video into the post from my dropbox link but In any case it works. This was my first attempt using OBS Studio. =) Feel free to download the map to use as a reference.

Nice !

A thought occurs to me (notes date in diary); since you only need to put rotate sprite in one of the stacked sectors, could other sectors in the stack be given different effects triggered independently ? In this instance, that could be used to add the crane lifting bit which also goes up and down ? Just a thought whilst you are experimenting.

TTFN,
Jon

[Captain Massive]

The Mechanic, on 24 September 2016 - 02:59 AM, said:

Nice !

A thought occurs to me (notes date in diary); since you only need to put rotate sprite in one of the stacked sectors, could other sectors in the stack be given different effects triggered independently ? In this instance, that could be used to add the crane lifting bit which also goes up and down ? Just a thought whilst you are experimenting.

TTFN,
Jon

Its a rotate rise so might work independently without any added effect.


:Nice video, have you considered making a TROR/ True Room Over Room video tutorial?

It would be an invaluable resource since you could probably count the number of people that can use TROR effectively on 1 hand.


And wow you went all out nice work!

You went full-on TROR and everything, I've attempted using TROR before but cant wrap my head around how it works even after reading every tutorial avialible.

[oasiz]

Guys, please use the main thread for posting effects!

This other topic is just for discussion since I want to keep that thread away from chatter.

https://forums.duke4...e3d-build-porn/

EDIT: Also the post syntax / etc.. is not strict there, Just have a visual video or a GIF file like that. Not text only !

EDIT #2: Made different take on qbutton using expertmode: http://lerppu.net/qbutton2.map
Exact same outcome but uses expertmode instead (no sprite floor stuff)

[Paul B]

The Mechanic, on 24 September 2016 - 02:59 AM, said:

Nice !

A thought occurs to me (notes date in diary); since you only need to put rotate sprite in one of the stacked sectors, could other sectors in the stack be given different effects triggered independently ? In this instance, that could be used to add the crane lifting bit which also goes up and down ? Just a thought whilst you are experimenting.

TTFN,
Jon

The way i made it was all stacked sectors make use of the rotating sector. I guess a person could only have the upper sector turn instead of having the entire crane column rotate. However, you can't really adjust the height of the crane without the extended TROR sector creating these side sector walls appear out of thin air. You would have to synchronize the raised crane effect with the surrounding TROR extended canvas which would also have an effect on all side sectors. I suppose under the right conditions it would be possible, but there there is also the challenge of how does one extend the crane sprite column unless the crane sprite column were to be replaced with masked walls instead. Hmm. To be continued.... =)

[Captain Massive]

zykov eddy, on 24 September 2016 - 05:02 AM, said:

3D button

Just like in Quake!

NICE! I was experimenting gpeed's to find it maximum (its 32767).

It never occurred to me to use it for a button, instead I made it so I could turn on/off polymer lights.

Attached File(s)

•  Speed-Test.zip (1.78K)
  Number of downloads: 195

[Mike Norvak]

Paul B, on 19 September 2016 - 09:08 PM, said:

**** UPDATED *** Sept. 24 2016

I was trying to achieve something I thought was almost impossible and I stumbled on the solution through trial & error. I have just made a controllable start\stop pivotal sprite crane which can go back and forth. The direction is reversible via a switch and I believe this could open the door for some really cool effects. As far as I know this has never been done & please correct me if I'm wrong?

This all stemmed from me fooling around with those inter-locking gears leading to this new creation. Duke can position the crane at different angles depending on the Speed sprite value then run along the inside of the top crane arm to the next rooftop depending on which position he flips the switch. Enjoy!

(Movie of Demo Map with narration) https://dl.dropboxus...s/DukeCrane.mp4

Don't forget to download the map and try it out yourself.

Turns out I may not have been the "FIRST" to come up with this type of combination. David B created a very similar effect in his Milltown Rampage release by creating some mechanical switches found in Thedocks.map. However, I may be the first to implement it in such a large scale using TROR to mask the relative floor problem and using the "Speed" sprite to control the angle \ direction of the sector.

Demo Map Available here:

That's really cool!!!!!! You can decrease the speed to make it more realistic and spawn a horde of flying enemies that the player needs to fight whilst the crane is moving.

[Micky C]

Paul B, on 19 September 2016 - 09:08 PM, said:

**** UPDATED *** Sept. 24 2016
As far as I know this has never been done & please correct me if I'm wrong?

I'm confused, what exactly is the innovation here?

If it's the use of the 3D crane, that's certainly been done before. Somebody needs to play the AMC TC https://youtu.be/kTO...cBZ0?t=1h58m55s

If it's the rotating mechanical switch, I'm sure that's been done before as well. I can't remember where. Probably something by Gambini, Zykov Eddy, or Craigfatman. It's possible I'm mis-remembering from David B's work though, but I just have a feeling I'd seen it before that.

That map in the video I linked has another innovation further in that uses TROR to create a rotating drill effect that drills through a floor into another sector, reminiscent of shadow warrior. Of course the way it works is completely different.

Mike Norvak, on 24 September 2016 - 04:31 PM, said:

That's really cool!!!!!! You can decrease the speed to make it more realistic and spawn a horde of flying enemies that the player needs to fight whilst the crane is moving.

That won't really do much good. I'm fairly confident that the duration of the effect is constant. That's why changing the speed changes the amount of rotation that occurs, i.e angle/speed = constant. If speed increases, so must the angle to maintain the balance in the equation. If you're hoping to have a long, slow rotation you can forget it.

[Paul B]

Micky C, on 24 September 2016 - 05:47 PM, said:

I'm confused, what exactly is the innovation here?

It's a new effect for me. I also haven't played the AMC TC. But I've always wanted to do this type of thing I just wasn't sure how. In the past I couldn't get sprites to stay properly in a moving sector aside from a train,elevator or bridge sector. You can't use swinging doors or any other effect in the game to make sprites move in this manner. I've also experimented with trying to adjust the height while this crane turns and the sprites don't seem to elevate with the floor. Only special sprites and active sprites get elevated. Unless the crane is made out of all Masked Walls... so I've tried the TROR masked wall crane and while it works, things get really messy when adjusting the height and I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Adjusting the height of the crane restricts you to the ceiling height of the Crane' arm's sector as you can't place a S.E in another extended TROR sector and have them associate with an activator in a lower sector. This makes this effect virtually impossible to do.

For now, it looks like a limitation of the effect. It is too bad, I attempted to use a SE 31 as well, with no such luck. I believe the Sector lowtag 30 prevents any useful lifting of regular sprite tiles. However, I did discover that if the sector effector containing a lowtag of 0 has a pallet greater then 1 you can change the direction of the crane from anti-clockwise to clockwise. That's pretty cool! =)

Captain Massive, on 24 September 2016 - 03:44 AM, said:

:Nice video, have you considered making a TROR/ True Room Over Room video tutorial?
And wow you went all out nice work!

Thanks for the kind words. I actually haven't considered making TROR videos before. I guess it all comes down to time. If i have some spare time next month I may create a few videos to highlight how to use TROR and once you get the hang of it, it is really not all that difficult to use and it definitely adds a new dimension. It just would be nice if it could be used heavily without taxing the system.

[Micky C]

Paul B, on 24 September 2016 - 10:14 PM, said:

For now, it looks like a limitation of the effect. It is too bad, I attempted to use a SE 31 as well, with no such luck. I believe the Sector lowtag 30 prevents any useful lifting sprite options. However, I did discover that if the sector effector containing a lowtag of 0 has a pallet greater then 1 you can change the direction of the crane from anti-clockwise to clockwise. That's pretty cool! =)

Yeah whether sprites move or not is always a bit dodgy. The rotate-rise definitely makes them rotate as you've noticed.
The lotag colour changing the rotation direction is clearly stated in the infosuite. You'd be surprised of all the interesting little nuggets of info you can find if you read through in detail.

I suppose your crane effect is slightly different in that for my crane, I had a sector in the bottom layer rotate with the crane in order to have a moving shadow (that didn't drag the player along with it or mess up the texture alignment). You've skipped this, which allows the crane to move over other sectors like you said.